271–280 of 295 posts
I will continue to admire him and his way of problem solving, speaking about your past work -- successes and lessons learned
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Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard did have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our future endeavors. I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task. Multiply that by however many classro…
HyperCard was the foundation of my programming career. I treated the HyperCard Bible like an actual Bible.
Modern continual versioning and constant updates means there is no finish line. No Bible could ever be printed. Ah, nostalgia.
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It’s ironic that the next graphical programming environment similar to Hypercard was probably Flash - and it obviously died too. What actually are the best successors now, at least for authoring generic apps for the open web? (Other than vibe coding things)
Flash completely missed the most important point of HyperCard, which was that end users could put it into edit mode, explore the source code, learn from it, extend it, copy parts of it out, and build their own user interfaces with it. It's not just "View Source", but "Edit Source" with a built-in, easy to use, scriptable, graphical, interactive WYSIWYG editor that anyone can use. HyperCard did all that and more long…
The earliest Flash projects were these artful assemblages of scripts dangling from nested timelines, like an Alexander Calder mobile. They were at times labyrinthine, like they are in many similar tools, but there were ways to mitigate that. Later on, AS3 code was sometimes written like Java, because we wanted to be taken seriously.
Many Flash community members wanted to share their source, wanted a space where interested people could make changes. We did the best we could, uploading FLA files and zipped project directories. None of it turned out to be especially resilient.
It's one of the things I admire about Scratch. If you want, you can peek inside, and it's all there, for you to learn from and build off of, with virtually no arbitrary barriers in place.
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Some programs, games, and zines made with Decker: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker Unlike LiveCode (or so far as I am aware HyperNext), Decker is free and open-source: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker HyperNext doesn't appear to be actively developed; the most recent updates I see are from last year, and it can't be used on modern computers. Decker's most recent release was yesterday morning. I'd be happy to go…
Livecode used to be opensource, which made me want to use it, but that window closed. I guess I want a Flash replacement....
I asked Bill if he thought I could become an engineer even after earning my degree in sociology and political science. I really enjoyed writing software at the time but had no formal training. He laughed as he did and said of course, and you will be better than most. He found it as a strength and not a weakness. I will miss him.
What a tribute! He was famous at the time, though now perhaps an unsung hero in leading us into a GUI world.
For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard. For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.
The NYT credits him with inventing the double click.[1] [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-...
In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not ju…
Also, this might happen in a few years if AI improves enough to be trusted to make things by novices. Hard to imagine, but just maybe.