Wherefore Art Thou, HyperCard? 64
gwernol writes "Macintouch is running an interesting section on the end of HyperCard at Apple. The original discussion was on alternatives to HyperCard but several ex-HyperCard engineers have come forward to describe the 'Steve-ing' of the project. It's an interesting insight into the workings of this company and the fate of Bill Atkinson's revolutionary piece of software." And lamz writes, "Thousands of people still use HyperCard but it has stagnated under Apple's stewardship. Is it time for an Open Source HyperCard? Great article at Wired." My first Mac programming was in HyperCard. Those were the days ...
A usefull link (Score:2, Informative)
Hypercard is basically a way to make slideshow like presentations and animations.
I remember using this back in elementary school to make some quite impressive presentations. Those 10 year old presentations are still more impressive than the stuff powerpoint does.
Re:People really use HyperCard these days? (Score:5, Informative)
The simplicity of the whole thing.
Back even as few as 5 years ago, I was using Hypercard as a front end to some of my C(++) projects. Myst is a good example of this, it is a hypercard frontend with extensive C++ programming in the form of XTNS (extensions). I used this to create a good deal of student testing applications for betas of computer adaptive testing (lots of intensive code that was VERY slow in scripting...probably run in perl or something else these days with ease though).
Hypercard was one of the greatest programs I ever had the opportunity to use. Its far more than PowerPoint or Director. Its Powerpoint mixed with Director and then filtered through Access / MySQL / Whatever and then given an object oriented language that was very easy to use and understand even if you didn't have the manuals in front of ya.
To be honest, until I started doing everything on the web, I used Hypercard as the frontend to all my softwares. Even after the web became useful, I STILL used it for CGI programming with Webstar on the Mac until I taught myself Perl and a half dozen other 'web' languages I use currently. With a few tweaks to the software, this COULD have been a contender with CGI programming on the Mac, but it was just confusing enough that the paradigm that HC users were use to was broken.
clif
Re:Jobs probably asked the same question (Score:3, Informative)
> why he exists but rather "Why are you Romeo?".
It could be either, but we're in danger of being attacked by rabid moderators if we elaborate at all.
However, since "whither" is an adverb, a better question is, "Whither is Hypercard?"