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ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

vipercard.net

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Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

pjmlp wrote: post #60
TeMPOraL wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. Still, I go to material.io and I don't see anything there that would make those things better.

I wish there was a UI philosophy that would take Tufte's ideas as a set of core principles: maximizing data-ink ratio, minimizing junk, increasing data density.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#62

Post by kowdermeister »

walterbell wrote: post #26
dangoor wrote: post #16

This is cool, but I wonder if anyone has made a modern, browser-based variation of HyperCard? Something with a model akin to HyperCard's but exporting stacks in a form that can be easily put onto a page. There's Amber Smalltalk, but that's more powerful and the simplicity of HyperCard is part of its charm.

Not modern, but the original in a browser via emulation: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...

How does it work? The http://hypercardonline.tk only accepts new uploads and a card archive is an iso file (https://archive.org/details/hypercard_twin-peaks) that the emulator can't seem to run.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#63

Post by pjmlp »

themodelplumber wrote: post #35
ashleyn wrote: post #23

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'd be interested to know what circumstances made the concept flourish. Massively popular yet difficult-to-program devices sitting in every home? If I could go back in time I would have stuck with QBasic for at least another five years before moving to C. I wasn't close to ready for the briefly exciting dive into "real" coding, which led to abstract CS concepts, the thick books with exciting illustrations on the cove…

I was lucky to have started in 8 bit machines, and having used Basic and Pascal compilers before ever touching C.

There wasn't a single new concept regarding low level hardware programming that C teached me, on the contrary, I got to learn how not to do it.

And I wasn't infected by the "micro-optimize each line of code as it gets written" culture, rather I was shipping software that was fast enough to keep its users happy.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#64

Post by dfex »

Wow! This takes me back! HyperTalk was probably my second language after Applesoft BASIC and boy did it seem powerful at the time.

Hypercard overall was just great at getting out of the way and letting you get things done. Looking back, if Apple had realised how powerful networking was back then, Hypercard may have morphed into the browser one day, but they missed that boat.

I remember reading somewhere a while back that Hypercard plus some XCMDs were used to control the lighting system in Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar... actually here we go: https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-go...

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#65

Post by pjmlp »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #54
ashleyn wrote: post #23

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 h…

> The fact that it was an interpreter meant you could read all the code for any program you found.

This wasn't a granted thing back then.

GW-BASIC source needed to be explicitly saved in ASCII mode.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#66

Post by efdee »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #54
ashleyn wrote: post #23

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 h…

To be fair, the difference between Snake and GMail is astronomical in itself.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#67

Post by kuschku »

kbutler wrote: post #14
jaysonelliot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been very interested lately in the idea of monochromatic interfaces. Aside from being easier on the eyes (especially an amber or red interface), they force UI designers to make careful choices, and potentially result in a cleaner, more useable interface. It's not a project for me yet, just a series of notes and concepts, but I'd like to turn it into a proof of concept at the very least.

Having made extensive use of amber and green and b&w monitors, I much prefer full color. Though I dislike the recent low-contrast efforts. Keep high contrast, reduce brightness as desired for your environment.

The problem of the low contrast issue is that otherwise content becomes unusuable on calibrated screens.

On a modern screen, a value of 100% is 1000 nits, 0% is far below 1 nits.

On an average shitty monitor, it's more a range 10 times more limited.

Your suggestion of making my monitor emulate your shitty monitor in hardware settings would also make it impossible to use it for use cases that do need this high contrast.

Reading text, on the other hand, gets very painful with that much contrast.

Real text, on a real newspaper, in normal room light, is #454545 text on #f0f0f0 background, in sRGB color space. Not #000 on #fff in sRGB, and definitely not 0 on max on ten times more contrast.

The real issue is that we have no color and contrast management at all for websites. I can't say that a color is meant to mean a certain brightness in nits, so it renders as #777 on my screen, and #000 on yours.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#68

Post by kuschku »

dman wrote: post #7
Karunamon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In case some UX / HCI experts read this thread, are there any credible studies of information density in user interfaces plotted over time?

You could simply plot recommended sizes for clickable items over time.

Windows 9x used 125% text height of 10pt as clickable item height, that's around 0.441mm.

Android 4.0 recommends a clickable item height of 48dp, "roughly one centimeter".

Android 5.0 uses 56dp (1.17cm), and on Phablets and Tablets even 64dp (1.33cm).

For items in lists, a second effect was seen, as it became recommend to show more info earlier, the number of list items visible at the same time was reduced. A multi line list item has a minimum height of 72dp (1.5cm), average is more around 96dp (2cm).

A similar effect can be seen on Windows, in UWP, the average item height also went to almost exactly 1cm in lists or menus.

This all fits well, as the smalest reliably clickable element in a UI is ~1cm on its smallest dimension.

This is also a common issue with HN, where voting buttons are 0.3 by 0.3cm, even on mobile, and as result I misclick ~2/3rds of the time, but no one seems willing to fix this.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#69

Post by buserror »

In 88 (I was 19) I was a 'professional mac developer' and wrote a stack in hypercard to convert huge list of points to polygons, and split them with other polygons.

The project was to split the parcels of land from Lille to Paris with the track of the TGV (high speed train) to calculate the expropriation the state was doing to the poor guys who'd end up getting their huge field cut in two, and would have to drive 20 miles to go from one side to the other :-)

Seriously. Hypercard was pretty cool to throw together something quickly, with a UI and more importantly it gave the client the impression they could go an tinker with it afterward.

It was also excellent to mockup UIs and 'processes' and other bits of Mac apps before committing to making them, so even internally at apple, Hypercard (and Supercard) were used a lot for mockups.

There was a huge ecosystem around hypercard, and it lasted for a very long time.

Oh, and Atkinson is still my hero!

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