Loved it, Hypercard was my first programming experience :)
Hypercard – Way Too Early
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#32I 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…
I thought the same when I read the article -- they missed the point of the programmability, and some of the downfall of hypercard (it was an unholy mess to sort out a badly written stack.) Sometimes I wonder if the spiritual successor of hypercard was in fact Visual Basic.
I believe it was indeed VB.
Remember that HyperCard was introduced in 1987 or so, the GUI/WIMP era was just getting started. The learning curve of writing a Macintosh application was incredibly steep - nearly impossible IMO - but here was a way to make a simple point-and-click app that actually did something (write to a file, do some calculations, show information, even talk out the serial port, etc) with a minimal amount of lifting. My first paid piece of software was a point-of-sale application written in HyperCard. And it worked just fine.
VB was pretty much the equivalent for Windows, once it came along.
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#33HyperCard 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
It is a dual license model. They offer a commercial license for those developers, who want to distribute their products as closed source (as it seems, exactly this is required by the Apple store).
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#34I 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 t…
> it was 640x480px in the beginning
Less than that. Must have been 512x342; as I remember using it on 9" Mac Plus and Classic BW screens?
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the same when I read the article -- they missed the point of the programmability, and some of the downfall of hypercard (it was an unholy mess to sort out a badly written stack.) Sometimes I wonder if the spiritual successor of hypercard was in fact Visual Basic.
I believe it was indeed VB. Remember that HyperCard was introduced in 1987 or so, the GUI/WIMP era was just getting started. The learning curve of writing a Macintosh application was incredibly steep - nearly impossible IMO - but here was a way to make a simple point-and-click app that actually did something (write to a file, do some calculations, show information, even talk out the serial port, etc) with a minimal a…
Has their been a successor to VB?
The web is close in some respects (HTML is easy) and not in others (servers and single-page apps are not).
I suppose, in another respect, Excel is a successor for many, though it isn't a good solution for making apps of any sort.
Surprisingly, the closest I've seen has been Microsoft's Project Siena[1]. I've not used it extensively, but my 5 or 10 minute made it look like it had the dirt-simple-to-get-started appeal of HyperCard and VB.
Anyone know of other "spiritual successors" out there?
[1] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-projec...
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#36Ugh... I worked with a guy who kept complaining that the web of today is "just Hypercard."
I did a lot of stuff with Hypercard back in the day and it's such a ridiculous statement that I ended up writing the guy off completely. He was real big on generated code and full of BS in general.
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#37I 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…
I thought the same when I read the article -- they missed the point of the programmability, and some of the downfall of hypercard (it was an unholy mess to sort out a badly written stack.) Sometimes I wonder if the spiritual successor of hypercard was in fact Visual Basic.
VB was clearly influenced by Hypercard. Likewise HTML. In many ways (including performance) VB was a huge regression from Hypercard (I was working on a multimedia project in VB3 in 1994 and a 25MHz 68040 running HyperCard simply blew away a 486DX66 with more of everything running VB3).
HyperCard was probably one of the most influential pieces of software ever written. It still has one direct clone ("Livecode") being sold commercially, and I believe Director (whose programming language started as an inferior clone of HyperTalk) is still being sold by Adobe.
It was also an incredibly stable programming environment. Back in an era when computers in general were as flaky as hell, you could work on it all day and experience nary a crash (and since it saved everything by default you tended not to lose anything even when it did crash).
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#38I've thought a lot about HyperCard. In 1994, when I was in fifth grade, I used HyperCard to make a demo of a program that would allow you to fax a grocery order to a store using a modem after you checked off the items you wanted to buy. Then the store would deliver your order to you. I didn't actually know how to make use of hardware devices like modems, but it was possible to make the user interface work reasonably…
Do you think the world has changed such that a modern HyperCard is just not something people would use? Or has the massive influx of "there's an app for that" papered-over the hole in the market?
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> it was 640x480px in the beginning Less than that. Must have been 512x342; as I remember using it on 9" Mac Plus and Classic BW screens?
Hmm, could be. I first used HyperCard on a Mac IIfx and I cannot remember to have it used on my Mac SE/30 before. Will check - the original HyperCard manual from Atkinson is still somewhere in my shelves.
Re: Hypercard – Way Too Early
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it was indeed VB. Remember that HyperCard was introduced in 1987 or so, the GUI/WIMP era was just getting started. The learning curve of writing a Macintosh application was incredibly steep - nearly impossible IMO - but here was a way to make a simple point-and-click app that actually did something (write to a file, do some calculations, show information, even talk out the serial port, etc) with a minimal a…
Has their been a successor to VB? The web is close in some respects (HTML is easy) and not in others (servers and single-page apps are not). I suppose, in another respect, Excel is a successor for many, though it isn't a good solution for making apps of any sort. Surprisingly, the closest I've seen has been Microsoft's Project Siena[1]. I've not used it extensively, but my 5 or 10 minute made it look like it had the…
As a non-programmer, I've been looking for a VB successor for a long time.