Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hypercard – Way Too Early

avc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#21

Post by AlphaGeekZulu »

aytekin wrote: post #7

I had really hard time understanding AVC's point so I searched for hypercard screenshots and found this screen tour: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568 It is an IDE to build small visual Mac apps. A card is basically an app.

The card in HyperCard was not an app, but rather served multiple purposes: First, it was a container for widgets, or, in other words, a canvas for the user interface. If the user interface would not fit in the fixed size screen of the card (it was 640x480px in the beginning and became resizable later on), it could be organized into multiple cards, each containing parts of the ui and with some navigation ui elements to browse between the cards. Second, the card could serve as a database record. In that case the card would contain editable widgets to make a form (for example for addresses), then the card was declared to be a template (in HyperCard notation a "background") and then as many cards were created from that background as database records were required. In that case field-widgets served as database columns, cards as records and backgrounds as tables. Third, the card (and its template-variant, the background) could contain code. Events (like a mousedown etc) were sent by the engine first to the respective widget on the card, then, when not handled, to the card itself, then to its template, then to the stack. The HyperCard stack was the app, and a stack was a collection of cards and cards served as user interface canvas, and, very much depending on the application logic, additionally as code or data containers.

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#22

Post by julianpye »

The whole history is explained nicely by Jakob Nielsen: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/hypertext-history/

Meanwhile, before Hypercard, there is a notable product: Guide by OWL in Scotland, who were approached by Tim Berners-Lee as his desired candidate for the world wide web. Matsushita had then in an 80s Japanese shopping frenzy bought up OWL (lawyers on the same trip to Scotland went on to buy a couple of distilleries and golf courses in the same week). Japanese management of OWL then turned down Berners-Lee.

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#23

Post by ballard »

Speaking of Android, there's a neat hacker dude at GOOG that has an unreleased Android-based visual environment based on Squeak complete with animated 3D and 2D examples. It's pretty neat that basically anything in it can be changed, and other bits of code can be imported from the web. Would be a fun environment to build a game in.

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#24

Post by thomasfl »

I spend a lot of time creating hypercard (and supercard) applications 20 years ago, before moving on to web development. HyperCard could not adapt to different screen sizes, and html+css+js is just way more advanced. But the idea of having a development platform that everybody can learn in a few minutes is very good, and could be used inside web sites today.

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#26

Post by mildtrepidation »

Hypercard was my first real programming exposure. Going back and looking at my stacks (which I found many years after forgetting about them) was a humbling lesson in "holy crap, I can't believe I was that terrible at programming." But it definitely did get me interested, and it was really freaking powerful for something we treated like a toy.

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#27

Post by x0n »

abalone wrote: post #8

There is nothing new about the card metaphor in mobile. The very earliest mobile web app standard, HDML (later WML), used a deck-of-cards metaphor. This was around the mid-90s. "The fundamental building block of HDML content is the card. The user agent displays and allows the user to interact with cards of information. Logically, a user navigates through a series of HDML cards, reviews the contents of each, enters re…

Yep, I wrote a few apps in WML. Here's someone back in 2000, (fourteen years ago now... wow) making the connection between WML and HyperCard:

http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/columns/mar2000/mobdev05.html

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#28

Post by aaronem »

mbell wrote: post #12
jacobolus wrote: post #2

I think this blog post is overly caught up on the word “card” – HyperCard “cards” weren’t particularly like the cards inside android or twitter or facebook. Indeed, if HyperCard cards were like anything, it’s web pages, except designed for the limitations of the hardware of the time and targeting only one hardware platform (standard display, etc.) and running on a single non-networked computer. Also, why “way too ear…

As an example of how far from the 'card' metaphor you could go using Hypercard: Myst was built in it.

That's...not actually all that far.

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#29

Post by scj »

AlphaGeekZulu wrote: post #17

HyperCard lives on in LiveCode - with card metaphor, HyperTalk and all. Plus color, images (with alpha channels), regex, (limited) sockets, resolution independence, XML-parsing, IDE for Mac/Win/Nix, compiles to OSX, Win, Nix, iOS, Android. And it is OpenSource, thanks to Kickstarter (Store deployment requires commercial closed source license though). http://livecode.com/

It isn't open source if it discriminates based on endeavour.

http://opensource.org/osd-annotated

Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early

#30

Post by e12e »

pirateking wrote: post #13

Seems like the author never actually used HyperCard, and is just another trend watcher.

From tfa: "I built a few Hypercard based applications in the late 80s and early 90s as I was winding up my programming “career”."

That doesn't mean the author built something like Myst, though.

Post reply on HN