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You can still get Hypercard clones, supercard, revolution... I wish Apple would buy one of the and rerelease. Hypercard was a major feature of Apple and they should bring it back. The development tools are terrific for programmers but they need something lighter.

Since HyperCard died and C++ didn't make life any easier, java is still so ugly duck, i turned to MetaCard for all my coding needs. It's HyperCard's next evolution - fast, easy, light and I know very few limits whether in number of platforms supported, compatibility, range of applicability, or even depth of project structure... You're limited only by your imagination with this product! Since the IDE is made out of itself, you can customize it to the gut like RunRevolution did.

Check out Runtime Revolution, a cross-platform JIT compiled smalltalk-like programming environment based on 10-year old engine technology from MetaCard. It compiles to very small standalones and works on just about every platform(from website):

68K and PPC Macintosh systems running MacOS 7.1 through 9.X, with a separate Carbon engine for use with Mac OS X. The Win32 engine runs on Windows 95, 98 and NT and Windows 3.1 systems with the Win32s library Nine popular UNIX/X11 platforms are also supported: Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86, DEC Alpha, SGI IRIS, HP-9000/700, IBM RS/6000, SCO ODT, BSD UNIX, Linux Intel, and LinuxPPC.

One of the best things about it is the robust IDE which looks and acts the same on *all* platforms. You can build and debug on any platform you wish!

I used it to build ButtonGadget in only a couple of weeks. Would've taken me months using C++ or VB --and would be most difficult to make cross platform.

It also has a great and supportful user community. Check it out.

Seems to me that both Macromedia Director and Revolution are offspring of the original Hypercard.

As a matter of fact, I believe that Revolution can import Hyper/Super stacks with pretty decent accuracy -- plus dig the development and deployment platforms: [snip]

Revolution supports these platforms for both development and deployment:

* Mac OS 7.1 and later
* Mac OS X
* Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000
* Unix flavors including:
* Linux (x86 and PPC)
* Digital UNIX
* BSD
* HP-UX
* SGI IRIX
* SCO Open DeskTop/UnixWare
* Solaris (x86 and SPARC)
* SunOS

Compare that to the Win32/MacOS Classic support in Director. Yeah, yeah... there was an OS/2 runtime environment for Director 4. But it never worked as well as running Dir 4 executables in Win compatibility mode.

Having used Director as my primary development platform during my "budding" years as a programmer, I'd be willing to bet that most people have absolutely no idea how powerful it is. I never came across a project that required more than it could deliver -- with the exception of the odd Xtra/Xobject.

In recent years, Director has started getting WAAAY too bloated, and the performance is down to a crawl -- on the Mac platform at least. Does anyone really use the 3D extensions that 8.5 provided?

I'm not even going to talk about how slow MM has been to carbonize Director, either.

Nope. Not gonna talk about that.

I've played with Revolution a bit recently -- specifically because it doesn't require the purchase of the authoring environment for multiple platforms if you wish to deliver on multiple platforms. I've been pretty impressed by it, and the company.

There's something to be said for supporting small Scottish companies with a sense of humour.

I have to say -- if I'm writing data-parsing utilities for my own/internal use -- I can get the job done in a fraction of the time (minutes vs. hours/days) using one of these tools vs perl/php or full-blown C projects.

This class of tools (and now Flash with Actionscript, and RealBasic I'd assume) is responsible for being the "training wheels" for oodles of budding programmers and shareware authors -- and the community support for this type of tool is awesome. Comparable with the PHP community.

Definitely worth a look if you're wanting to learn the basics of programming without having to deal with OS-level display toolboxes and the like.

Young children are fantastically good at learning languages by example, but often not good at predicate logic or deductive reasoning, which takes a lot of training. (As an aside, the book Reading Reflex applies this insight to teaching reading - instead of teaching deductive rules parrot fashion, it groups different representations of the same sound and gets the children to work through them until they derive an unconscious model that way).

The best 'programming' exercise with small children is the 'I am a robot' game. You play their robot slave, and do what you are told, but very literally, and in small stages, with 'error messages' returned in a robot voice. Just getting you to walk from the sofa to the bedroom can take ages and they love it. They naturally want to be the simple-minded robot too (just make sure they don't get too attached to it, or they may end up working in telephone support).

I've seen a huge amount of 'educational' software - I used to work in the CD-ROM business, and I buy up remaindered CD's from Marshalls for my 2 boys and watch how they use them. Most of them are dross, with the same few ideas (Pelmanism, missing words etc.) recycled with a different character or brand attached. Some have genuine insight, and I can see them learning to reason using them. Here are a selection:

Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is a wonderful introduction to deductive logic through a compelling game. It was designed with this in mind and my boys have been playing this since they were 3, and are still enjoying it now at 5 and 7 (as do I).

The Pajama Sam series of adventures from Humongous are good at teaching the global/local focus, but one that is great fun and teaches valuable debugging skills is Pajama Sam's SockWorks which features a long series of machines that have socks in them that you have to get into the right coloured baskets. As you can also build your own puzzles, the idea of solvable and unsolvable problems naturally comes up.

Zap! is another great game that teaches by stealth. You have to help 3 wisecracking cartoon charcters to fix their electrical, optical and audio-visual gadgets to get their show on the road. It manages to include a compelte circuit simulator, an optical workbench simulator and sound environment simulator, and still be lots of fun for Kindergarten children.

To teach programming concepts without writing textual code, Cocoa is perfect (if you have a Mac). It is a tool that enables you to create 2d video games by drawing the characters and defining what happens when they encounter each other by example. Andrew has made about 65 games with this, some original, some homages to TV programs or his brother's films.

Finally, if you want a comprehensible textual language, use Runtime Revolution, whose language Transcript is based on the old Apple HyperCard language, and as such has completely human-readable programs. This is what I plan to get Andrew into next.
(republished from my blog, May 12th 2002)

Young children are fantastically good at learning languages by example, but often not good at predicate logic or deductive reasoning, which takes a lot of training. (As an aside, the book Reading Reflex applies this insight to teaching reading - instead of teaching deductive rules parrot fashion, it groups different representations of the same sound and gets the children to work through them until they derive an unconscious model that way).

The best 'programming' exercise with small children is the 'I am a robot' game. You play their robot slave, and do what you are told, but very literally, and in small stages, with 'error messages' returned in a robot voice. Just getting you to walk from the sofa to the bedroom can take ages and they love it. They naturally want to be the simple-minded robot too (just make sure they don't get too attached to it, or they may end up working in telephone support).

I've seen a huge amount of 'educational' software - I used to work in the CD-ROM business, and I buy up remaindered CD's from Marshalls for my 2 boys and watch how they use them. Most of them are dross, with the same few ideas (Pelmanism, missing words etc.) recycled with a different character or brand attached. Some have genuine insight, and I can see them learning to reason using them. Here are a selection:

Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is a wonderful introduction to deductive logic through a compelling game. It was designed with this in mind and my boys have been playing this since they were 3, and are still enjoying it now at 5 and 7 (as do I).

The Pajama Sam series of adventures from Humongous are good at teaching the global/local focus, but one that is great fun and teaches valuable debugging skills is Pajama Sam's SockWorks which features a long series of machines that have socks in them that you have to get into the right coloured baskets. As you can also build your own puzzles, the idea of solvable and unsolvable problems naturally comes up.

Zap! is another great game that teaches by stealth. You have to help 3 wisecracking cartoon charcters to fix their electrical, optical and audio-visual gadgets to get their show on the road. It manages to include a compelte circuit simulator, an optical workbench simulator and sound environment simulator, and still be lots of fun for Kindergarten children.

To teach programming concepts without writing textual code, Cocoa is perfect (if you have a Mac). It is a tool that enables you to create 2d video games by drawing the characters and defining what happens when they encounter each other by example. Andrew has made about 65 games with this, some original, some homages to TV programs or his brother's films.

Finally, if you want a comprehensible textual language, use Runtime Revolution, whose language Transcript is based on the old Apple HyperCard language, and as such has completely human-readable programs. This is what I plan to get Andrew into next.
(republished from my blog, May 12th 2002)

If the goal is to go cross-platform while maintaining (improving, even) ease-of-development, check out Revolution, it lets you easily target Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac, in an environment that is easier than Visual Basic, but just as powerful. Also consider Revolution's older brother, MetaCard.