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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!"
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.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
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.
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
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)
I had to reply to this as a former worker for an Apple VAR and development company (Siemens IT). Apple did wonderful things for us working in an enterprise environment.
I know I got modded down as flamebait, but I'm pretty bitter about my personal experience with Apple and those of my friends who were fellow early Mac advocates.
Some examples: Just about anything to do with the 68K->PPC conversion. Many applications were seriously delayed because of Apple's inexplicable decision not to port their Pascal to PPC, and then destroyed by Apples sudden about face on OpenDoc (Cyberdog rocked).
How about how they left the Appleshare Pro users high and dry with no upgrade path when they eliminated A/UX?
As an IT manager I waited years and years for Apple to come up with some means of connecting Mac clients to relational databases, until Visigenic's port of ODBC. How can you play any kind of role the corporate environment without database access architecture?
What about all those horribly unstable releases of MacOS 7 that Apple took it sweet time acknowledging were a problem?
What about the Newton spin-off cancellation? That burned my company big time.
Of course then there was the licensing then the killing off of the clones. And the things that were out and then in again, like Open Transport.
Now, some of these things were probably good decisions, like the clone decision. Some of them were profoundly bad decisions, like axeing OpenDoc. Others were simply incomprehensible thrashing. But through it all, the one thing that was a constant was that Apple was utterly shameless about selling you on a strategy that they were going to turn to utter swill tommorow. There was no remorse, no gee we recognize this is going to hurt some people who believed what we told them. It was strictly caveat emptor, suckas.
Of course, Siemans is a lot bigger than we were so you may have got more TLC than most.
Maybe the post-Amelio era is better, allowing for a few transitional pains. I don't know, I didn't stick around to find out. There are greener pastures these days.
Maybe part of the reason I was so bitter was the way Apple marketed itself to people like me -- peple who believed we were going to use computers to make a difference. It seems absurdly naive now. The scales fell from my eyes when OpenDoc was pulled just as it was ready for prime time. It wasn't about changing the world -- it was about pushing boxes.
OS X almost has me ready to take another look at Apple -- it looks interesting, but having used recent KDE and Gnome it's got a long way to go to make up for the trust you can put in a major open source effort not to be killed by internal politics.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
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.
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...
Rich
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.
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.
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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.
So I'll have to transfer all that to filemaker?
Ow, how the users are going to looooove that...
120 chars is not enough!
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