Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

The author's answer to this question is totally wrong.

> Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.

Really? Nobody ever had the intelligence and discipline to design a simple GUI builder in the history of computing since Hypercard?

No, the answer is that there are numerous simple GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web. But none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit.

When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.

Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."

The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.

As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

As I said, I do think GameMaker is a reasonable enough substitute for stuff. While I find having to write shaders a bit irritating, you don't have to do it very often, and you can get up and running in a fairly short amount of time, and it's HTML5 exporter works pretty much perfectly from what I've played with. Is it as easy as Flash? No, but it's still a pretty low barrier-to-entry for people, I think I could probably teach a kid how to use it and they'd pick up the basics.

In 1995, putting together a website was easier than using Hypercard. And so people flocked to it. Even people who were already somewhat familiar with Hypercard. Even though, at the time, Hypercard was largely more powerful. Some of that was because the Web made it so much easier to share. But I don't think that's the whole story.

Fast forward 25 years, and the Web has become much more powerful, but the number of people making websites recreationally who don't also get paid to write software seems to have dropped precipitously.

On the Amiga we had a system called CanDo that was very similar to Hypercard in how it enabled end users to make multimedia applications. The interview below has some excellent insight into CanDo and the relationship it had with HyperCard.

http://www.rcfinch.com/Amiga/INOVAtronicsInterview.pdf

And I was reminded of these other application building tools, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_programming_languages#Ap... the 3d construction kit kind of occupied the same place as minecraft for a lot of kids in the 90s.

*edit, his is fascinating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsPKjbMvxY

But actually, looking at Wikipedia, it appears there was work on a Hypercard 3.0, which added a bunch of features and turned Hypercard stacks into a special kind of Quicktime movie. It was demoed as alpha quality and never finished... which sounds pretty much exactly like nearly all other Apple products at the time! Smart people doing cool stuff with little direction under bad management, unable to get the cool stuff out the door. And arguably by the return of Jobs, the ship had sailed. There was no way Hypercard was going to take over the world after the introduction of Windows 95 and WWW, that was clear to anyone. I wish it had, though.