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 ...
Re:People really use HyperCard these days? (Score:3, Insightful)
I myself never used HyperCard. But I *did* use a clone called "ToolBook", from Asymmetrix, which was launched pretty much in parallel with Windows V3.1. The differences between the two were: HyperCard's metaphor was a stack of cards, while Toolbook was a book of pages. Toolbook also dealt with graphics in a different way, using color and beeing slightly deeper in terms of GUI object structure.
Toolbook was wounded mortally by the introduction of Visual Basic...but before that happened I wrote some kick-ass medical writing assistant code in Toolbook that parsed a National Library of Medicine MedLine search into a set of cards...I mean...pages, let you tag, sort and search them in various ways, and pull the data on a page into a properly formatted bibliographic reference in a Word document, with the option of pasting the abstract in.
So it wasn't just the Macinfolks that were having fun with this kind of stuff Way Back When.
Toolbook tried to recast itself as a "multimedia tool"...I'm sure there's still folks using it somewhere too. But Gawdalmighty I'd rather be writing ToolScript on a web page than JavaScript.
Re:Jobs probably asked the same question (Score:2, Insightful)
"Wherefore art thou Romeo?" is not really asking why he exists but rather "Why are you Romeo?". The problem with their relationship was that the love of her life belonged to the family of her father's enemy. Specifically, that he was Romeo.
So that I'm not totally off topic, I will suggest that a more appropriate title for this article might have been "Whither Hypercard?"
Devon