131–140 of 171 posts
I've mentioned this several times on HN before, but I maintain a collection [1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks hosted by the Internet Archive. The great thing about modern technology is they're all emulated in-browser - just select the one you want and press start. You've got silly little animations[2], sound samplers[3], choose-your-own adventure stories[4], reference guides[5] and teaching materials[6]. But there's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that TFA said it well, if brusquely: > And if you think that XCode, Python, Processing, or the shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS are any kind of substitute for HyperCard, then read this post again. The thing that made HyperCard great was that it wasn't very capable. Which made it approachable.
Sure, Xcode today isn't a substitute. But Xcode is a large step back from what NeXTstep had, at least when it comes to this kind of capability. The standalone Interface Builder had palettes, which you could fill with custom objects. There were third party palettes that allowed non-programmers to click together and configure custom applications for specific domains. There were palettes that extended the whole shebang…
Unless you're saying that the most recent versions of Xcode don't do that, which would be news to me.
I agree that it's not well-used, but that's not the fault of Xcode. As far as I can tell it provides everything you'd need.
Quartz Composer had a very similar sort of level of ease of use. Drag some components out, wire them together, add some AppleScript or JavaScript if you want. And of course Apple has let that whither on the vine for the last ten years. I still use it on occasion to debug HID devices because it’s so fricken easy. Drag out the HID block, pick my device, drag the value I want to inspect onto a text render block. Done. U…
I think the framework is even deprecated now.
Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, yo…
Building a blog, a news website, a niche web app, or the new Facebook, it nearly doesn't matter, you must use the latest state of art tools. We have completely lost all the intermediate levels between beginner and professional.
Sometimes it's justified as an unfortunate effect of the internet for sites and apps handling personal and sensitive data, something that the semi-professional 90's shareware didn't have to deal with. But I feel like that doesn't explain it all.
Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, yo…
But as far as I can tell, there's no one trying to recreate Flash the authoring program. Which is a big shame IMO. We need something that enables creativity with a low barrier to entry.
Visual Basic is not dead, it's still in development (although in .NET form, which might have steeper learning curve). It was highly hyped in past too, but now it has only niche uses, and it's used not as "bicycle for mind", instead mostly for handling bureaucracy in large corporations.
I'm sure "calculator" example will be very similar in Visual Basic.
There are lots of no-code, low-code tools but they almost always fail and become discontinued quickly. Only spreadsheets thrive out of these.
There should be other reasons for that, not "corporations don't want users to program their computers".
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…
I still believe there are so much potential untapped in this HyperCard, no-code, or very little code Apps. But it seems it is similar to Nuclear Fusion it is always another 5 years away.
Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, yo…
They should and open source it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see it as not-invented-here. He was in love with NeXT Step because it was his. The Apple ][ shipped with BASIC. Apple was not founded on letting you consume your computer. But the world had changed since the 1970's and there was a software ecosystem. Hypercard would seem to have brought programming to the masses. But by then there was a broad base of software companies that would provide users the calculator app, e…
> He was in love with NeXTSTEP because it was his. Famously, when he returned to Apple, he used NeXTSTEP/OpenStep instead of a Mac until Mac OS X 10.1 came out and it was stable enough for production use. I can't find the article, but someone received an email from him around 2000 where the headers said NeXTMail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12182350
iWork suite didn't become "free" until 2013, and even then you have to buy a new mac or iOS device (so for example, given that I bought my mac used, I'd have to buy it new)