HyperCard Gone for Good 187
Second to Last HyperCard Goddess writes "HyperCard has finally been removed from the Apple website. Read some comments about the passing. I read about HyperCard's demise on the RunRevolution list. It's pretty sad; the unexpected part was that it remained for sale at the Apple Store for six years without an update. Although we've all moved on, we'll certainly miss it." I won't.
Re:Any hypercard replacements out there? (Score:4, Informative)
Don't know anything about it - just followed the links.
Three that I know of... (Score:5, Informative)
There may be others...
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? (Score:4, Informative)
Its funny, I just presented an article on UI prototyping tools yesterday. I included Hypercard, although even my sources from 1996 said it was dying then. I made note of it of course, but I didn't think it would be dead the next day.
I originally found this on ACM, but most of you probably don't have access so here it is:
User Interface Prototyping: Concepts, Tools, and Experience [ubilab.org]Re:What was hypercard? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What was hypercard? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Six Years? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What was hypercard? (Score:5, Informative)
Data was oriented into "stacks" of "cards". Each card was of a certain design (I forget the HyperCard terminology), which basically consisted of a number of layers on which objects were placed. Widgets, layers, cards and stacks had scripts associated with them and could interact by message passing (or somethign like that - it's been ten years now). Layers could be turned off and on providing a rough and ready way to reorganize the interface based on user interaction. Data was kept in "fields" which are UI widgets and represent, roughly speaking something like a table schema. However things were pretty loosy-goosy -- a card in abstract a card is kind of like a hash which has data slots created by the card design's field UI elements. The reason I bring this up is that you could add new fields and widgets to an individual card if need be.
You could put these elements together in various ways. For example you could treat a stack sort of as a database tightly bound to UI (like Filemaker - very good for non-experts although obviously not scalable). In this kind of design each card design was kind of like a table and each card was kind of like a row, and each field is kind of like a column.
Or, you could use the elements in various ways; maybe creating a single card stack whose job was to control a laserdisc, or be a calculator, or some such thing.
My wife used a one card HyperCard stack at work to manage her to do list. Each item was kept on a line of a text control. Being the kind of person she is, she had several hundred lines of things on her to do list, each prepended with a numerical priority. When it came time to sort (on these 16MHz 68000 machines) it took over a minute to sort. I remember replacing the bubble sort with a shell sort to get the sort time down to something like 15 seconds.
Re:Me neither... (Score:1, Informative)
Hypercard was more like flash (or VB for dummies). You can draw pretty pictures, add text fields, buttons, etc. without knowing any programming, and have them do stuff. Or if you were more advanced, you could write code in HyperScript, which was very english-like.
What made it especially powerful was persitent storage - add an entry to your rolodex and it saves when you quit, no prompting, no saving step.
Re:Dead? (Score:1, Informative)
It's even Applescript aware so you can get your "program" on and do some really neat stuff. Does classic applescript send commands to OSX apps?
Re:Myst (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Software killed by Claris... (Score:3, Informative)
My 2-year-old loves to use the Paint part of AppleWorks. He does so with one of those "hard-to-use" one-button mice.
Re:Most underrated mac app ever? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? (Score:4, Informative)
The fun thing about the reader was that it was actualy the full application, it just had a crippled home stack. If you got the regular stack and the ad-ons you could make it the full version.
Re:Software killed by Claris... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Any hypercard replacements out there? (Score:5, Informative)
If you're a Java programmer and want to see an opensource HyperCard clone come to fruition, please drop me a line or jump onto the FreeCard-general mailing list and start hacking away.
Re:Three that I know of... (Score:3, Informative)
After coexisting for a few months eventually Runtime Revolution brought the rights and code for the Metacard engine and from Scott Raney of Metacard. So Metacard became Runtime Revolution.
RunRev is not 'buggy' it has bugs but it also as a very active development team working on removing them. Not quite as good as when Scott was The Man when support was second to none but far far better than most of the monolith software companies where bugs turn into features
Re:What was hypercard? (Score:3, Informative)
I wrote a stack for the newspaper I once worked for, that took the daily nationwide temperature reports and massaged them into something suitable for printing. I was rather proud of that at the time.
The object orientation even included inheritance, of a sort. There was a handler (HC's term for method) called openCard that was called whenever a new card was shown. If there was no openCard handler attached to the card that was opening, the background's (series of cards with a shared layout and handlers) openCard handler was called. Then the stack's. If it still wasn't handled, the handler in the "Home" stack was called.
If you did handle that somewhere along the way, you could elect to pass the message on and let the "superclass's" scripts take a whack at it.
The Home stack was a superclass of sorts for every stack in HyperCard. You could modify behavior globally from there (it could be overridden, of course, by individual cards, stacks, etc.). You could also insert arbitrary stacks into the search order. Some of Apple's demonstration stacks did that, as I recall.
The search order was the same for pre-defined handlers as well as user-defined handlers.
- Aaron
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? (Score:2, Informative)
There was more than one. See HyperCard Virus Compendium [hyperactivesw.com]
Early versions of the reader were the same code but with a stack that had a white image covering buttons to switch to the Authoring and Scripting levels. For those, you could enable the extra levels by typing "magic" at the message window. I don't think that worked for the Hypercard 2.2 reader. It really couldn't switch to the upper levels.
Re:others. . .Applescript Studio (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Myst (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple killed HyperCard (Score:5, Informative)
I've used HyperCard since 1987 when it was introduced, and bundled with all Macs. That was the same time that Mr. Jobs was ousted out of Apple.
Actually, Apple's new leadership in 1997 killed HyperCard.
When Mr Jobs returned to Apple, it was no surprise that he hated HyperCard. He hated all things Apple and launched the "think different" campaign that killed off all things "Classic". His job was to deliver on what Apple paid for, bringiing the NextStep OS to Mac OSX.
I can't say why Mr. Jobs hated HyperCard. It always helped sell Macs to educators in the same colleges and universities Mr. Jobs was trying to woo over to NexT. The Macs were selling because of HyperCard to these educators, it was easier for a scientist to mess with HyperCard on a project than with NextStep.
Still is easier to use HyperCard.
There are no similarities between Cocoa or AppleScript with HyperCard. On the surface, many languages advert they are object oriented. Under the hood, HyperCard simplified a lot of things for beginning users. Unintimidating, the language looked like plain-English, and the software used a message-passing heirarchy between objects that I have not seen in any other object oriented environment, save "xTalks".
Before the G3 appeared, all software was getting slow. HyperCard on modern Macs runs like a fine tuned watch, it is very fast. And if I had to pull something out of the tool chest to write code that would translate spreadsheet data into uploadable ASCII for any mySQL server database, I'd use HyperCard. and get the job done in a fraction of the time. The HyperTalk language excelled at munging text, much easier to write a utility (in minutes) with HyperTalk than BASIC or C any day.
What else have I used HyperCard for? Just about everything Apple might wexpect me to do with Apple Script Studio or Cocoa with much greater effort. HyperCard made creating interactive CDs child's play. I managed employee benefit plans with it; excellent for creating input data forms, posting and reporting. Also creating many stacks that produced clean HTML code, and more recently have written scripts that translate a stack's data to XML and other formats.
HyperCard died becasue there has been a real shift in what the computer companies are willing to develop and bring to users. Their decisions are now based on demand-driven technologies. The companies know that people generally are not interested in computing, they want products that perform tasks at the click of a button and require little or no thought.
Today, there is no need to "open up the box" for users to learn and understand what a computer is all about; few want to anyway. Back in 1987, that was an important part of marketing a computer, and HyperCard fit in very well. This environment no longer exists today.
So what was once a computer renaissance in the '90s has digressed to a rather dark age for computing, as we are no longer seeing tools that let us expand how we understand the technology, tools like HyperCard. I do see a lot of tools that let us do things that the programming factories "think" is best for us, best for what we want to to with these wonderful works of technology. Many of the iApps looked like remakes of things I had already created with HyperCard.
Think of what we've seen for progress in software since 1997. The only software that has appeared works basically the same as it did five or more years ago, only retrofitted to run on the new OS. Still the same MS Office or Works, Quicken, web browser, games mix. I thought speech recognition would have arrived by now. The only software innovation I've seen has not come from computer companies, but from the open-source community as so much has become web-centric.
The reas
Re:Three that I know of... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow, this is something I might really like... (Score:1, Informative)
HyperCard documents were formed like stacks of index cards (they were, in fact, called stacks). Each card could contain GUI elements (forms, buttons, text fiends, etc.) and images, and every element could be scripted to interact with the stack as a whole, certain cards, or certain elements. The scripting language gave the programmer control over just about everything that the user was able to see and click on.
Because HyperCard was capable of doing just about everything (IIRC, it was even used to implement a networking stack before TCP/IP existed), Apple didn't know how to market it. They were constrained by a promise to HyperCard's creator to give it away away for free, and it eventually got lost in a mire of company politics.
I personally learned how to program through HyperCard, way back in Jr. High. I had a science teacher who made us all make multimedia presentations with it. In the after-school hours I managed to write a game into my presentation, in which the user had to squish an unflattering representation of one of my classmates as it moved randomly about the screen. Ah, those were the days...
But in short, yes, it's Mac only. Yes, it's outdated (was there ever official support for color graphics?). No, there will never be anything like it ever again, unless Apple decides to go into the unprofitable business of marketing nostalgia. I'm afraid there's nothing for you to do but go and learn Java.
MUCH more than a presentation tool! (Score:3, Informative)
HyperCard had REALLY powerful features that made it ideal for building ledgers, contacts databases, tools to run Scout Troops, take computerized tests in schools, etc.
My dad still runs his business on HyperCard, he designed the stacks he uses back in the late eighties, and the format is so amazingly extensible.
You culd write front-ends for very complex things easily and without knowing much more than natural language. Today the tools that let you do thing that Hypercard could do are much more complex and expensive, and require MUCH more development. Very few database engineers would have jobs today if HyperCard took off like it should have.
Apple should have made HC web-enabled, and let people run a 'HC Player' plugin written in Java. My job would be an order of magnitude simpler and more efficient if HC were properly fed ten years ago.
Re:Any hypercard replacements out there? (Score:2, Informative)
From their site:
What is Squeak? Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling network access support that allows simple construction of servers and other useful facilities it runs bit-identical on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others) a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers efficient bulk-mutation of objects Squeak is available for free via the Internet, at this and other sites. Each release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and network access, with complete source code. Originally developed on the Macintosh, members of its user community have since ported it to numerous other platforms including Windows 95 and NT, Windows CE (it runs on the Cassiopeia and the HP320LX), all common flavors of UNIX, Acorn RiscOS, and a bare chip (the Mitsubishi M32R/D).
What it is not
The Squeak Smalltalk system bears no relation to the "Squeak" language designed by Rob Pike and Luca Cardelli in 1985, nor to its successor, "Newsqueak".
What is Cool about Squeak
To quote from Dwight Hughes, a frequent contributor to the Squeak mailing list, "How is Squeak important? Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy of complete openness -- where everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend for whatever purpose -- to include even the VM. It is a genuine, complete, compact, efficient Smalltalk-80 environment (*not* a toy). It is not specialized for any particular hardware/OS platform. Porting is easy -- you are not fighting entrenched platform/OS dependencies to move to a new system or configuration. It has essentially been put into the public domain - greatly broadening potential interest, and potential applications. The core team behind Squeak includes Dan Ingalls, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, and Scott Wallace. All of this has attracted many of the best and most experienced Smalltalk programmers and implementers in the world."
Squeak stands alone as a practical Smalltalk in which a researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to see or deal with any language other than Smalltalk. Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base, greatly facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. The system, together with an adherance, for better or for worse, to the image model (the entire state of Squeak is manifest in an image file), has yielded a system of extreme portability and sharability. Any image file will run on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely different hardware, with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).
A Brief History of Squeak
Squeak began, very simply, with the needs of a research group at Apple. We wanted a system as expressive and immediate as Smalltalk to pursue various application goals (prototypical educational software, user interface experiments and (let''s be honest) another run at the Dynabook fence). As you can read in the OOPSLA paper ("Back to the Future") we hit on the idea of writing a Smalltalk interpreter in a subset of Smalltalk, together with a translator from that subset to C.
Philosophy
The current Squeak interpreter combines a classical ST-80 interpreter with a simple yet efficient 32-bit dir
Re:I had completely forgotten about HyperCard. (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know if that's still the case -- probably not.