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Trying To Save HyperCard For Mac OS X
jse75 writes: "This story from the O'Reilly site comments on the state of HyperCard - Apple's much-loved, long-lived, multimedia software tool. Lots of HyperCard stacks are in use today, in all sorts of places - businesses, doctor's offices, museums, and more. Currently there seem to be no plans on Apple's part to update HyperCard to run natively under Mac OS X. The story from O'Reilly contains more info about the International HyperCard Users Group and their quest to get Apple to Carbonize HyperCard. They even had a booth at MacWorld Expo! Join in, maybe together we can convince Apple that continued support for HyperCard is a Good Thing!"
Can't believe I got fp with such a stupid comment. Anyway, I say in the end forget reverse engineering it, why not use the power of Cocoa to make a similar OS X app that's modern and useful, which Hypercard at this point is not.
Oh man.. HyperCard.> The program that got me into programming.. What an increadible piece of software..
:-).. + you'd have cross platform stacks sort of like Java but even slower ;-)..
:-)...
Hypercard is the gizmo that gave use the word hyperlink. It's responsible for Myst and inspired TCL/TK as well as half a dozen other such scrpting languages. Ever used Delphi or any other visual programming tools? Hypercard's in there somewhere...
Hypercard is one of these old gems that are out there. It basically changed the world and then was neglected by Apple... the bastards.. For a while they said they would put Hypercard into quicktime. I liked that idea since quicktime with hypercard scripting would give macromedia a run for their money.
pitty that didn't come to pass...
HyperCard is the Mac ideal in programming form. Easy, freindly, practical and totaly disrespected by all those that built on its lead or use its derivatives.
Now.. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play Cosmic Osmo
Pinky
I mean, Mac OS X has been out since March 24th, but if Slashdot was your only source of 'geek news' (god help you if you're like that) then you'd have no idea it was out.
HOWEVER, Slashdot is happy to post articles about lack of DVD players or CD Burning, and now a story about some antique piece of hardware that i've never even heard of. Seems Slashdot likes listing OS X flaws, but won't even tell you that the thing has been released.
This might come across as flamebait, but it's the truth. You can't just report the bad stuff.
If anyone's interested, Cannons and Castles is a HyperCard port I did of an old Apple II game. Well, sort of a port and sort of a rewrite. Anyway, if you've got a Mac, or Basilisk II or something, check it out.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Yes, for less than US$1,000 you too can program like you used to with the free Hypercard interpreter that came with your Mac. It's practiclly a steal!
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
I know I'm being redundant, but I loved Hypercard on my old LC and I just want to get my 2 bits in.
Hypercard is by far the easiest and fastest gui development environment (RAD at its finest) I have ever used. I learned everything I know about programming Hypercard from reading other peoples scripts (it was fairly hard to prevent people from reading your source code, so almost all Hypercard stacks were essentally open source). The entire package was so well designed an integrated that even a 7 year old can design a frightfully complex application. The best part is, every Mac came with a full development environment (until that blasted "HyperCard Player" appeared at least) that was only a "Command-M set userlevel to 5" away. Hypercard was Apples version of "GW Basic" when Apple did everything 100x better than Gates and Co.
Nur ar det slut
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
just let it die, please.
There is nothing Hypercard can do that PDF and web technologies can't do better.
Why do we need another proprietary one-platform standard?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
yeah! let's start our own HyperCard Open Source project! Fuck Apple! Then in 10 years, we can have the functionality of software that was obsolete 10 years ago. That's progress!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Odd that, my experience is exactly the opposite. At university we were given a few projects that specified HyperCard (writing stacks to demonstrate 2D graphics primitives). I don't know where I was supposed to get documentation, because asking for HyperCard's online help caused the whole machine to crash.
I don't believe it's big or clever to allow English-looking code, the way Hypercard does. In the absence of documentation, I had no way of knowing whether one English phrase (let's say "put input into x") would work or another would not (get the input and put it into x).
In the end I believe I just gave up on the project and sacrificed the grade. I mean, what's more important, a degree or your sanity? (I got a decent degree in the end -- Hypercard was not needed in the final year)...
I appreciate there are a lot of Hypercard stacks out there that may be valuable. Perhaps someone needs to find a way to allow those scripts to be maintained, while preventing anyone from ever having to embark on a project using it again....
--
Actually, VB was created because of HyperCard, not vice versa. And, like everything else out of Microsot, it was only a pale imitation.
I used to use HyperCard too, though I got into it later than you did. It was some great stuff. But its time has come. It's been superseded by how many different technologies now? Let's see; QuickTIme, AppleScript, Cocoa, [i]and [/i]Flash all have either HyperCard's power (QuickTime), ease of learning (AppleScript), or both (QuickTime, Flash). Put a good GUI builder on top of AppleScript, perhaps integrating it into ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder, and you basically have HyperCard; the language AppleScript was, despite what the HC bigots out there loudly deny, based off of the language, and in fact they take it a step further.
HyperCard is a nice tool. It's what got me into programming. But its time has come; better things are out there. Things more powerful and faster, and even easier to learn. I think it's sad that HyperCard is dying, but I'm satisfied in that there are plenty of capable replacements on the Mac, and even on OSX.
----------
Quite frankly, I don't think it's anything worth saving. If you think Mac zealots (which I am) are anal retentive about keeping their OS and their Macs, remember just one thing: HyperCard users are twice that, to the power of 2.
HyperCard is a black and white product. The color support was added as a sort of plug-in (XCMDs and XFNCs) and merely complicates colorizing. Multimedia support (QuickTime) is another suck hacky addition that doesn't really well mesh with the original intent of HyperCard.
History lesson: HyperCard, imagined and brought to life on spare time because of lack of interest of the then managment, is the child of O Grand Master Bill Atkinson, father of the Mac's original (B&W) QuickDraw code, whom to which we owe much of Apple's graphical prowesses. HyperCard is a meta card system which you can script using a near-english dialect called HyperTalk. This hypertalk is the ancestor of AppleScript. both share alot of the same architechture design, and even dialect. In fact, HyperCard evolved (around version 2 or 2.2) in a way that you could script using either or both HyperTalk and AppleScript in the same or across "stacks" (aka, HyperCard "applications").
A number of clones started appearing around that time (more than 10 years ago) in order to solve the lack of color and multimedia support. SuperCard, the most notable one, is still around today and is still maintained.
Note to HyperCard zealots: use SuperCard if you can't think of migrate to anything else. SuperCard DOES import HyperCard, and is compatible with the same XFNCs and XCMDs you (still) use today.
The are other alternatives for this today. Although you can't import a HyperCard stak or convert it easilly, some AppleScript-based similar products exist today, and are, quite frankly, much better than HyperCard ever was. One of them, for being a user of it (we use it as a build machine controler software) is called FaceSpawn. Think of it as Visual Basic, but AppleScript based and therefore able to communicate and exchange data with ANY AppleScript-ready application, including most of the mac OS system software--both 9 and X.
There's one comment (very personal) which I'd make about this issue. Mac OS has evolved a LOT since HyperCard (and Bill Atkinson original involvement). It's time HyperCard users evolve too.
Lastly, and since I haven't had a chance to do it before and that I'm publicly speaking about him, I'd like to express my gratitude and sincere thanks to Bill Atkinson for both QuickDraw (and it's regions!) and HyperCard. Thanks for the memories.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Supercard was painful when I used it in 1994..
I wonder if there's an OSS project out there to interpret HC stacks? Could be fun..
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
You can ask, please, pretty please, Apple, will you please Open Source HyperCard? They will say no.
Or you can start a project that clones it and produces software that anyone can run. Reverse-engineer the format. Do the reverse engineering part in an EU country where such things are clearly legal. Do the thing in layers, so that you have a GUI-independent layer at the bottom that people can build on top of. Innovate. Could you come up with a scheme for mapping HyperCard links to URLs? Maybe you could come up with a way to navigate HyperCard stacks with ordinary web browsers.
But don't beg. Don't do petition drives. Just Do It.
I don't know much about Quicktime and Flash, but I don't think either is the complete package that Hypercard was.
Hypercard had three basic features: graphics, database, and programming. None of them were very advanced. Oh, I suppose the graphics in Hypercard were state-of-the-art when it was introduced into a monochrome bitmapped world. But its database capabilities were merely very basic, and its programming was only a bit more than basic (don't get me wrong - it wasn't intended to be anything fancy; it was supposed to be easy to use).
Today there are many products that beat the pants off Hypercard in one or two of these three areas. Flash clearly beats it graphically, and I'll take your word for it that Quicktime does too. I don't know much about Flash's scripting language, but let's say that it's as good as Hypertalk. However, I don't think Quicktime has programming capability, and I don't think either of these products has database capability like Hypercard did. I know even less about Visual Basic, but I doubt it has a built-in database either.
Perhaps you can hook up a database to these products. I know you can to Visual Basic. Maybe it's even easy to do. So maybe with some modern products you can come up with the same three feature sets as were in Hypercard, and they would be much more powerful.
That would still be missing the point.
In Hypercard, the three features were designed and built together. There was nothing external to hook up - no database, no ODBC drivers, no graphics package to add. You got it all right out of the box.
The best part was that they were exceptionally well integrated. Everything fit nicely into everything else. The object hierarchy that glued them all together is still one of the best and most likeable designs I've ever seen. For example, I still very much admire the way that Hypercard handled events -- passing them from specific to general: button to card to background to stack and finally to Hypercard itself. The design of Hypercard showed that Apple hadn't just stuck together a bunch of features -- they thought about what they wanted to do and came up with a holistic, comprehensive design.
The "card" paradigm was just a metaphor to let people work with databases without having to think in database terms. Build a background card and you're building a database schema. Add a card and you're adding a database record. Except, of course, that Hypercard never mention databases nor records. The closest they got to database terminology, if I remember correctly, was the "field".
My only complaint about Hypercard was that sometimes things were too simple. In trying to design a system that was "easy" for the average user to work with and even program, they built in some limitations that became obvious when pushed to their limits. Its database capabilities were crude, at best. And I seem to remember that string manipulation was often a problem. What I wouldn't have given just for some perl-like regular expressions! Probably, though, there's an XTND resource out there somewhere to do just that -- at least they made Hypercard extensible.
So, while I agree with you that there are many, many products that beat Hypercard in one or two if its feature areas, I don't know of any product that beats it at all three. And even if there is such a product, I doubt if the three features are as well-integrated as they were in Hypercard.
There's not a whole lot that I really miss about my old Macs, but Hypercard is definitely one of them. For simple databases like my card catalog, it not only did the job well, but it was a joy to use.
--Jim
They haven't officially said they're abandoning it but their resources are stretched with OS X install problems and NOBODY has any friggin experience with it.
Maybe they don't want to commit to anything one way or another because they can't. For the moment, boot into 9.1 and grumble and keep writing that you want it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Yes! Hypercard is powerful, and can be used to write apps.
:) )
However, as a 16 year mac veteran, trained in multimedia art in college, and above all else a geek...
Euthanize it already.
I'm not saying that anybody who's using it should stop. Tools are tools. I'm saying that we can do evrything that hypercard did and more sans cruft if we move on.
And I don't mean use flash either. To a designer who doesn't know a for from 4, flash is cool. For a programmer, it's the ultimate hell-spawn.
And Director has a good IDE, but let's face it folks, english is NOT the best language to do logic in, and Lingo is based on it.
I'll just list the following technologies included in MacOS X, and let your minds wander. I'm sure you can come up with very nifty stuff.
System Level XML parsing
Java access to native object frameworks
Java/Quicktime Integration
Apache
Plus the following Open Source technologies which can be brought on:
Mozilla's Java based JavaScript 1.5 VM (try/catch
Vorbis
Coccoon
Xang
Need I go on? Hell, I'll bet some enterprizing hacker could write an XML formatting Object to fart out hypercared stacks from modern apps written using the above.
Us mac artists and coders have far much more at our disposal now than we have ever had. I think Apple should if anything work on giving us stuff that isn't out there yet, as opposed to porting over tech that in their default install is outclassed by mostly open source tech, especially when the old version works in classic.
I know it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks...I'm sayiong that we should let old dogs do their thing, and teach New tricks to new dogs.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Let me continue by saying that i think it was a great, great loss that apple chose to drop hypercard the way they did. Had it continued to *grow*, it could have been a disturbingly influential piece of software. Hypercard could have been what Virtual Basic is now, only better. Short bit of obligatory history for the slashbots here: Hypercard was created BECAUSE of visual basic. Remember, Apple historically thought Basic was a nifty language. When Microsoft was first working on VB, apple asked them to create a BASIC R.A.D. tool, and MS agreed.. time passed, VB came out for windows, VB did not come out for mac. Even more time passed. Apple realizes VB is not going to come out for mac, and so an engineer there named Bill Atkinson (AKA "the dhali lama") decided screw microsoft, he was going to create his OWN visual basic.. and it came out beautifully. Hypercard was just SUCH an elegant tool for what it did, ESPECIALLY for the time, in every way, from the way it made the Fields and Buttons feel like the graphical elements they were to the strength and simplicity of the scripting language. Unfortunately with time apple just started neglecting it, in a horrible way. They blatantly refused to add color, they wouldn't take the obvious step of expanding their concept of button icons into real, useful SPRITES, and they let it get SLOW
hell, Cyan was a hypercard company. Myst was a hypercard app, and i think Riven was too.. or had they switched to Director by that point? Blah.
However, at this point.. dude, it's too late. Let the thing die. It had it's day. It's fun as a relic, but.. just.. no. If hypercard still holds some niftiness for you, just drop the damn thing and get Shockwave Flash. It is well worth the $300 or whatever it is (i don't have it). Flash IS what hypercard COULD HAVE BEEN: vector-based, visually rich, POWERFUL, flexible, cross-platform.. hell, just look at Flash and give me one good reason for Hypercard to still exist. And as far as hypercard serving a PURPOSE.. well, at this point the tools apple is serving instead have such power, such potential. I don't know if any of you have ever USED the combination of neXTStep interfacebuilder and objective C, but i honestly doubt it would be any more difficult to get a fifth grader like i was-- if you presented it right, and threw in kinda object library for sprite animation, and integrated that library with I_B-- to deeply grok writing cocoa software to the point where they could do everything they could in hypercard and more without much more difficulty. But oh, i mean, HELL. At this point *QUICKTIME* is as powerful or more so than hypercard. That's right, Quicktime now has sprites and interactivity and filters and everything hypercard had! I was actually for a short time considering writing a program that would convert hypercard stacks into quicktime movies! (I still think this would be an awesome project.)
If we're going to carbonize/update ANYTHING, it should be World Builder. Anyone remember World Builder games? "Mr. Roger's Revenge" and that whole bunch.. i mean like just think like what if they like added support for like color and quicktime movies and hypercard and shit DUDE HOW FUCKING L337 WOULD THAT BE??
(note: i honestly do not think i am being sarcastic about this last bit.)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Royal Software released just such a thing, back in 1996 or 1997. It was pretty darn cool at the time, but I can't remember its name.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
These days I write mostly C/C++ on Solaris, and some Java.
I started with BASIC on an Apple ][ e, but I really got going with Hypercard. It allowed you to create results quickly, and learn to program at the same time. Heck, I got started with C by writing Hypercard XCMDs.
There might be bad programmers who code in Visual Basic, probably even a higher per-capita than other languages becuase of the lower barrier to entry. But don't be a language bigot - things like VB and Hypercard have their place, and I sure owe a lot to Apple and Hypercard for gettme me going 12 years ago.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Having worked a number of years for an Apple VAR and developer, I can honestly state that I have never once seen Apple do anything that indicates it gives a shit about its advocates, much less it users. They're willing enough to flatter them in marketing campaigns and pats on the back at MacWorld, but when the chips are down anybody who relies on Apple to act with anything but indifference to the fate of its friends is a sitting duck.
This is why they blew it in the corporate market. Early on, there were opportunities for Apple to earn several niches other than graphics in the corporate arena. However, IT managers who went out on a limb to advocate for Macs not only received no real support from Apple (other than copious brainwashing sessions at the local sales office), but time and time again Apple demonstrated its ruthless willingness to pull the rug out from its diminishing supply of friends if there were short term gain to be made.
The shell-shocked ex mac manager rushing into the embrace of Microsoft has become a sad cliche.
I'm not saying Apple products are bad, most are good and many have been revolutionary. I'm just saying that time and time again they have proven to be driven by a endogenous, technological vision rather than any sensitivity to the needs of their users except as abstract system components. If anything Apple has even less of a communitarian instinct than Microsoft. I'm not saying that companies should be run as charities, but there should be at least some sense of enlightened self interest. Microsoft at least offers a faustian bargain -- Apple's more take it or leave it.
If Apple open sourced ANY product they expected to be of value to anyone, it would signal the birth of a new Apple. Yes I know about Darwin, but I'd be surprised if Apple didn't go through OS X and carefully remove anything that might be of value over what is already available in existing BSD systems.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I also admire Applescript, but that's an Apples-and-Oranges comparison. The key to understanding HyperCard is that there isn't really anything to compare it to.
The abandonment of the product is one thing -- the abandonment of the model is another. You wouldn't throw out the idea of a spreadsheet because your favorite spreadsheet product of yesteryear wasn't updated.
The Hypercard model is sufficiently flexible to act sort of like a database, but a little like paper records too. It was an uniquely flexible structure that allowed individual records to inherit the attributes of their templates yet have custom attributes and behavior. If you are a database designer, this is anethema, but the result is that naively designed applications could display forms adapability that would be very difficult using sophisticated techniques.
Again, I like Applescript -- it is far superior to VB and Apple Events are easier to program with and debug than COM. I think Applescript can justifiably be compared to Python. The problem with getting Python or Applescript to play in the VB space is that they don't have a kind of native home for somebody to get their feet wet in doing simple kinds of useful things.
I'd like to see the product reborn as a server product which serves out HTML representations of cards over HTTP. This would be like Wiki on steriods.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lots of HyperCard stacks are in use today, in all sorts of places - businesses, doctor's offices, museums, and more. Currently there seem to be no plans on Apple's part to update HyperCard to run natively under Mac OS X.
Everyone seems to read this as "Apple is dropping support for HyperCard." Let's take a few seconds to analyse the situation.
There are thousands upon thousands of HyperCard stacks out there, developed for the last fifteen years. A safe estimate would indicate that the vast majority were developed more than three years ago.
OS X is support on boxes shipped with G3s and G4s. These are all boxes developed in the past three years or so. By one of the few appropriate applications of Moore's Law, these machines are from 1 to 1000 times faster than the boxes used to develop and deploy the HyperCard stacks, which are mostly UI-bound anyway.
There's not a significant enough performance hit for Classic apps for these HyperCard stacks to be slower than they were originally. It's still pretty doggish, but it is in Apple's best interests to improve Classic.app and MacOS.app to lure customers away from their old boxes. As it is, even though it's slower than it should be, remember the environment for which they were developed, and remember that almost all of them are not computationally demanding.
The fact that it isn't being ported to MacOS X doesn't mean it's being abandoned. It still runs on MacOS 9, which (for a year or two) is planned to be continued in parallel with MacOS X. So HyperCard still works (and works well) as a product under one of Apple's current OS lines.
I agree that Open Source is preferable to abandonment (except where the original product is being used as a foundation for the in-development next phase) but that doesn't apply here. Please wait until Apple abandons OS9 (and HyperCard along with it) before complaining.
There was a hypercard clone for NeXTSTEP called "HyperSense" several years ago. The last I heard about it (ran into the principal developer at WWDC about two years back) a Mac OS X port was planned, so there should be a way to run your existing stacks, at least.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
For about ten years now I've been hearing different permutations of the rumor that AppleScript, HyperCard, and QuickTime will eventually all become the same thing. In the meantime, those looking for a Mac OS X solution might want to keep their eye on HyperSense. HyperSense is a Hypercard work-alike for NeXTStep (aka "OpenStep"), soon to be available for Mac OS X (aka "OpenStep"
Ya gotta love a programming language where is actually valid code...
-Mark
Oh! Lovely idea! Let's keep alive ANOTHER defunct, archaic standard in an operating system that's even sacrificing performance in backwards compatibility to get RID of the ridiculously outdated infrustructure of the classic Mac OS in favor of modernizing and UNIX-izing! Apparently some people aren't too clear on the concept of OS X.
Frankly, HyperCard stacks are not the prettiest thing to behold. Let's just let it die and be done with it. It will always run in Classic under OS X, to boot.
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
I learned to program in HyperTalk. In high school every 9th grade history student had to make a HyperCard stack for one project that was basically an interactive history report. This got me into playing with HyperCard, and specifically into playing in HyperTalk, which is HyperCard's built in scripting language.
The whole language was kind of "Object Oriented" though I don't know if OO was much of a concept back then (at least I knew nothing about programming).
I would say I wouldn't be the person or programmer I am now without HyperCard. There was a whole (sub)culture of HyperCard users/scripters/geeks. I remember using Gopher to find cool stacks.
I eventually learned C later in hich scool but before that I was creating stacks that drew fractals, graphed arbitrary equations, and made generational graphics. One teacher encouraged me to start learning MacroMedia Director, but HyperCard so much more fun, for me.
My friend and I were Lab Assistants in the Computre Lab at my school and would spend every minute of our time there playing around in HyperCard.
Some notable hacks that my friend and I wrote in HyperCard:
A stack that looked exactly like the existing (1993) MacOS interface, completely with desktop, trash and HD icons, and menubar! And when some unsuspecting student ran it it would look like nothing had happened, and every menu command they did resulted in a System Bomb window. Yeah we were kids, but it was hella fun.
Also, since the macs were networked and most of them had Program Sharing on by default (a long forgotten way of communicating between mac apps), you could send ANY ARBITRARY SCRIPTING commands to ANY OTHER HYPERCARD RUNNING MAC! This was the coolest thing I had ever seen at 13. We wrote a script that would cause somebody's screen to pop up a text entry dialog with the message "You have been logged off. Please enter your password below." Damn that was cool.
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
The problem is that Apple killed it before version 2.0 (still desperately in black & white) as they started to no longer give it away with each Macintosh sold, starting at Mac Classic. (in fact version 2.0 was limited to a runtime unless you paid for it, but you could still "hack" the home stack to tell HyperCard to move to the development level). Then later, starting with System 7.0 they only provided a runtime, not unlockable.
At that time, Apple thought of replacing HyperCard with AppleScript. Not only they didn't achieve this, HyperCard and AppleScript did not cooperate well as it should have. In the mean time, Apple failed to provide color support in HyperCard making it worthless as a separate product.
Hey Apple, if you listen ? You provide iMovie free, you provide iTune free, why not writting iHyperCard and provide it free of charge for everybody with every Macintosh, with every MacOS X? You already provide complete professional development tools... That would be a great asset for you.
(and opening the file format would be the cherry on the top, for sure)
Hub
WTF? Apple will never open-source anything?
How about Darwin or Quicktime Streaming Server? Or MkLinux. No apple never will open source anything.
I'm one of the ones who missed Hypercard, because when I got my first computer, my Mac IIvx (bless it's departed soul!) Hypercard wasn't bundled and I had to save for Code Warrior a few years later.
:-)
I'd thought about writing my own hypercard replacement and GPL it, but I realized that hypercard is dead and should be dead, because it's the web that took it's place. The web makes it so easy to author many of the basic apps that hypercard did, that why should we make a replacement? Granted, it can't do everything, but you pay with features and you get portability and internet support. No, let hypercard rest, just bundle the fucking dev tools and an iTool that will kick the shit out of Frontpage express
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Silly troll. You're living way Way WAY in the past, and even then you were still wrong.
It's hard to quantify the amount of value that HyperCard added to the Mac. Most people who use computers are not so übergeek that they want to dive into C++, Perl, Java, etc.; just the opposite.
HyperCard offered (for the first time and, perhaps, the last) a development environment that the average person could understand and work with, giving immeasurable power to the user community. That sounds like a pretty heady statement, but it's true. A somewhat small case-in-point was a Greek class that I was struggling through in my undergrad work; I was having a rough time keeping up with the vocabulary. Incredibly, I found an HC stack for Greek vocabulary drills that followed the same book we were using, written by a grad student at some other university. The author was not a programmer, and I think that it was safe to say that he never would have attempted something like that in BASIC. This was purely a work of the community that would not have existed otherwise.
In fact, I ended up authoring my own stack for Hebrew that gave a basic introduction to the language, did vocabulary drills, and even spoke the vocabulary aloud using MacinTalk. Not being a programmer, I wouln't have known where to begin to author something like that without HC.
Sure, there are better tools out there today for doing snazzier stuff; there were a lot of more advanced tools during HC's days, too. But what made HC a killer app for the masses was both its accesibility and its flexibility. And of course the fact that it came free on every Mac.
Not coincidentally, HC came onto the market just as Microsoft was starting to put some distance between PC's and Mac's. The biggest argument for buying a PC (then and now) was, "The PC has thousands more apps available!" I think Bill Atkinson realized that putting a tool like HC in the hands of the average Mac user just completely deflated that argument. For almost any category you could imagine, if you couldn't find a commercial app to suit your needs, the chances were good that someone had already written an HC stack to fill the void. Or, it wasn't such an outrageous proposition to think that you could write one yourself.
And therein lies another missed opportunity for Apple; creating a community of coders for the Mac. The Apple ][ had a very long life, I believe, because there was always a strong emphasis on programming it, and that emphasis gave rise to commercial authors who grew the software base. The Mac floundered in the mid 80's because Steve Jobs made it difficult to become a Mac developer; in 1984, you had to fill out an application and be approved before Apple would sell you their development kit (and don't even dare to suggest that you wanted to write games). Not surprisingly, Mac software development got off to a slow start.
HC could have done for the Mac what AppleSoft BASIC did for the Apple ][. Created a community of "amateur" developers that would go on to become loyal, professional Mac developers. But unfortunately, CEO's Gil Ameilo and Jobs got all hung up on the fact that Apple giving HC away, rather than viewing it as an investment in the platform's future.
HyperCard, as it now exists, is dead. I stopped using it years ago because its development path was just pathetic (e.g., the way color was handled was just totally bizarre). The app is dead, but the market it addressed still exists, perhaps now more than ever. If Apple would rewrite HC from the ground up, rebrand it, and GIVE IT AWAY (while still selling add-on packs, books, support, classes, etc.), they would have a tremendous investment in the Mac's future.
Apparently, Jobs now understands the value of giving away apps, because he's giving away frivilous stuff like iTunes and iMovie (I say "frivilous" because, cool as they may be, they won't have the lasting impact that a consumer-level development tool would have). Now if only he could be convinced to see the long-term impact a new version of HC could have...
HyperCard is a development environment based on a card metaphor - it's designed for use on a Mac in a non-networked environment.
WebObjects is an application server that is used to build database-driven Web applications that are, by definition, served to multiple client machines.
BTW, WO 5 is due in May, the developer release is already out - it's a pure Java rewrite that will be deployable on any server OS that has a Java VM. Also, a totally revamped OS X Server is due at around the same time, and it should serve as an excellent development and deployment environment for WO.
HyperCard was great - it's what got me into multimedia and web development, but Apple has limited resources, and they need to think about the future. Life goes on, RealBASIC is here, Cocoa is here.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If Apple fails to support HyperCard, how long do you think it will be before emulators or other software pop up that make it possible to run them? I'm guessing that it'll happen butt-quick. As is often the case, it only takes one nostalgic programmer to get the job done.
Got Rhinos?
Rich
I don't think so. It wasn't impossible to write useful software then and people are still writing useless software today. I think it's time that we lose the assumption that just because something's old, it's likely to be crap.
Rich
Rich
Rich
And when you delete something from an MS-DOS window? Undelete could recover. Not the recycle bin.
<attach name="rm.bat">
@move %1 \trash\
</attach>
I used this batch file on MS-DOS back in the day. It still works.
Syntax: rm foo.txt
And foo.txt will be moved to your trash folder.
If you don't believe, go rent a paltry month old game CD from Blockbuster and observe its condition.
I assume you're limiting your topic to software for game consoles. It's against 17 USC 117(b)(1) to rent software for computers without an explicit license from the copyright holder unless the target platform is one marketed primarily as a video game system.
So when I buy a game, I make a congressionally authorized (which preempts the game makers license) copy for $0.25. If the kids scratch that up after a while, no big loss. Burn another.
Most game consoles do not use standards-conforming compact discs. For example, PlayStation stores some Mode-2 (2,336 bytes per sector) boot code on an otherwise Mode-1 (2,048 bytes per sector) partition; ISOs do not handle this. PlayStation 2 and VaporBox use DVD media; affordable DVD burners are not readily available. Dreamcast and VAPORCUBE use completely proprietary media; good luck even finding a burner.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The best part is that if it works on OSX it will almost certainly work on Linux.
Not if the app is written to the proprietary Carbon API instead of to the POSIX+X11 API. Porting a Mac app to *N?X is not trivial.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is not necessarily good or bad, just expeditious...
:-) )? The best they could possibly do is rewrite the whole bloody mess from scratch, and they most likely have better things to do with their time.
Think about it. OS X comes with a full suite of developer tools and they're said to be pretty damn good; they essentially serve the same purpose as Hypercard in a much less idiosyncratic manner.
Also, why would Apple want to devote resources to a program maintained in hand-hacked 680x0 assembler, translated to PPC by a mechanical cross-assembler called PortAsm, and maintained and extended solely by extension modules (especially when they have an OS that already fits part of that particularly gnarly description
The best solution IMHO would be an open-source Hypercard sandbox. Start with someone willing to write a HyperTalk interpreter and go from there?
/Brian
There have always been HyperCard lookalikes, such as SuperCard , and MetaCard. Maybe one of those companies could breathe some life into it.
Maybe, also, it would generate more interest if it were a browser plugin.
I'm not suggesting that it can hold a candle to Dreamweaver, but for teaching the basics to beginners, I have found that Home Page has next-to-no learning curve. Home Page 3.0 was also really big in the education sector, as it didn't cost an arm and a let ($59 academic) Yet it has some features lacking in the barebones editors like Netscape Composer (like the ability to create form widgets).
I would imagine that Apple is scared of torquing-off any developers that have competing projects, but there is really no one left in Home Page's price catagory on the Mac. I think that is sad. How (in 2001) can you ship a product that does not give the user the ability to create web pages out of the box? (Okay, I know there's SimpleText -but you know what I mean!)
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
But why exactly is hypercard worth saving? Not a troll, I really want to know. Yes, I understand that it has a large installed base, but so did DOS at one point. Is hypercard really that groovy, that the technology just has to be migrated over. Again, I'm not trying to start an argument, but I'm MAC illiterate for the most part, with my interest in Apple mostly coming from my following the development of OSX. Help me out, O wise ones.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
If they don't want to port it, why wouldn't they leave its source to some generous Geek?
Hypercard has one elegant aspect, it is its simplicity.
If many people have been using it for years, it is not because of something else.
The problem is that we might have to wait for a very long time to see companies Open-Sourcing software instead of just abandoning it.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Your Windows 98 box has a security mode. I believe they named it "Power saving" or something.
Your Linux box has a Commodore 64 emulator and Speccy emulator available. What more do you need?
BeOS has many dozens of applications, and a version of Wine that has been known to run for several cycles before crashing.
This is clearly the rambling of a troll who has no idea what the current state of the art is on any of these platforms.
I agree with your logic.
The fact that I was modded down for having an opinion once again demonstrates how broken the moderation system is. Moderation is done based on the moderator's agree/disaggrement with the post -- and nothing else.
One of my issues with Hypercard is that it is not that great of a development tool. I learned it over a decade ago. The code is easy to read. The syntax is difficult to learn. Documentation giving precise description of syntax is hard to find. Once you write it, it is extremely easy to read. If you maange to obtain an exhaustive explanation of what properties apply to what objects, you can become fairly productive. AppleScript, IMHO, shares similar problems.
Essentially, developers can learn to program HyperCard. People who fundamentally can't program can read and somewhat understand HyperCard, but can't write it. They become a neverending nuisance to people who can write it. They never learn the precise syntax and semantics. This is, IMO, because people think that Hypercard just magically understands a computer-dialect of natural language English. They try to write free form English, as correct HyperTalk appears to be, and they can't get it to work. It's not as if it is a good learning language -- despite it's fantastic readability.
My other issue with Hypercard is this; as soon as Hypercard was releasd, the BBS's were stuffed to overflowing with horribly engineered crapware containing the most gawd-awful code I've ever seen.
Finally, Hypercard never realized it's full potential. It should have been updated to really support color, QuickTime, more widget types, a non-paint-only graphics orientation, etc. It was not possible to use Hypercard to develop a "real" mac program that was indistinguishable from a program written in C.
So, I'm not sad to see Hypercard die. It was revolutionary. But like so many pioneering things, it provides insight in how to do something as well as insight into how NOT to do things.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
If this makes some people realise that trusting your data to closed source applications is a bad idea, it'll be worth it.
Hopefully someone will write an open source clone of Hypercard. And do it in a portable way, so it runs on Unix and MS boxes as well as Macs. Or Jobs will allow it to be open sourced.
"LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1989 OCT 27 (NB) -- The author of Zoomracks, a popular shareware program for the PC and Atari ST, has filed suit against Apple Computer, charging that its HyperCard software violates a patent he obtained on screen displays.
"Paul Heckel of Quickview Systems in Los Altos, California, created Zoomracks in 1985. Available as shareware from such firms as PC-SIG, Zoomracks allows portions of information from various fields to be combined and displayed in an electronic version of file cards. Heckel won a patent for the design -- patent number 4,486,857. Two years later, the suit contends, the design showed up in HyperCard from Apple."
[...]
The rest is at http://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/lpf/patent.events
I am the Raxis.
Liberty in your lifetime
I don't understand why Apple doesn't come out with a new product, that they call Hypercard, that fills the same niche as Hypercard. Legacy Hypercard can run under 9.1, new Hypercard under OS X. The two sides don't have to have a thing to do with one another, besides namespace.
I think it is incredibly fantastic that Apple is distributing developer tools with the OS, but my soon-to-be-five-year-old son has a long way to go before he is ready for C++ or Java. His nine year old brother is going great with Hypercard, though.
Dave
Even if apple chooses not to support hypercard in macos X, i'd still like to thank apple especially the core group of programers that wrote the first version of hypercard. Hypertalk was the first language I learned and I feel that it taught me the core concepts of programming. Hypertalk featured an event driven instruction scheme that is similar to several programming api's in use today (gtk and qt come to mind.) It was one of the early languages to have "english like" syntax, and it used the idea of objects extensively. Later as I moved to C I still continued using hypercard through the of xcmd's. I still have my books somewhere, all dog-eared, riped and wrinkled. Thanks.
So I'll have to transfer all that to filemaker?
Ow, how the users are going to looooove that...
120 chars is not enough!
"But HyperCard might be in danger of going the way of the dinosaur. With the launch of Mac OS X, unless HyperCard is 'carbonized,' it could be the beginning of the end."
Simple answer. Open source it! Anything with enough support to form a user group has enough support to form a programming group about as well, and if the Apple folks don't want to bother to carbonize it I'm sure others will.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Hypercard is the reason I became a programmer. If not for hypercard I would have never found my love for programming, without it I would be a shapeless drifter bouncing from job to job. If hypercard dies I think I will just cry. Over the years I has ment so much to me. In college many of my peers could have benefited from the fundementals that hypercard taught me when I was a child, loops, variable types, control statements. Hypercard will be missed.
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
I can't understand why Apple would ignore user requests like this.
No other maker of Operating Systems ever ignores user pleas. For example.
My windows 98 box is bug free and secure just as I requested.
My Linux box has the latest in gaming capabilities without any duplicate, incomplete, or beta software of any kind. Of course I run the standardized window manager. (As I requested)
My BeOS box has a plethora of software available and runs Windows applications too! Just like I wanted!
Hypercard was a great, easy-to-use, groundbreaking program. I once wrote a series of web server CGI's with it! (I passed info back and forth between Webstar and Hypercard by using Applescript.)
But I sure couldn't recommend to Apple that they spend development dollars on renovating this program.
First, what about the Cocoa / Interface Builder tool on OS X? Talk about powerful GUI building & rapid app development.
Second, as others have mentioned, there are already plenty of third-party options that come close to (or surpass) Hypercard in function, power, and ease. Apple should instead spend a little money on convincing them to port their software to OS X, as opposed to spending money on porting Hypercard -- a very nice, but aged and now superfluous -- media authoring tool.
-the monkey department