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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

#91

Post by nine_k »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #78
schoen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Inform 7 ( http://inform7.com/ ) is a modern programming language with "English like" syntax. And as someone who's tried to work from their manual (it has only "shallow end" and "learn by example" formulations) when you actually want to do the thing, one particular English-like construction will compile and a very similar English-like construction will be rejected and it's awfully hard, except by repetition, to learn…

I find well thought-out formalized grammars easier to follow in either direction. In particular, I find Python striking a good balance between reading almost like English for the most part, and being compact and non-ambiguous.

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

#92

Post by djsumdog »

gm-conspiracy wrote: post #79
buserror wrote: post #69

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…

...and Myst.

Wait, was Myst in hypercard? I remember watching videos where they talked about how everything was only in 256 colors with adaptive pallets, plus they had Windows, 3DO and Plyastation ports.

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

#93

Post by sjm-lbm »

djsumdog wrote: post #92
gm-conspiracy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and Myst.

Wait, was Myst in hypercard? I remember watching videos where they talked about how everything was only in 256 colors with adaptive pallets, plus they had Windows, 3DO and Plyastation ports.

The Mac version was in Hypercard, all of the other versions were different engines written from scratch for Myst.

They actually had to use the same color palette for each age to ensure there wasn't any strangeness as they flipped between cards to move around in the game.

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

#94

Post by mmjaa »

II2II wrote: post #87
mmjaa wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forgotten realm of democratising programming This phrase reminded me of a thought I once had, that the removal of the compiler as a first-class application in user-centric OS distributions was an imperial gesture to enforce class hierarchies among end-users: you were either a user, incapable of making your computer do new things, or you are a developer, who must be convinced to make computers do new things using ru…

I suspect that there were a number of things going on: - The bundled development tools were usually still there, but they took a form that those of use who grew up with computers in the 1980s were less likely to acknowledge. Consider how web development took off soon after more traditional languages were removed. - People are more interested in programming when new technologies appear. There are more itches to scratc…

> And if end users are less keen on programming, why should businesses make the investment in creating tools for them?

Alas, I feel that if we don't make it easy for users to become developers, they stay users.

Its not the other way around - clearly there is a market for developers/users. Its just that I think the dividing line is completely arbitrary, and enforced by marketing decisions - not technical or ethical ones.

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

#95

Post by mmjaa »

icebraining wrote: post #83
mmjaa wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forgotten realm of democratising programming This phrase reminded me of a thought I once had, that the removal of the compiler as a first-class application in user-centric OS distributions was an imperial gesture to enforce class hierarchies among end-users: you were either a user, incapable of making your computer do new things, or you are a developer, who must be convinced to make computers do new things using ru…

No computers actually come without the means of making them productive; they all have a JS engine. It's how I learned programming, almost twenty years ago - IE5 on a public computer. That said, I do agree that programming should be made more accessible. Bret Victor and others seem to be exploring new ways of doing that, besides making computing more physical: https://dynamicland.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item…

There are many who think that JS is not an acceptable means of developing applications for computers. It may be effective, but not acceptable.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of them, so this argument doesn't really appeal to me personally. I'd rather there were tools that don't require me to have a lobotomy to use them..)

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

#96

Post by dman »

kuschku wrote: post #68
dman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed comment!

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

#97

Post by kuschku »

dman wrote: post #96
kuschku wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed comment!

It’s honestly not much effort – I was compiling a new version of my app when I wrote it, and the last change I had done was the size of a button, because people complained about it. So I happened to have all the documents open by luck :)

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

#99

Post by kbutler »

kuschku wrote: post #67
kbutler wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contras…

Gosh, I didn't realize my new MBP had such a bad screen.

Low-contrast UIs can work well in a typical office environment on bright screens.

Take your ideally calibrated monitor, and use it as a second screen while watching a movie in your darkened home theater. Now take it and use it outside on a sunny day.

I prefer to adjust the brightness. YMMV.

Your description of sRGB is incorrect. sRGB was specified for CRT screens in 1996, used in an ideal viewing environment that is very dimly lit ("The current proposal assumes an encoding ambient luminance level of 64 lux which is more representative of a dim room in viewing computer generated imagery... While we believe that the typical office or home viewing environment actually has an ambient luminance level around 200 lux, we found it impractical to attempt to account for the resulting large levels of flare that resulted" https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB.html)

That doesn't match my viewing environments, which include the range above.

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

#100

Post by kuschku »

kbutler wrote: post #99
kuschku wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contras…

Gosh, I didn't realize my new MBP had such a bad screen. Low-contrast UIs can work well in a typical office environment on bright screens. Take your ideally calibrated monitor, and use it as a second screen while watching a movie in your darkened home theater. Now take it and use it outside on a sunny day. I prefer to adjust the brightness. YMMV. Your description of sRGB is incorrect. sRGB was specified for CRT scree…

MBP? That's surprising to hear then, they've got great (not $1600 Dell HDR monitor perfect, but great) monitors.

One of the core issues is constantly fiddling with the brightness, especially with multiple monitors.

That's where ideally you'd want to have the brightness of the panel fixed, and change it with a lookup map, e.g. what f.lux does for color mapping at night.

That's where you'd get ideal results, would be able to enjoy media in high quality without having trouble with too high contrast or too low contrast websites, and you could choose separate profiles for text and media.

Not everything supports this yet, but with the move to HDR10 and DolbyVision, support is getting better, because now people do have content in the same window that's mastered with completely different contrast ratios (the min for HDR10 is "moonless night", the max is "as bright as sunlight on a cloudless day", while for text the ideal min/max is newspaper text)

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