What I find amazing is that early B&W GUIs were more usable than modern material design. Most takes on Material that I’ve seen take poor use of screen real-estate, poor conveyance, and distracting/hard-to-read color choices to an art form.
Once we get usable and affordable e-ink monitors designers will have to revisit this territory seriously.
Color abuse isn't really the most serious problem; the loss of information density is. E-ink isn't going to help here. Some alternative business models that would not incentivize companies into making their application glorified interactive movie posters would be welcome.
HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like. It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these…
People have written a lot about programming languages that try to use natural-language syntax, but one idea that I remember is that both HyperTalk and AppleScript are a lot easier to read than to write , because you can relatively easily use your knowledge of English to understand what the code is doing, but you can't easily use your knowledge of English to figure out how to phrase instructions in a way that the inte…
Like many commenters here, I loved HyperCard and used it quite a bit in middle through high school (and even college years). For me, it never was the syntactic-sugar-laden language, but the entire environment: it was really easy to create an interactive, custom GUI to do more or less what one wants. And since every Mac shipped with HyperCard, a stack can run anywhere (unless it depended on specific extensions).
HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like. It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these…
I totally agree - QBasic was my first language (after DOS batch files!). The fact that it was an interpreter meant you could read all the code for any program you found. Which, IIRC, was via floppy disks from my neighbor and a friend from school.
The web has some of that, but the technology is just so much more complex. The difference between reading the .bas file for SNAKE vs. using the web inspector to understand how gmail works is astronomical.
I used to make Hypercard stacks back in 7th grade when I was learning from Quantum Link (Q-Link) hackers like Mobeius from the Pan-American Information Network (#hellonearth). And AOL hackers and soical engineers like HappyHardcore, creator of AOL4Free & the Master Blaster, the famous Da Chronic, creator of AOHell and KT (Shameer) who first taught me social engineering in 1995- http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlin…
People have written a lot about programming languages that try to use natural-language syntax, but one idea that I remember is that both HyperTalk and AppleScript are a lot easier to read than to write , because you can relatively easily use your knowledge of English to understand what the code is doing, but you can't easily use your knowledge of English to figure out how to phrase instructions in a way that the inte…
The way "normal" people tend to enter into programming is by starting with some example code and modifying it to their purpose. In this sort of scenario readability is very much a benefit.
As opposed to software developers, who take some existing application code and refactor it to their purpose.
this is great, but how do i hit option on an android to draw multiple?
The UI was so mouse-centric that I haven't tried it much on mobile. If the menus work ok on mobile, it might make sense for "draw multiple" to be switched on in the menu like the way "draw wider lines" is now.
minivmac does a good enough job of it on the android port, and the in-browser mac emu at the archive too. looking forward to seeing where this project leads.
The way "normal" people tend to enter into programming is by starting with some example code and modifying it to their purpose. In this sort of scenario readability is very much a benefit.
As opposed to software developers, who take some existing application code and refactor it to their purpose.
I would expect a software developer to be able to write code from scratch (when necessary), but then again I'm old fashioned like that.
Hypercard was the inspiration behind much of the early Web. In particular the Viola browser suite. http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html
Hadn't known that about Viola-thanks. Love seeing influences between software tech. JavaScript's "onmouseup" and HyperTalk's "on mouseUp". I wonder what else HyperTalk has influenced?
I have done material design somewhat badly. I would mean a design directly from Google not someone’s reinterpretation of it. You can use it to justify your sloppyness but you could do the same thing in HyperCard.
I'd say Google is widely recognized for "taking poor use of screen real-estate to an art form" with their designs; though Material design is probably just a symptom here, the cause being the ongoing desire to dumb down applications and remove functionality.
Actually a typical rant on Android development forums is how Google doesn't follow their own Material designs.