111–120 of 171 posts
I think people give Hypercard (and Flash) too much credit. Its easy to make UIs if you use absolute resolution and position. You can make apps with about the same effort today using a lot of modern WYSIWYG tools but its the scaling layouts that are so tedious.
There is still no great tool for preschoolers to start programming. Scratch is great but limited by its web and flash roots.
I have very fond memories of getting balls to bounce on edges and sprites as a kid. RIP Hypercard
I think people give Hypercard (and Flash) too much credit. Its easy to make UIs if you use absolute resolution and position. You can make apps with about the same effort today using a lot of modern WYSIWYG tools but its the scaling layouts that are so tedious.
"Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a "bicycle for the mind." But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)"
So dramatic! Cmon now.
The sentiment at the bottom is what rings most true, you could fit the entire manual for hypercard in your head, and achieve proficiency much faster than many tools.
I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in HyperCard, but I don’t think that Steve Jobs killed it because it was some existential threat to Apple’s profits. Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge they don’t make a large fraction of money on selling software licenses. It’s also completely possible to run your own code today on a Mac, so we would have to believe that…
> Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, Correction: Apple charges a premium for their computers because that premium pays for all the software packages they include with it. XCode, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, etc... None of that is included in Windows but I can buy a fully usable by most people Windows laptop for $299 vs the cheapest Mac laptop is $999. Of course some of that $700 difference is that…
These apps are functionally "complete." I think there's a pretty grey line between "you're paying for bundled software" and "Apple is just giving away these old things that cost them nothing to keep functional."
If you had a peek at the spreadsheet that lists the expenses of "macbook" (materials, TSMC fees, industrial design man-hours, OS programming hours, etc.), "Pages" would not be a $50 line item. And if Apple dropped that bundled software Macbooks wouldn't drop by $200 or whatever.
Myst was originally built using HyperCard, which I always thought was rather clever
Imagine the look on our faces when my best friend and I tried this... and ended up getting the full source code to Myst in plain text. They didn’t even try to obscure it.
It really DeMystified (heheh) the act of professional development. They had used the exact same tools that I was proficient in to build something as meaningful and impactful as Myst, which literally changed the gaming world.
HyperCard broke all the UI conventions of the Mac. You couldn’t use it to create native look and feel Mac apps.
Geeks keep all sort of obscure things alive - GNU Emacs, OpenTTD, ReactOS. Either there are indeed Hypercard-like things out there, or this really is nothing more than nostalgia.
The conclusion feels bogus and forced: > The various HyperCard clones and HyperCard-influenced software lack HyperCard's radical simplicity and the resulting explorability. Explorability of the "master of all you survey" variety matters. All of the extra features in a more feature-rich system like SuperCard (or even VB) are not harmless. There is a fundamental difference, especially for a child, between a system whic…