HyperCard Gone for Good

Any hypercard replacements out there? by cheezus · 2004-03-31 05:30 · Score: 1

I remember hyperstudio, which seemed to be hypercard lite with multimedia stuff added.

Maybe there's a Free project underway?

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Re:Any hypercard replacements out there? by attonitus · 2004-03-31 05:41 · Score: 4, Informative

Maybe this: FreeCard?
Don't know anything about it - just followed the links.
Re:Any hypercard replacements out there? by TheAJofOZ · 2004-03-31 09:25 · Score: 4, Informative

FreeCard is intended to be a drop in replacement for HyperCard with a lot of nice new updates that people have been hanging out for since HyperCard stopped being updated. Unfortunately the project is struggling due to my not having enough time to work on it.

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:Any hypercard replacements out there? by sagefire.org · 2004-04-01 06:16 · Score: 2, Informative

Take a look at SQUEAK.
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:Any hypercard replacements out there? by BobWeiner · 2004-04-03 16:44 · Score: 1

Last I checked, HyperStudio only runs on older Macs (pre-OS X) and Windows boxes these days. I remember using it back when I had an Apple IIGS. It seemed spiffy at the time...I can only imagine what Hypercard and Hyperstudio could have been if they had continued to be updated over the years. RIP, Hypercard.

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Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by SewersOfRivendell · 2004-03-31 05:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

What killed HyperCard? Shunting it off to Claris, where it languished. Lots of good applications with plenty of future potential were killed at Claris, not least of them being MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw. Damn shame.

Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by skwirlmaster · 2004-03-31 05:50 · 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

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Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 08:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

In my opinion, the first and fatal blow to hypercard was when the full version was removed from the system software releases. When it was included with every single macintosh shipped, it promoted the idea that anyone could be a programmer. Anyone could build a tool useful at least to themselves and make their work on the computer more productive. It didn't matter if it was adding a field to the address book, copying a button with a canned script into a new stack, or adding new handlers to the home stack.

Everyone had the tools available to them, everyone could share their work. (It was also fertile ground for viruses, but lets ignore that for the moment. I don't want to speak ill of the dead.) Everyone could peak into the source of a stack and see what was going on.

When Apple started shipping "Hypercard Reader" with the systems for the "users" to have and requiring people to choose to be "developers" and buy the development environment from Claris, Hypercard lost its purpose.

Everything since then has just been a slow decline.
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by MoneyT · 2004-03-31 08:50 · Score: 3, Informative

It may have been fertile for viruses, but as I recall there was only one hypercard virus.

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.

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T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 10:15 · Score: 2, Informative

There was more than one. See HyperCard Virus Compendium

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:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by WalterSobchak · 2004-04-01 00:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

When I present Objective-C, I throw in that the Macintosh veterans may notice some similarity to HyperCard. Both HyperCard and Objective-C use a bunch of SmallTalk concepts, which I think is a very cool thing.

Bye

Alex

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Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by TheRaven64 · 2004-04-01 03:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

When it was included with every single macintosh shipped, it promoted the idea that anyone could be a programmer. Anyone could build a tool useful at least to themselves and make their work on the computer more productive.
I may be way off here (I bought my first Mac last year, and I've never used HyperCard), but do you not think the AppleScript studio included with OS X does the same thing?

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Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by jbolden · 2004-04-01 04:21 · Score: 2, Insightful

Problems with AppleScript studio:

Not as easy
Not cutting edge in the same way
More business oriented
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by Angostura · 2004-04-02 02:38 · Score: 1

Absolutely agreed. I work in publishing, I'm not a programmer, but I cobbled together some Hypercard stuff to parse exported data from Quark Xpress pages and prepare them for online use. Everyone was impressed and it saved us a LOT of time. Would I have bought a dev environment? Never because, of course... I'm not a programmer.
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-02 02:43 · Score: 0

Don't forget the Palm Desktop apps.
Re:Pudge, who asked you, anyway, man? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-02 07:04 · Score: 0

Can it DO the same thing? Probably.

Is it as easy to use? NOT!

I had completely forgotten about HyperCard. by schmoli · 2004-03-31 05:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

While I used it all the time in middle school, I had managed to completely forget that this application ever existed. All of a sudden I wish I could look at all the games and stuff I used to make with this. I think after learning basic this was the next 'programming' language/tool I ever used.

Re:I had completely forgotten about HyperCard. by commodoresloat · 2004-03-31 10:35 · Score: 2, Interesting

I miss it too. I used to stay up all night making things with HyperCard. When I was just learning it I made my first stack -- it had a line drawing of a naked girl and when you pushed invisible buttons on her body it made noises and played screen effects. Really dumb. But it got me into it, and I made stacks that were really useful, including a database application that helped me manage information about students in my classes (I was a grad instructor at the tim) including grade information, which would be automatically calculated....
It was a great program. Apple should really open source it so someone can make an OS X version.
Re:I had completely forgotten about HyperCard. by AnonymousKev · 2004-04-02 04:47 · Score: 3, Informative

Don't forget. The original Myst was completely written in HyperCard (with lots and lots of XCMDs!)
I don't know if that's still the case -- probably not.

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Demos by Rubel · 2004-03-31 05:35 · Score: 1

Hypercard was certainly an odd beast, but I miss it. It made demos easier!

What was hypercard? by ben_degonzague · 2004-03-31 05:41 · Score: 2, Interesting

Well, I'm clueless, what is/was it?

Re:What was hypercard? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 05:49 · Score: 2, Funny

Essentally a gimmick. Early versions of the Mac were shipped with playing cards (the Ace of Spades with the original 128k Mac IIRC, Queen of Clubs with the 512k, Prince of Hearts with the Mac Plus, etc, etc.)
After the Mac II, they quit with this, and there was a bit of a backlash. Some joker (no pun intended) then came out with "Hypercards", Mac-style cards soaked (supposedly) in caffeine (to reflect the improved performance over the older Macs.) These took off like wild fire. Eventually the idea was bought by Claris, then a division of Apple.
I still have a 7 of Diamonds, goes with my Beige G3. :)
Re:What was hypercard? by MoneyT · 2004-03-31 05:58 · Score: 5, Informative

Basicaly it was something like powerpoint with scripting and full user interaction. You could write games, animations,and whatever else you wanted tutorials, presentations, interactive demos. Very powerful, very small, very cool. It was also a decent intro to basic programing with seperate functions and such.

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T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Re:What was hypercard? by radicalskeptic · 2004-03-31 06:00 · Score: 4, Informative

This should help

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WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
Re:What was hypercard? by falcon5768 · 2004-03-31 06:00 · Score: 0

And I know there will be at least 2 people out there, that might buy this account of what HC was!!!

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"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Re:What was hypercard? by hey! · 2004-03-31 06:48 · Score: 5, Informative

In some ways, HyperCard is (er was) analagous to Logo, only oriented towards persistent data rather than graphics oriented. By that I mean it is an entry level, interactive programming system that encouraged setting small incremental goals and giving immediate feedback (and satsifaction). Since it was data oriented, it was very useful on a day to day basis.

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.

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Re:What was hypercard? by SewersOfRivendell · 2004-03-31 06:51 · Score: 3, Interesting

Other points:
It was actually a nice introduction to object-oriented programming. Everything was addressed as an object, and events were passed as messages sent to objects.
HyperTalk, the HyperCard programming language, was the predecessor to AppleScript. Lessons learned from HyperTalk were factored into the design of AppleScript, in particular the langauge extensibility features. As a result, AppleScript suffered somewhat from second-system effect.
A lot of people also used HyperCard as a database. Many tasks that people use FileMaker Pro for today could be done with HyperCard.
Re:What was hypercard? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 07:58 · Score: 0

nobody will since you ruined the surprise, poophead. :P

(that tongue is for licking pussy, not poop. thanks)
Re:What was hypercard? by WaterTroll · 2004-03-31 08:02 · Score: 1

> In some ways, HyperCard is (er was) analagous to Logo

darn, when i read Logo i accessed a memory in my brain that has been lying dormant, unaccessed for atleast eight years. good ol' grade school days. i will cherish them forever.
Re:What was hypercard? by selderrr · 2004-03-31 08:15 · Score: 1

I remember replacing the bubble sort with a shell sort to get the sort time down to something like 15 seconds

ehm.. ever heard of quicksort ?

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When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Re:What was hypercard? by Radiola · 2004-03-31 10:00 · Score: 3, Informative

I learned programming on HyperCard. Everything essential was there: loops, conditionals, variables (local by default, global if you declared it such), subroutines, and a pretty powerful object orientation.

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

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Re:What was hypercard? by hey! · 2004-03-31 10:14 · Score: 1

Yep. One of my favorite soft algorithms.

Note that quicksort has a pretty significant worst case: when the data is already sorted. Pretty common case unfortunately.

Really there's no such thing as a sort algorithm for every purpose.

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Re:What was hypercard? by mjc_w · 2004-03-31 11:41 · Score: 1

I like heapsort. It has a guaranteed n*log(n) worst case and average case, and uses no storage other than the input array. Quicksort is often preferred because its average time is, IIRC, about half of heapsort's.

Heapsort is discussed in Knuth vol 3 and in "Combinatorial Algorithms" by Nijenhuis and Wilf. The latter has a generic, high-level implementation and a (not easy to understand) 23 line fortran version.

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Re:What was hypercard? by hey! · 2004-03-31 15:22 · Score: 1

I'm familiar with heapsort. It's very appropriate as a workhorse sort algoritm. I do have a fondness for Quicksort because of its conceptual elegance, although its worst case is, unfortnately, a very common one.

I used shell sort in this case because I'd just read about it and never used it before, and it was very easy to code. I like it because it is efficient although it grows O(n^2) is is competitive for small sets (on the order of a few hundred).

Personally, I can never understnad why CS students are taught bubblesort at all. Quicksort is much better and easier to understand and in no case worse than bubble sort. Shell sort is not only more efficient, it's more intuitive. Bubblesort is simple, to be sure, but Shell sort is even simpler in my opinion and far faster. It's also interesting from an academic standpoint because it has a insightful strategy: reducing the entropy in the set quickly to reduce the number of interchanges done in practice. I think the theory is that real system should use an O(nlog(n)) sort algorithm, but we'll show you bubblesort so you can grasp the concept of sorting. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how many production systems I've encountered that have bubblesort in them, since it seems that programmers are too lazy to look up algorithms in reference books and can only remember the first sort algorithm they've ever been taught.

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Re:What was hypercard? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 13:40 · Score: 0

Prince of Hearts?
Re:What was hypercard? by ModernGeek · 2004-04-02 14:38 · Score: 1

Kinda like Visual Basic except for the mac?

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Re:What was hypercard? by MoneyT · 2004-04-02 15:31 · Score: 1

Better.

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T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984

Open Source by MrBlackthorne · 2004-03-31 05:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

Apple should really think about releasing the source code and letting the OS community take it over. HyperCard was a great development environment, and I really think it influenced the way current environments work. HyperTalk was the first language that I learned on the Mac, and it was my second overall language, first being AppleSoft BASIC. Rick

Re:Open Source by deleuze · 2004-03-31 06:52 · Score: 3, Interesting

Rumors are that there is a very advanced search technology inside of HyperCard :-D. Remember, you could to full-text searches in your stacks at an amazing speed for the technology at this time?
Then there were plans to integrate a color-HyperCard into QuickTime (i think it was QuickTime 3.0), which would be the flash-killer today. I once implemented a windowing-interface complete with mouse-triple-click handlers and drag and drop, all in HyperTalk.
Awesome. Sad. Good Bye HyperCard.
The remainings can be found here:
plusLibs
Re:Open Source by Ann+Coulter · 2004-03-31 08:29 · Score: 2, Funny

I would look at Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming Volume 3 Chapter 6 to find information about string searching. I bet that Hyper-Card uses a combination of algorithms in that chapter.
Re:Open Source by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 08:33 · Score: 0

They should, but they won't. They're still a corporation, and giving something away without getting something back is pretty much against the rules. Plus, they're notoriously anti-open source internally, though they won't admit to it publically (because they'd lose karma with the Slashdotters probably). They're willing to take BSD software, but never to give much back that won't directly improve product offerings on OSX.
Re:Open Source by MoneyT · 2004-03-31 08:52 · Score: 1

Question: Why would apple spend time giving back changes that don't improve the software?

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T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Re:Open Source by moof1138 · 2004-03-31 09:15 · Score: 3, Interesting

I read somewhere that this was brought up at a WWDC session at one point, and an Apple dev explained that "we dont want to use Open Source as dumping ground for dead technology."

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Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Re:Open Source by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 11:30 · Score: 0

They will release code back (to the Konqueror guys, or PPC optimizations for GCC), but they will not release code to the open-source community if it does not directly benefit Apple "primarily", or if it stands to substantially improve their "competition", Linux. They won't add features to GCC, for example. They will, however, improve GCC's performance on the PPC. But we're not interested in helping the "open source" community at all.
Re:Open Source by punkass · 2004-03-31 12:30 · Score: 2, Funny

How's that phrase go? "One man's dead technology..."

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"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Re:Open Source by pherris · 2004-03-31 13:34 · Score: 1

Apple should really think about releasing the source code and letting the OS community take it over.
One problem: Jobs wants HC dead which is really sad. When HC came out it blew me away. It was fun and mildly productive. People did some pretty cool stuff with it. People that never programmed before and many that haven't programmed since.
Because of all the low level XFCN stuff I don't know how well it would translate to cross platform life but allowing the open use of the langauge would be a good start.
Dumping it out under a BSD license (GPL would be better but that's a whole other war) would be sweet but IMO it will never, ever happen which, again, is sad. A lot of great stacks and hundreds of thousands of programming hours will be lost because Jobs wants it gone.
I love macs (I still use an eMac for video work) but everything else is on my gentoo box because of crap like this. You'd have a better chance of Apple bring back the Newton (what a sweet machine).
Maybe something like pythoncard might pan out some day but HC will never be replaced. RIP

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Re:Open Source by MoneyT · 2004-03-31 16:56 · Score: 1

Improving GCC on PPC doesn't help the OSS comunity? It's kind of hard to call yourself cross platform when your cross platform alternatives suck ass compared to your primary platform.

And again, why would apple spend it's resources doing anything that doesn't help itself? IOW, if Apple doesn't need new features for GCC why would they spend time writing them?

Do you randomly download source for programs you'll never use, write new features that you don't want for it and then publish them?

--
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Re:Open Source by localman · 2004-03-31 19:28 · Score: 1

"we dont want to use Open Source as dumping ground for dead technology."

Um... why not? Seems like a great use for both Open Source and "dead technology" to me.

I seem to remember hearing something about Unix being dead at some point in the past :)
Re:Open Source by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 23:18 · Score: 0

...is another man's, uh, soap.. right?
Re:Open Source by thanuk · 2004-04-01 02:12 · Score: 1

I can't imagine the source being much use these days to be honest. It's likely to be written in Pascal, completely non-Object Oriented and written using superceded APIs. If you wanted to improve it in any way you'd probably be better off writing a clone from scratch.
Re:Open Source by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 03:42 · Score: 0

Since my friend Stef found what I and my fellow programmer peers believe is an NSA (or some other government agency) backdoor in OSX, I've ONLY been using software where I can verify the code integrity 100%. It made me realize that "The Man" is more in control than I had thought. I never doubted that MS would have no problem putting NSA code in Windows (in exchange for favorable court rulings, of course), but even Apple, who I loved and trusted as "Thinking Different" are not immune to the increasingly aggressive demands of government. That's why all this freedom software stuff is so important.

You have the same Apple-defending attitude I had until we found and verified the backdoor. I always gave Apple the benefit of the doubt. I always defended them whenever they screwed over a third-party distributor, website, theme-maker, customer, supplier, or whatever. I supported them through the lean years, I support them in their arrogant years. I was like the majority here, flat-out lying in order to promote Apple. I would gloss over Apple's weak spots when that's what people needed to hear. I always had a positive attitude about Apple's market share, software selection, and compatibility. I tried to "spin" everything to make Apple's failures sound like benefits ("Who needs 10,000 software titles when you only need ONE really good title?"). Up until we discovered the backdoor, I told people that PowerBooks at 500 Mhz were as fast as Pentiums at 2Ghz. I LIED BECAUSE I LOVED APPLE. I ALWAYS FORGAVE THEM BECAUSE I LOVED THEM.

But Apple has gone from people who dissed Pepsi as being unimportant ("selling sugar water") to people who admit that they're not in business to change the world anymore, they're in business to make money. Even that I could accept. But the backdoor, I couldn't accept. Once they betray you, you break inside. And you never look at them the same way again. It happened to me, and hopefully, it will happen to you.
Re:Open Source by MouseR · 2004-04-01 13:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

Giving away the source code of HyperCard would give away the back-end to AppleScript's OSA architecture. It's not something they want to do.

Not that cloning this is not feasible, it's "safer" for Apple to keep it shush.
Re:Open Source by borius · 2004-04-04 00:49 · Score: 1

Mind explaining the joke?
Re:Open Source by nova20 · 2004-04-13 05:14 · Score: 1

Hmmm... I thought Claris held the rights, not Apple.
/nova20
Re:Open Source by MrBlackthorne · 2004-04-13 06:51 · Score: 1

Apple transferred HyperCard over to Claris in the early 90's, then it was transferred back to Apple shortly thereafter. By the time HyperCard 2.2 (the first release with Apple's 'Color Tools') came out, it was already back in the hands of Apple.

Rick

Three that I know of... by ksdd · 2004-03-31 05:45 · Score: 5, Informative

Maybe none of these could be called "replacements." Perhaps "spawn of HyperCard" would be more appropriate:

There may be others...

Re:Three that I know of... by Dephex+Twin · 2004-03-31 06:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

The one we used for one of our classes was MetaCard which is a cross-platform Hypercard with more features like color.

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If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Re:Three that I know of... by selderrr · 2004-03-31 08:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

1. RunRev is bugge (last I heard anyway)
2. Supercard is payware
3. Pythoncard is Uuuuugly

Hypercard was unique in a way that it was free, super-stable and totaly intuitive.
But most of all, it never ever pretended to be a GUI builder for any app and the kitchen sink. It was a fun tool. An application to just play around with and by miracle pump out insanely great applications. The screenshots of pythoncard & supercard for instance make it look like it is yet another tool to make adressbooks & morsecode converters and shit like that. Hypercard never pretended any intended usage. It was just.. you know.. just "there when you needed it"...

No other RAD I ever used even came close.

--
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Re:Three that I know of... by mcdesign · 2004-03-31 09:38 · Score: 3, Informative

The one we used for one of our classes was MetaCard which is a cross-platform Hypercard with more features like color.

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:Three that I know of... by ejeetify · 2004-03-31 15:46 · Score: 3, Informative

HyperCard wasn't ever free. HyperCard Player was free, but you couldn't go past level 3 (i.e., no Scripting/Authoring).
Re:Three that I know of... by capmilk · 2004-03-31 20:10 · Score: 1

HyperCard was free in terms that it was bundled with every Mac for quite a while. I still have two copies - one that I bought as a retail version and one that came with the Mac SE I bought afterwords, because HyperCard was not too useful without a hard disk.
Gorgeous tool, btw. I mean, show me another database application that you can build a breakout clone with just by moving text fields and buttons. :))
Re:Three that I know of... by macmaniac · 2004-04-01 14:44 · Score: 0

The one we used for one of our classes was MetaCard which is a cross-platform Hypercard with more features like color.
Not to nit-pick, but the latest versions of HyperCard (2.3 on I believe) did have color.
I haven't used HyperCard in ages but it is seriously what (how the progression happened I have no idea) got me into wanting to go into computer programming.....
Re:Three that I know of... by Dunedain · 2004-04-02 04:34 · Score: 1

Squeak SmallTalk, http://www.squeak.com/ , is a close sibling -- the descendant of SmallTalk, much as HyperCard was. The syntax is as simple as HyperTalk, though it is not compatible with HT. It does have some expressive power which HT lacked, though. And Squeak's "Morphic" UI has the same GUI-editing features as HyperCard.

--
-- Brian T. Sniffen
Re:Three that I know of... by Monx · 2004-04-04 16:36 · Score: 1

Many people magically got it to go past level 3.
Re:Three that I know of... by Beardydog · 2004-04-08 01:14 · Score: 1

2.3.5 had "color", not color. It had bevelled rectanglees that could be wedged behind buttons to color them, and support for loading pictures and quicktime movies in a similar fashion, but manipulation was so slow and hideously painful as to be useless.

By any reasonable measure, card graphics were still in black and white til the very end.

Six Years? by bfg9000 · 2004-03-31 05:53 · Score: 4, Funny

It's pretty sad; the unexpected part was that it remained for sale at the Apple Store for six years without an update.

Being in the market for a new PowerBook (and waiting anxiously for new revisions), this is a truly terrifying statistic.

--

I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."

Re:Six Years? by KingOfBLASH · 2004-03-31 06:07 · Score: 0, Redundant

Why? It only runs on Mac OS 9 and less.
Re:Six Years? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 06:40 · Score: 0

I don't think you get the joke.
Re:Six Years? by MoneyT · 2004-03-31 06:41 · Score: 1, Informative

I think the joke was that Apple had an item up for sale that was 6 year out of date with no updates. And that we're expecting a powerbook update sometime soon.

--
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984

Sad news ... Hypercard, dead at 16 by orthogonal · 2004-03-31 06:06 · Score: 4, Funny

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Rolodex/Programming tool Hypercard was found dead in it Cupertino, California home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its output, there's no denying its contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

--
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?

Re:Sad news ... Hypercard, dead at 16 by blackmonday · 2004-03-31 09:27 · Score: 1, Funny

Hypercard and Stephen King on the same day, what a shame.
Re:Sad news ... Hypercard, dead at 16 by commodoresloat · 2004-03-31 10:20 · Score: 1

Anybody look at Netcraft to see if they confirm this, or count the number of usenet posts about HyperCard over the years? It's fine to have your assertion about its death but I want some real data.
Re:Sad news ... Hypercard, dead at 16 by rolocroz · 2004-03-31 17:28 · Score: 1

Google Confirms: HyperCard Is Dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered HyperCard community when recently Apple confirmed that HyperCard will no longer be sold. Coming on the heels of six years with no updates in sight, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. HyperCard is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by not being used by anybody after about 1994.

You don't need to be Steve Jobs to predict HyperCard's future. The hand writing is on the wall: HyperCard faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for HyperCard because HyperCard is dying. Things are looking very bad for HyperCard. As many of us are already aware, HyperCard continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. On Google Groups, the number of posts about HyperCard has steadily declined over the years:

Year Number of Posts 1987 851 1988 2090 1989 2850 1990 4470 1991 5810 1992 8700 1993 11000 1994 17280 1995 15420 1996 13610 1997 11000 1998 8570 1999 7210 2000 4710 2001 3410 2002 2200 2003 1770 2004 451

Clearly, HyperCard is dead. You don't even have to look at the chart to see the pattern.

Fact: HyperCard is dead.

--
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.

admit it, you HAVEN'T moved on! by xMac · 2004-03-31 06:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

>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

you followed diligently for 6 years! and didn't give up hope that it may be updated!

i'd say you are gonna have a tough time moving on... good luck. :D

Me neither... by csoto · 2004-03-31 06:11 · Score: 0

Everybody writes applets in Java, now, right?

--
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom

Re:Me neither... by Llywelyn · 2004-03-31 06:19 · Score: 1, Insightful

0) Java sucks.

1) HyperCard filled an entirely separate niche, so no.

--
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Re:Me neither... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 07:03 · Score: 1, Informative

java requires an IDE, compilers, reading through books, etc.

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.

I'll miss it by jht · 2004-03-31 06:16 · Score: 4, Interesting

The only "software" I ever created from scratch was HyperCard-based. I built a guitar tuner and a lotto game player (input state rules to a randomizer), both of which got a decent number of Compuserve downloads back in the day. I also used to hand out a version of my resume as a browsable stack, which was kind of cool and helped me get a few Mac-related jobs as well.

Of course, I stopped writing stacks entirely by about 1991 or so, and haven't written more than a shell script since. But I still have fond memories of it as a tool and environment. It's a pity that HyperCard died when it did (really about 10 years ago), but it was always the "neither fish nor foul" of Apple products.

That and Pippin.

--
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."

Re:I'll miss it by pherris · 2004-04-02 15:34 · Score: 1

The only "software" I ever created from scratch was HyperCard-based.
It (I'm guessing) helped you become more computer literate and/or better teacher of computers to others. HC was about fun and exploring your mac (something I suspect you also know).
I also used to hand out a version of my resume as a browsable stack, which was kind of cool and helped me get a few Mac-related jobs as well.
Again, not programming jobs but (always assuming) jobs that required more than the average mac person.
It's a pity that HyperCard died when it did (really about 10 years ago), but it was always the "neither fish nor foul" of Apple products.
HC never made Apple money as a stand alone product but sold a ton of macs. It sucks they both killed and buried it. It was really fun. Thanks for reminding HC programmers of that. Great post. BTW, IMO HC on GNU/Linux would rock.
That and Pippin.
Don't forget the Newton.

--
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Re:I'll miss it by jht · 2004-04-03 14:40 · Score: 1

Back when I wrote the apps, I was working in the field doing tech lackey-type work. I was already a "guru" by the standards of the time, particularly on Macs, but I had only dabbled in programming before that point. The only code I ever hacked on in those days was dBASE - I did a little commercial work at it but I sucked.

For me, the joy of HyperCard was the combination of a plain English-like language with a tool that did most of the dirty work for me. You could deliver about 90% of a working HC-based app quickly, and there were XCMD's you could easily work with to handle almost anything not provided by the native HC environment.

It probably didn't make me a better user - it sure as heck didn't make me a better programmer. I still suck at general-purpose HLL programming. But as you said, it was just plain fun to actually create usable programs on my Mac. There's HyperCard derivatives out there, but it's just not the same as the original. Bummer.

I had an original Newton MP back when they came out. About a year or so ago, I bought an old MP2100 for nostalgia's sake. It's amazing just how advanced Newton was for it's day, and still is today. On more modern hardware and with a better screen, a revised Newton today would be an absolute killer. It's a pity it was killed, but then again, it was John Sculley's baby so it was easily killed by the new regime. Bummer again.

--
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."

Dead? by Gropo · 2004-03-31 06:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

My dad still uses the Hypercard Address Book stack under Classic. I keep urging him to take the time to transcribe the hundreds of entries so something uh, more... XML-ey :P His main gripe is that there's no cheap/free "dial selected number with the modem" augmentation available--freeware, OSS or otherwise.

On a side note, my good friend recently joked about a 'skinny' port of Hypercard for the iPod. GID input might be a pain, though scrolling through buttons/fields might work?

--
I hate Grammar Nazi's

Re:Dead? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 07:11 · Score: 1, Informative

This is 8 bucks... http://homepage.mac.com/jonn8/jpt/ Is that too much? :)

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:Dead? by Arkham · 2004-03-31 07:29 · Score: 1

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's close. From AddressBook help:

Dialing your cell phone

If both your computer and cellular phone are Bluetooth-enabled, and you have paired both devices using the Bluetooth pane of System Preferences, you can use Address Book to place outgoing telephone calls.

Click any phone number label, such as "home," on an address card.
Choose Dial from the pop-up menu, then use your cell phone to listen for the person you're calling to answer.

Click the Bluetooth button in Address Book to search for paired phones that are within range.

For more information about pairing Bluetooth devices or using Bluetooth, open Bluetooth File Exchange, located in Applications/Utilities, and choose Help > Bluetooth Help.

--
- Vincit qui patitur.
Re:Dead? by brauwerman · 2004-03-31 08:10 · Score: 1

In what sense is Address Book XML-ey ?

It is, however, faxy.

From the page you linked:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/faxing/
"S ending a fax
When you choose to print a document from an application, the Print Panel now includes a Fax button that lets you send the document as a fax using your computer's built-in modem. You can choose cover page options from a pop-up menu in the Print panel. The Address field automatically fills in addresses using fax numbers from your Address Book or you can enter a fax number manually. It shows only contacts with a fax number."
Re:Dead? by Chucker23N · 2004-03-31 08:10 · Score: 1

Wait, what's XML-ey about Apple's Address Book? The internal format is binary; vCard is a plaintext format.

As to dialing, you can if your cellphone does Bluetooth...
Re:Dead? by Gropo · 2004-03-31 08:50 · Score: 1

In what sense is Address Book XML-ey ?
Well, should papa ever want to export his modernized Address Book database in to another PIM app down the road, he'd find his data easily exportable (and inevitably importable) using the well established vCard-XML standard.

--
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Re:Dead? by Gropo · 2004-03-31 08:57 · Score: 1

Wow, you're right. Never opened an Address Book exported vCard to look at the syntax, rather rested on my outdated (and apparently flawed) research of the format. :slapped!

--
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Re:Dead? by coldcup · 2004-03-31 11:11 · Score: 1

Address Book dials numbers, sends SMS, answers calls, receives sms. What more do you need?

Slashdot Editor Cynicism... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 06:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

we'll certainly miss it." I won't.

*sigh*. It's easier to be negative that positive isn't it? And so I'll be likewise: maybe we don't care if you do or not Pudge. I certainly remember it fondly. And as someone who uses "classic macs" for fun, find it a very convenient tool to still use. So let the rest of us have our say.

Re:Slashdot Editor Cynicism... by larry+bagina · 2004-03-31 07:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

I agree. I used to fool around in hypercard and enjoyed looking at other people's hypercard creation. It was a good introduction to programming, as you could usually see how a stack was made and easily test/modify what the script did.
Pudge won't miss HyperCard, CmdrTaco thinks the iPod is lame. At least Jon Katz got fired.

--
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Re:Slashdot Editor Cynicism... by transient · 2004-04-01 02:28 · Score: 1

Yeah, really. HyperTalk was my first programming language. Significant portions of my childhood were consumed by writing openCard handlers and making useless but fun stacks. So Pudge, do us a favor and cram it.

--

irb(main):001:0>
Re:Slashdot Editor Cynicism... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 04:08 · Score: 0

I think it's just nice to see their snide, snippy, non-value-added comments directed at something other than Microsoft for a change.

Address Book dialing by rjung2k · 2004-03-31 06:44 · Score: 1

Doesn't MacOS X's Address Book let you click on a telephone number and choose to dial it from a pop-up menu?

--

--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net

Re:Address Book dialing by Gropo · 2004-03-31 06:51 · Score: 1

Doesn't MacOS X's Address Book let you click on a telephone number and choose to dial it from a pop-up menu?
No, it simply allows you to see it REALLY REALLY BIG so you can reach all the way over to the touchpad and kick it oh-so-20th-century 'monkey action' style :P

--
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Re:Address Book dialing by Incadenza · 2004-03-31 07:30 · Score: 1

It does for Bluetooth enabled phones. Sure works with my T68i, I even can send SMS messages through Address Book. Oh, and you get caller-ID on your Mac as well.
Re:Address Book dialing by Udo+Schmitz · 2004-03-31 21:27 · Score: 1

I even can send SMS messages through Address Book
Whaaat?? You can't just drop something like that and don't explain to me how! :-D
Re:Address Book dialing by foo12 · 2004-04-01 07:00 · Score: 1

great googley goodness http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/11/2 7/sms.html

Myst by DavidLeblond · 2004-03-31 06:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

I was surprised while reading about the death of Hypercard (like 3 days ago, way to stay on top of things Slashdot) to find that Myst was written in Hypercard.

Not that Myst is anything special, I hated that damn game. But still, its interesting to note.

Re:Myst by sirmikester · 2004-03-31 07:14 · Score: 1

While it certainly could have been, I doubt that it actually was. Maybe it was prototyped with hypercard, because to my knowledge Hypercard never ran on windows-based systems...

--
In linux libertas
Re:Myst by macrom · 2004-03-31 07:35 · Score: 1

http://members.aol.com/hcheaven/articles/cyan/cyan .3.html

It's been known for a while that Cyan used Hypercard.
Re:Myst by DavidLeblond · 2004-03-31 07:38 · Score: 1

It was made with HyperCard.

I don't think Apple's HyperCard ever ran on Windows, but I know there were plenty of HyperCard clones that did. They probably ported it to one of those for the Windows version.
Re:Myst by shane_rimmer · 2004-03-31 07:49 · Score: 4, Informative

Straight from the horse's mouth
Graphics and Construction tools:
HyperCard (Apple)
Think Pascal (Symantec)
Photoshop (Adobe)
Premier (Adobe)
Illustrator (Adobe)
Painter (Fractal Design)
Morph (Gryphon Software)

Images and animations were modeled and rendered on six Macintosh Quadras using StrataVision 3d by Strata, Inc.

HyperCard was colorized using a proprietary version of Symplex System's HyperTint, written by John Miller.
Re:Myst by Meowing · 2004-03-31 12:00 · Score: 2, Informative

I don't think Apple's HyperCard ever ran on Windows, but I know there were plenty of HyperCard clones that did. They probably ported it to one of those for the Windows version.
The PC version used Macromind Director. Director's Lingo bears a strong resemblance to Hypertalk, and porting wouldn't be so horrible.
Re:Myst by Oculus+Habent · 2004-03-31 12:01 · Score: 1

I remember stealing the HyperTint XCMD out of something (I think it was one of the Atlas CDs that would Sad-Mac some computers if it was in during boot) for a teacher's presentation.

--
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Re:Myst by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 20:50 · Score: 0

not just Myst -- back in the day, the main competitor to Premiere (DiVA Videoshop) was a highly customized HyperCard stack. (!)

DiVA Videoshop -> Avid Videoshop -> Strata Videoshop -> dustbin

Children of HyperCard by karnat10 · 2004-03-31 06:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

HyperCard was waaaay ahead of its time. Years before the common user knew about HTML, JavaScript, or Wikis, all those concepts were already beautifully united in HyperCard. Well, the network was missing, but it was already WYSIWYG (en contraire to today's Wikis).

Seriously. I learnt to know HyperCard like 15 years ago and developed some nice applications, and I haven't used it again until recently, and then I was like saying: Wow, shit, it was all there already!

It wasn't perfect though because only a few people had macs, and I think it was too intuitive and required too much creativity from average Joe (OK, mod me down for my arrogance, come on, come on, give it to me, yeah)

--
Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography.

Re:Children of HyperCard by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 08:35 · Score: 0

Hey, shitface, I turn sigs off for a reason. That means I don't want to see em. Put that boatload of Michael Moore shit in your sig file where I don't have to look at it, capice?
Re:Children of HyperCard by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 10:44 · Score: 0

Shitface? I like that one! I'll remember it next time I climb off your mum.

Well, Michael Moore (or whoever said it) seems to have hit a nerve...

As a courtesy I'm posting it again, so other shitfaces get their chance too:

Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography.

And thanks for the sig file advice, shitface...
Re:Children of HyperCard by MrBlackthorne · 2004-04-01 05:32 · Score: 1

A college buddy of mine and I created a network battleship game to play between two Macs in HyperCard. I'm not sure we ever 100% completed it, nor do I remember exactly how we did it. Wasn't there an 'Application Linking' feature for network sharing in classic Mac OS? I think we used that.

Rick
Re:Children of HyperCard by Petronius · 2004-04-01 08:44 · Score: 2, Interesting

Absolutely right. Not to mention something Apple seems to have always overlooked: for a lot of people, HC was the only way they could *program* their Mac, hack it.
It was for me. Even though I was learning Pascal and C in school, HyperCard was free, THINK Pascal/C were expensive. HC was simple to use, the Inside Mac API was horrendous. I knew people that traded free/shareware HC stacks: it was easy to learn from other people's code. People that *got it*, LOVED IT. It was great.
It's not until years later when I discovered Python that I had the same kind of joy hacking again... Still, what made HC so unique (and impossible to explain to non-HC people) is the way it blended graphics/scripting/persistence/OO so uniquely. I'll miss HC for the rest of my life. :)

--
there's no place like ~
Re:Children of HyperCard by Night+Goat · 2004-04-08 03:19 · Score: 1

Put your signature in the signature field. I turn those off for a reason.

So many uses... by cryptochrome · 2004-03-31 07:04 · Score: 1

Back in high school, I used Hypercard to shut down At Ease and gain access to the regular OS and play Crystal Quest of a floppy, or fool around with our video capture card. The one hack I figured out for myself.

--

---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?

Re:So many uses... by crackshoe · 2004-03-31 12:19 · Score: 1

Dude - Crystal Quest. My solution for getting around at ease in middle school to play crystal quest was to discover that my teacher wrote the password on a postit attatched to her monitor, but... crystal quest, yeah. I also dug hypercard based games (Cosmic Osmo and the Manhole come to mind), and spent waaaaay to long making annoying hypercard games my self.

--
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Re:So many uses... by Monx · 2004-04-04 16:42 · Score: 1

I still have my Cosmic Osmo box. I think there are 10 floppies in that thing. I loved that game. It might be worth the hassle of getting a one of my old machines with a floppy drive onto my network. I wonder if there's any way to get it to run on OS X?

Holy Mackerel!

LiveStage Pro 4.5 & QSXE Component by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 07:29 · Score: 1, Interesting

With the recent release of LiveStage Pro 4.5 and the QSXE QuickTime Component, is this a simple coincidence? Maybe.... but if you look at the QSXE reference manual, it specifically refers to HyperCard and how QSXE can now do everything that HyperCard could do and then some. Maybe Apple finally found a replacement app and decided they could now remove it from their site.

Software killed by Claris... by MinutiaeMan · 2004-03-31 07:33 · Score: 2, Interesting

Not to mention Claris/AppleWorks itself, which hasn't had a real update in more than three years...

Thank goodness FileMaker got spun off into its own company before it was nixed, too!

Re:Software killed by Claris... by javaxman · 2004-03-31 08:25 · Score: 2, Informative

Hey hey, AppleWorks isn't dead *yet*, a copy of it came with my flat-panel iMac, along with a ton of other useful software. Appleworks now includes a "Paint" document type which looks suspiciously like "what ever became of MacPaint" so I'm not sure it's right to say MacPaint is dead, either.
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:Software killed by Claris... by hawaiian717 · 2004-03-31 09:18 · Score: 2, Informative

AppleWorks's various modules are decendants of the individual applications: MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint, and FileMaker. Though FileMaker has now far surpassed anything AppleWorks Database offers. When ClarisWorks first came out, the word processor wasn't quite as full featured as MacWrite Pro, and I imagine the modules were the same way.

--
End of Line.
Re:Software killed by Claris... by MinutiaeMan · 2004-03-31 13:35 · Score: 1

The only reason AppleWorks isn't dead is because there isn't anything better in the same price bracket. TextEdit still doesn't have all of the style features to make it a full-fledged word processor (and shouldn't, IMO); Keynote, FileMaker, and MS Office are all full-scale applications that cost a crapload of money.
Re:Software killed by Claris... by AnonymousKev · 2004-04-02 04:35 · Score: 1

That's sad, because the AppleWorks interface is good. Simple and powerful: two attributes I like to see in software.
Since Mac OSX came out, I've been wondering if Apple will replace their underpowered database engine with Postgres. It would be too much to hope that they would make AppleWorks available on BSD/Linux.

--
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)

Most underrated mac app ever? by sokoban · 2004-03-31 07:42 · Score: 4, Interesting

I can't believe that Hypercard was still was just recently killed. I always thought that Hypercard was WAY more powerful than people let on. It was really the Mac OS of programming. On the surface level, it was an easy to use, fairly limited, programming environment. What most people didn't know though is that Hypercard was capable of just about anything any other language could do at the time. The "guts" of Hypercard were hidden from the user (and most programmers), but with some effort you could have a tool that was flexible as hell.

--
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.

Re:Most underrated mac app ever? by vallette · 2004-03-31 08:44 · Score: 2, Informative

I totally agree. One thing that I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion was the way it could be extended by little compiled widgets called XFCNs and XCMDs. If HC didn't have some piece of functionality that you needed (or it was to slow when implemented as HyperTalk) you could whip one of these up in C or Pascal, stick it in the resource fork of a stack (or the HC app itself for global access) ,and call it from your scripts just like any other function or command. Allowed you to use compiled code where you needed it without having to worry about constructing a friendly UI.
Re:Most underrated mac app ever? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 09:41 · Score: 0

The one time I tried to write something in Hypercard (in high school), I quickly figured out the environment was missing really basic features like random number generation. The non-solution was to learn C and write a plug-in.
Re:Most underrated mac app ever? by vallette · 2004-04-01 09:29 · Score: 1

Not to nik-pic but HyperTalk always had a random number generator--random(). So not only was writing one in C a non-solution it was also a waste of time. Next time RTFM.
Re:Most underrated mac app ever? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 22:40 · Score: 0

Maybe I'm mis-remembering what I couldn't make it do. But I do remember that I couldnt' afford the programming manual and was using some cheezy user guide thing.

Fond memories of Hypercard by nvrrobx · 2004-03-31 07:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

I had a teacher when I was in 7th grade (1990?) that used a Laserdisc player, Hypercard and a projector to teach us life science. All of his lectures revolved around that setup. That was my first major exposure to a Mac. He had the Mac controlling the Laserdisc player and everything. Hypercard will be missed.

The closest I ever really saw to Hypercard on the PC was IBM Linkway. I played with it briefly, and it just couldn't compete with Hypercard.

Re:Fond memories of Hypercard by commodoresloat · 2004-03-31 10:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

A long time ago High Times had a great article about somebody growing weed in a warehouse and controlling everything via a HyperCard program. The cameras in the warehouse let him see what was going on, he could turn water on and off remotely, change the light settings, etc., so he rarely had to actually visit the warehouse until harvest time. I think he connected to his mac with Timbuktu or somesuch and then everything was controlled through his HyperCard interface.
Re:Fond memories of Hypercard by punkass · 2004-03-31 12:43 · Score: 1

An Apple user involved with weed?! NO WAY!

--
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Re:Fond memories of Hypercard by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · 2004-04-05 18:48 · Score: 1

>The closest I ever really saw to Hypercard on the PC was IBM Linkway.

There was also Asymetrix's Toolbook, a Hypercard-inspired Windows application that came out in the late 80s. Successor company SumTotal is still offering something by the same name.

Apple killed HyperCard by Sonic+McTails · 2004-03-31 08:48 · Score: 1

If memory serves HyperCard was created with System 6 (or was it 7) and I remember still seeing it about the time Mac OS 8 became popular. The reason HyperCard wasn't updated is because Apple replaced it with AppleScript. In Mac OS X, AppleScript can use C/C++ Code, have it's own interface, talk w/ other AppleScript applications. Although HyperCard was easy to use, AppleScript has more power, and I rather have more power then easy to use software.

--
This signature was left intentionally blank.

Re:Apple killed HyperCard by chillybean77 · 2004-03-31 11:02 · Score: 2, Insightful

I don't think Apple has killed Hypercard at all.
I think the fundamental principles behind Hypercard have been translated into Objective-C, Cocoa and many of the MacOSX technologies relating to these - Applescript, Delagates, outlets, forward chains, the runtime message lookup, object introspection, cocoa bindings, and most of the current Mac OS X frameworks are based on or around the principles and OO patterns of Hypercard.
These architectural principles have been available in other languages for a while, but Apple has paid careful attention to the designs of MacOSX, and I think they've learnt from the Hypercard experience of yesteryear, and brought that experience into the new age of software development for the Macintosh.
The difference between the development environment that Apple provides today (xCode), and what it used to provide (HyperCard) is that today's tools give all the seasoned C/C++/Java programmers the ability to develop however they want to AND in addition, Apple provides the opportunity to use the frameworks MacOSX provides (which, to labor the point, I think are Hypercard-like in principles, hence the elegance of Cocoa app designs) So we get our cake, and get to eat it too! :)

While everyone debates about the fact that Apple has given Hypercard the flick, I disagree. It's fundamentally there in MacOSX if you look beneath the surface.
Software development is about learning from your experience and using that to your advantage, and this 'experience' is what software engineering using systems of patterns is all about. The developer documentation is pretty heavy on the patterns, architectures and designs inherent in MacOSX because they want people to use them and benefit from them, beacuse, in turn, Apple benefits.
I think Apple has combined both the business and programming experiences they got from the 'Hypercard days', with the culture and benefits of the opensource community and that's why they are steadily gaining a strong foothold in the marketplace with MacOSX and their products.

Hypercard still kinda-sorta lives on. At least, that's what I rekon. :)

Cheers!
Re:Apple killed HyperCard by idlewild · 2004-03-31 13:02 · Score: 5, Informative

Nothing in OSX frameworks has anything to do with HyperCard. All of the OSX frameworks have their roots in the NextStep technologies that were developed at NexT computer, the company Mr. Jobs formed after his oust from Apple Computer.
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:Apple killed HyperCard by chillybean77 · 2004-03-31 19:31 · Score: 1

Whoah... awesome history. I tend to agree with you too. Ultimately, we're constrained by the tools we use, "the tools that people 'think' are best for us." Opensource is not _as_ constrained by the organisational strutures that tend to result from the use of these tools. Hence creativity and exploration thrive. It's like everything, you can't repress the underground music cultures because 'Punk' will become popular. You can't start 'a war based on lies' beacuse 'the people' will revolt (unless you keep them ignorant, ba-doom-ching! ;) You can't restrict software development to a single development environment because creativity and innovation are stifled You can't fertilise your crops because the soil becomes less fertile, more quickly. What we (usually unknowingly) aim for is some sort of balance. Anyway, to add to what I meant about Apple not killing HC: While the design of Mac OS X has similarities to the hypercard design, many well designed systems will often have similarities between their architectures. So saying that the Mac OS X frameworks is _based_ on the Hypercard framework is like saying there's similarities between the molecular designs of a tree and a flower. The fundamental patterns (atoms) exist in both, but they get implemented (into molecules) in very different ways. To see patterns in different things, we just have to get the granularities of our observations close to matching each other. A hard thing to do when the contexts (or artefacts) are very different. And I definately, now that you mention it, see the NextStep roots. :)
Re:Apple killed HyperCard by Swedentom · 2004-04-02 03:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

I don't think Steve Jobs hated HyperCard at all. In fact, HC was originally created by Bill Atkinson, who was a good friend of Steve. I think the reason Apple dumped HyperCard was the same as with the Newton. They simply had to prioritize more important things, such as the iMac.

--
Sig Nature
Re:Apple killed HyperCard by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-02 07:14 · Score: 0

Or is it just possible that Hypercard was killed ala the infamous 'knife the baby' order by Microsoft to keep Office alive for the Mac?

QTi (Hypercard 3.0, which, integrated with QuickTime, certainly could have been one helluva powerful cross-platform creation tool) was likely to have been wanted squashed by Microsoft (which, recall, they pressured Compaq into renegging on a QT bundling agreement with Apple, brought out during the DOJ trial). Microsoft had already previously killed at least one visual programming environment for the Mac (MacBasic) with the promise to release its own (never happened).

I wonder by MoneyT · 2004-03-31 09:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

It always struck me as odd that Apple kept hypercard around all these years, after all even Appleworks got more updates, and given that when Apple moved to OS X, they killed off a lot of calssic stuff (and steve's declaration of the death of classic) it seemed odd they would keep it arround.

I wonder if we may see the next generation of hypercard from Apple in the near future? Something like that would be an awsome addition to OS X, and it seems to me like it could be Apple's iLife version of Keynote.

--
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984

Re:I wonder by chillybean77 · 2004-03-31 11:10 · Score: 1

I think you're on the right track here with this thought, see my reply post to the thread "Apple killed HyperCard" about the principles of Hypercard existing in the MacOSX frameworks. I think Apple have kept the Hypercard principles alive, but let the Hypercard product die. :)

Applescript doesn't have more power than Hypercard by cr0z01d · 2004-03-31 09:27 · Score: 1

Applescript is a tool for sending messages to other applications, mostly. Hypercard is a database / presentation system, mostly.

I think it's clear you aren't very familiar with Hypercard. You could put Applescript code in a Hypercard stack. You use C/C++ code through XCMDs. When I was in elementary school I created a sequencer in hypercard... you clicked on a drawing of a piano keyboard and could record / play back songs you wrote. The songs appeared in a field that I could copy and paste into a different stack which was a computer game I was working on.

The only reason I gave it up was because it was so slow, not that it wasn't powerful enough. I had written my own XCMDs to add color pictures, get the state of the keyboard, anything a game normally does with the Mac APIs.

The interfaces that are created in Applescript programs are a pale shadow of Hypercard. Applescript also isn't that great with persistent data. If you really want power, stick to C. Actually, you can't do coroutines in C, so you should stick to assembler. Wait, you really should be programming in FPGAs. Er, just wire the logic gates by hand.

Re:others. . .Applescript Studio by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 10:28 · Score: 1, Informative

http://www.apple.com/applescript/studio/

Dialing with Modem in Address Book by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 11:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

(* Written by Cecil Esquivel Requires DialModemOSAX from Javier Diaz Reinoso http://homepage.mac.com/javier_diaz_r/ J avier Diaz-Reinoso <javier_diaz_r@mac.com> Place this script in ~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/ *) property national_prefix : "1" property international_prefix : "011" property length_of_local_number : 8 -- number of characters in a local number (no prefix needed to dial). Include dashes. property my_version : "v1.0" on prefixed_num(num) if first character of num is "+" then -- if number starts with a +, it's international. return international_prefix & "-" & characters 2 thru (length of num) of num else if ((characters 1 thru (length of national_prefix) of num) as string is not national_prefix) and ¬ ((characters 1 thru (length of international_prefix) of num) as string is not international_prefix) then -- if number starts with neither national nor international prefix, assume local unless has more digits than length_of_local_number if (length of num) > length_of_local_number then return national_prefix & "-" & num else return num end if end if -- number is already starts with a national or international prefix return num end prefixed_num using terms from application "Address Book" on action property return "phone" end action property on action title for aPerson with aPhone set thephonenum to (value of aPhone) as string set thephonenum to prefixed_num(thephonenum) return "Dail " & thephonenum & " with Modem" end action title on should enable action for aPerson with aPhone return true end should enable action on perform action for aPerson with aPhone initModem "/dev/cu.modem" with "~^M~AT&F1E0S7=45S0=0L2^M" set thephonenum to (value of aPhone) as string set thephonenum to prefixed_num(thephonenum) delay 1 dial modem "ATDT" & thephonenum display dialog "Dialing " & (name of aPerson) & "'s " & (label of aPhone) & " at " & return & (thephonenum) & return & ¬ "You can pick up the reciever, then click OK to hang up modem." buttons {"OK"} default button 1 hang up end perform action end using terms from

Re:Alas, HyperCard dead at 53 by Person+with+Taste · 2004-03-31 11:41 · Score: 1

You've got the middle two things in reverse, you idiot! Apple was there long before Microsoft was; in the personal computer industry, in the software industry, in the graphical user interface, everywhere. Microsoft took everything from Apple, not the other way around. Get your facts straight.

Wow, this is something I might really like... by josh+glaser · 2004-03-31 11:57 · Score: 1

Okay, I'm not supersmart like the rest (well, most) of you. I'd like to do some simple programming to make stuff, but I have no idea where to start, what language to learn, etc. I know basic HTML, but that's it.

So I have some questions on this Hypercard...I assume it's Mac (and OS9) only? Is it really outdated or something? Will somebody come out with something similair (is there already?) or would it be worth using today?

Re:Wow, this is something I might really like... by zbrimhall · 2004-03-31 20:54 · Score: 1, Informative

HyperCard was created by Apple wizard Bill Atkinson back in 1987. It was an odd mix of database, multimedia, and presentation software, with a simple but powerful scripting backend that made it possible to do just about anything with the software.

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.
Re:Wow, this is something I might really like... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-02 07:17 · Score: 0

Yes, Josh:

Try Revolution (www.runrev.com) or Supercard (forget where they are now, but they're there and OSX-compatible!).

Emailer!! by macdaddy · 2004-03-31 12:24 · Score: 1

I loved Emailer! That's got to be the best MUA I've ever used, at the time. Of course now it's missing features like Bayes classification but still... Emailer was great. I bought a copy of Powermail just because it reminded me so much of Emailer.

Re:Emailer!! by cei · 2004-03-31 12:51 · Score: 1

Claris Emailer / Claris Organizer was a strong combination, made all the more powerful when Palm conduits were made for them. Too bad they stopped when they did.

I had one person tell me that the Outlook Express client for the Mac was written by the Emailer development team, but was never able to confirm...

--
This sig intentionally left justified.
Re:Emailer!! by Maserati · 2004-03-31 15:00 · Score: 1

I can't confirm-confirm that, but I have heard the same thing. OE 4.5 did bear a striking similarity to Emailer.

We got a 250-seat license for Emailer with Appleshare IP 5.0. Then my evil moron of a boss (bad combination) bought a 50-seat license for QuickMail Pro literally on a fucking golf course. Naturally I had to deploy THAT piece of crap instead of Emailer, or the boss would have wasted money. Moron.

I hate three pieces of software: QuickMail, PowerPoint and Quark Xpress. Where I am now, my first task was to complete the migration from QuickMail to Entourage - which still bears some resemblance to Emailer, despite a broken back-end design. Quark is gone once Adobe stops fooling around, and Keynote is standing by to replace PPT - we've already started presenting from PDFs in full-screen mode. In a technical sense, it's a pretty good job, but I've lost track of how many dotted lines I have on the org chart (no solid line either, which is odd).

--
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Re:Emailer!! by MsGeek · 2004-04-03 20:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

Claris Organizer lives on...for now...in the Classic MacOS version of Palm Desktop.

I don't know about the MacOS X version...it might have some Claris Organizer code, it might not. I'll soon find out...my blue-and-white G3 will be Pantherized soon.

A lot of Claris developers (developers! developers! developers!) wound up at Microsoft Mac Business Unit. No fooling. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Emailer developers involved in Outlook Express for Mac.

--
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.

a mystery of Apple's priorities... by highbrow · 2004-03-31 12:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

I have always seen HyperCard as a great opportunity lost by Apple.

I had my first development job in 1993 producing university teaching materials using Hypercard & Quicktime. Back in those days developing using a Mac only product wasn't a problem, as the majority of our labs were Mac anyway. As Apple as a platform slumped in the mid-90's people's expectations changed- they wanted things to run on PC too.

All that needed to happen was to produce a Windows runtime, and Apple could have maintained a stranglehold on straightforward multimedia creation. No-one's saying it was a great tool, but as a simple mechanism to convey rich content to users, it couldn't be beaten.

Why Apple never dedicated the resources required to do this I will never know- perhaps it was so tied to Quickdraw that a port would have amounted to a complete rewrite... there were rumours too that playback was going to be built into QuickTime, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking.

Anyway, it never happened, and it was pretty obviously after a few years of point upgrades that it was never going to.... the lame way that colour was bolted onto the original 1 bit code (using a plugin or XCMD) didn't bode well for where the product stood in Apple's priorities.

I tried SuperCard, which at least natively supported colour and multiple windows, but the end result could still only be run on a Mac. The product changed owners so many times, it never boded well, and a Windows player or, better still a plug-in (Roadster, anyone?) were always just around the corner.....

So I, and many others I imagine, moved to MacroMind Director v4. It was clunky as hell back then, interactivity strapped onto an animation package. But it has got better ;-). Coming from a Mac-dominated environment, we also discovered that you could use these tools on PCs too- perhaps not as elegantly, UI-wise, but with the price differentials in hardware, many grew up creating content on PCs for PCs. That can't have helped Apple at all.

Hypercard and Bill Atkinson by MacTechnic · 2004-03-31 13:18 · Score: 5, Interesting

Hypercard was the wonderful creation of Bill Atkinson, along with MacPaint and Quickdraw. Although Bill spends most of his time now as professional photographer, and not actively programming for Apple, he still uses Hypercard every day. Rumor has it that Bill has the certain retained rights to at least a good sized portion of the source code of Hypercard, which become active if Apple does not actively sell Hypercard. While more recent features of Hypercard such as Quicktime 3.0 might remain Apple's property intellectually, I would be interested to see if Bill Atkinson would be interested in putting Hypercard core code out in the Open Source area for development. It would require at least some grudging cooperation by Apple. So, the fact Apple has dropped it from its active inventory may actually set part of Hypercard free sometime in the future.

Hey pudge! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 14:57 · Score: 0

fuck you.

Still miss Hypercard as a development environment by alangmead · 2004-03-31 14:57 · Score: 5, Interesting

The Hypercard environment suited a very iterative development style, perhaps more so than anything else that I have worked on since then. Data was automatically persistent. Switching from running a program to editing a method handler was just clicking on a graphics palette. You could be using a program, see something you don't like, click on a selection tool, click on something, and fix it.

It very much had the feeling of being able to tinker with the engine while the car is running. I suspect that working with Lisp Machines and Smalltalk environments was similar, but unfortunately I missed those boats. (except for being able to play around with Squeak now.)

My first professional software development job was writing a series Hypercard stacks. I remember one time realizing that I had hit an architectural dead end, and needed to refactor a bunch of methods (although I didn't learn the term refactor until much later.) I was lamenting having to make those changes all across all the code base until it suddenly hit me, I could write a hypercard script to make the changes. I put something home stack that said "for each backgroud ... for each card in ... for item in .... set the script of it to ...." and it was all done.

Really is sad by kylector · 2004-03-31 15:04 · Score: 1, Interesting

The passing of HyperCard really is sad. Sure, not many people used it anymore, but being fairly young, it was my introduction to "programming" ("scripting" was more like it). I was first exposed to it in 3rd grade, but really started to take-off in 4th grade. I played around with it for years because it was so flexible, and at the time, lots of third-party stacks were accessible that I could learn from. People built entire applications out of this thing, which simply amazed me, and there were tools around to break locked stacks so I could look at their code. There were even "resource" stacks that had animated icons, encryption routines, etc that you could copy and paste into your own! It was a wonder for multimedia way back in the day. Even the first Myst was built on this thing, using a hack that allowed for color cards!

It's not much to todays standards, but it was what got me started in my future career of computers and software development, and for that I owe it much. Farewell.

if you think Quickmail Pro is a piece of crap... by PDubNYC · 2004-03-31 15:44 · Score: 1

you should have had the pleasure of administrating Quickmail LAN. Pro was a downright delight after that POS, and that is saying something.

On a side note, I still preferred supporting QM Pro over Notes on OS X.

Re:What was hypercard? Now - sorting algorithms by mjc_w · 2004-03-31 16:43 · Score: 1

Actually, shell sort is O(n^1.25) or so - see Knuth (the answer to all these type of questions). So it is, for large n, better than bubble sort and worse than heap sort.

BTW, I have sometimes used the much maligned bubble sort in cases when I knew in advance that few (less than 20) items were to be sorted.

--
This is the Constitution.This is the Constitution under the Bush administration. Any questions?

Re:if you think Quickmail Pro is a piece of crap.. by Maserati · 2004-03-31 17:02 · Score: 1

Ugh. I had suppressed Quickmail LAN. Thanks. I ran that on... a Performa 620 - with a 20MB drive. For 25 people. Christ that was ugly. The software stank. Bad design, funky mail archives that corrupted and everything was stored on the server until filed locally. Did I mention the 20 MB drive ? There were physical confrontations over mail quotas.

I haven't done Notes since '99. I was at the Gap then and figured out that all the six patches and the attendant reboots (seven counting the install to get to 4.76) were unnecessary. I put the two extensions and the application folder on a share and just copied them down for new setups. They thought it was magic.

Entourage is our current standard, X is a big improvement over 2001. They raised the mail store limitation from 2GB to 4GB (signed to unsigned int) but it isn't stable at sizes much over 2GB anyway. One big file for all your PIM, in a horribly arcane binary format. One glitch, and it's recorrupt. And directory damage or crosslinking will hurt large, frequently modified files first. As happened recently at the office recently. The poor woman had three Databse files in her home directory (active, archive and a backup stashed away). All three files (1.6GB to 1.94 GB) got crosslinked. It took most of two days to retrieve everything, and I still have some crumbs to sweep up.

I personally am using Mail.app/iCal/AddressBook . Mail.app integrates nicely with LDAP servers set up in Address Book. I hhaven't ever gotten much use out of shared calendars, even though my bosses have. My mail folders contain two years of mail, all seamlessly imported from Entourage (AppleScript it looked like). Searches take 2-4 seconds (dual G5), indexes don't break, and there's a vast body of knowledge on working with .mbox files. Prior to 10.3 Mail.app was *not* capable of handling that much, but in 10.3 things were running fine on a 500MGhz G4 (minus three months worth of mail)

--
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951

A shame. by mrseigen · 2004-03-31 17:49 · Score: 1

HyperCard's a fine tool; it's where I started making little hobbyist games, and now I'm actually approaching a modicum of being able to program my own.

It would have been really killer to be able to drop Smalltalk in there instead of AppleScript and Hypertalk for the scripting language, or to be able to use a number of networking goodies, or OpenGL crap, or whatever. Would have really showed off the power of Cocoa to have done an updated version. As the original article said, though, it's been time to move on for a long, long while.

Anyone remember... by ravenspear · 2004-03-31 18:04 · Score: 1

Global Thermonuclear War!

Die Zedminos!

What HyperCard 3 was supposed to be by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-31 19:12 · Score: 4, Interesting

HyperCard 3.0 and Quicktime 3.0 were previewed about at the same time. Hypercard projects (known as "stacks") would have become Quicktime movies playeable on any QT player on Mac OS, Windows and that also in a Web Browser. Evidently that meant full color support and things like wired sprites and QT movies in stacks without add-ons. Somehow thats about where Hypercard got an accident and went on life-support. Maybe backward-compatibility became too much of a puzzle when they asked themselve what to do with xfcn and xcmd's support(native code add-ons). Maybe they were also pressured by Macromedia as they were pushing flash and shockwave for interactive web content. Ironically, Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio originated from VideoWorks, a linear sprite animation program on the Mac. Macromind (that's how they were called at the time) took VideoWork, renamed it Macromind Director and added "Lingo" wich was more or less a carbon-copy of HyperTalk, HyperCard's own scripting langage and messaging structure. Director had persistent data too, fields and buttons, but it had color, native sprite supports etc, but it cost 1000$. Until version 4.0, it was a Mac only app and I guess Apple lazyness in upgrading Hypercard to support color and multimedia features had ,among other things, something to do with Macromedia even before HC 3.0 was planned. Hypercard 3.0 +Quicktime 3.0 on the web was probably too much for Macromedia. Mr. Gates had probably something to say about it too, in a way QT 3.0 would have become too much of a "trojan-horse" in Windows. It should be noted that Quicktime for Windows already contains some parts of the Classic Mac OS API to emulate Quickdraw in PICT files and other things.

Anyhow HyperCard 3.0 never saw the light of the day and only some basic interactivity and the wired sprite feature was brought to QT 3.0. There is a single 3rd party app that can exploit all of the interactive features of Quicktime and its called LiveStage. Still, its very far from HC 3.0 could have been.

Another thing I have rarely seen mentioned about HC, is that it was used internally for many years by Apple so the interface designers could prototype their GUI without having to know about memory pointers and A-traps. Specialised Pascal and C++ programmers would then reproduce the layout and behavior using Mac OS APIs. Many widgets, dialogs and control panels in Mac OS 6-8.x were designed and prototyped in Hypercard. I guess than Interface Builder and AppleScript Studio (please rename this Apple) fulfill the same goal today internally for Mac OS X interfaces.

As for Myst, not only Hypercard was used to build the first Myst, it was the inspiration for the game itself. One thing so easy to do with HC right from the start were point and click adventures. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to have started to build (and never finished) a point-and-click black and white adventure game in HC before Myst was out. I guess the Authors from the start had the idea of doing an "hypercard point and click adventure using rendered graphics and qt movies". Hypercard limitations made the game what it is (for better or worse, but mostly the better). Also precursor to Myst and inspired by HyperCard is Cosmic-Osmo, one of the very first cd-rom game (also from Cyan). It ran on HC with a Macromind VideoWorks extension for animation. For those who don't know Cosmic-Osmo, it's a fun wacky adventure game with no goal where weird things happens when you click on things. You can go thru mouse holes and water drains and warp from place to place with secret passages. Oh well tha post is getting wacky too, let's end it here. HyperCard is Dead, long live HyperCard!

Buzzy Beetle

MUCH more than a presentation tool! by MarcQuadra · 2004-04-01 03:45 · Score: 2, Informative

Ugh. too many people think of it as a game or presentation tool.

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.

--
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails

Bet the company on HyperCard by darby_smeed · 2004-04-01 04:36 · Score: 3, Interesting

We had a HyperCard product that filled a niche. It was perfect. It sold like hotcakes at the state fair on a sunny morning.

We kept getting inquiries: when is the Windows version coming?

We'd been told by Apple that a Windows version was in the works, and that the way they were going to do this was to build on top of QuickTime, which was already cross-platform. It was about a year overdue and we were getting anxious, so I cornered one of the main HyperCard guys at WWDC and asked him (1) why he was presenting on technologies other than HyperCard and (2) what was up with the QuickTime-based port. As you've probably guessed, the two were related.

The company lasted another six months, then we closed the doors because HyperCard just wasn't keeping up with what people expected. It just languished away.

If Apple had come through with a cross-platform HyperCard which made QuickTime programming accessible to non-programmers, it might have been killer. Might have been.

Backdoor troll... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 05:19 · Score: 1, Funny

Wow, not only are macs "only for gay people" now the computers themselves take it in the backdoor?

I expect to see this message reposted a few times.

Don't leave us hanging... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 07:45 · Score: 0

So what was it? If it's that good of an itch, I'm sure someone here could scratch it.

Re:Don't leave us hanging... by darby_smeed · 2004-04-01 08:48 · Score: 1

Music Director's Assistant

Re:The culprits by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 08:24 · Score: 0

You mean the entire Apple user base was behind this?

1) Myst; 2) The vanishing technote by dpbsmith · 2004-04-01 09:20 · Score: 2, Interesting

Perhaps HyperCard's biggest commercial success was the series of games released by Cyan: "The Manhole," then "Cosmic Osmo," and finally "Myst" (based on a much-extended version of HyperCard).

I was in the room in 1987 at MacWorld Expo when BIll Atkinson announced that documentation for the format of Hypercard files was to be publicly released by Apple. He may have even mentioned the number of the technote. (It was in the low two digits back then). Everyone in the room applauded.

And I remember my disappointment a few months later when the technote with that number was, in fact issued--and consisted of a single sentence, to the effect that "The Hypercard file format is not available."

--

"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!

Re:1) Myst; 2) The vanishing technote by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 21:57 · Score: 0

It's probably not very complicated, but an open standard back then would have meant a lot.

Hypercard Programming... by feloneous+cat · 2004-04-01 11:37 · Score: 1

... it turned programming from a vibrant art to something dull and tedious.

--
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV

I have missed Hypercard for sometime now! by rspress · 2004-04-01 14:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

It has been dead for years they have only just now gotten around to writing the obituary.

In its day Hypercard was an easy to learn and fairly powerful programming language that anyone could use to pump out very Mac like applications.

The problem was that Hypercard did not keep pace with the Macs it was running on. Color was slow in coming as well as support for features that were added to the OS. Back in the day it was the defacto standard for Mac multimedia CD's.

If Apple had kept development of hypercard on the same pace as the MacOS, hypercard would have been a killer program under OS X. Who knows how far it might have gone. Hypercard with access to all the goodies that OS X has to offer like a shell to UNIX, etc. might have been very powerful. Maybe even integration to the Xcode tools might have produced compact, fast, standalone applications without the need for a player app.

Many people have tried to fill Apples shoes with programs like supercard and revolution but none had the knack of producing good programs like Apple.

I am sad to see it go. It could have been so much more than it was. Too bad Apple did not notice the diamond in the rough that it had.

I've still got it on floppy... by Tuxedo+Jack · 2004-04-01 15:07 · Score: 1

And I even used the "MAGIC" trick.

--

Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!

Re:The sodomy by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-01 16:21 · Score: 0

Wherever the userbase was, it's safe to assume that Apple staff was behind them.

Upgrade Hypercard - Supercard by xiaodidi · 2004-04-01 18:25 · Score: 1

If you purchased a copy of Hypercard (like I did), you can have Supercard at $ 129 instead of $ 179.

In case somebody is interested.

Re:Upgrade Hypercard - Supercard by Ben+Urban · 2004-04-06 17:30 · Score: 1

What version of HyperCard do you have? Would you be willing to post it somewhere public? Can Apple really enforce a license for it when the product is no longer available legally?

--
Every time you run "emerge", a Microsoft drone dies.

Hypertalk rocked too by SuperBanana · 2004-04-01 19:52 · Score: 1

HyperCard was waaaay ahead of its time.

Yup, and so was Hypertalk. PHP and Perl brag about type-less variables, but few people realize that Hypercard was released almost around exactly the same time Perl was. While Perl took years to take off, Hypercard(and hence Hypertalk) were a near instant success; it used to be that a HUGE percentage of software on Infoman was hypertalk based, and people did some astounding things with it(there was an entire BBS coded in Hypertalk, for example.)

Among other things, it was fully object oriented(something that took Perl many years to get); you could send a message to any object, be it a text field, button, etc. It was also way cool that you could pretty much program it in English; very little in the way of syntax was required and programs were incredibly easy to read and understand. Unfortunately, both made it pretty slow, but fast enough for most purposes.

My college used it in the Introduction to Algorithms class, and several friends laughed and dismissed it as a joke. It wasn't, in the slightest. It was incredibly easy to pick up, which was a requirement given that the class was popular with liberal arts majors to satisfy credit requirements.

We spent very little time on "how to program in Hypertalk", because it was easy to understand. Further, the functional description(which we were trained to write completely, before even starting coding) was rather easily converted into a working program. The whole concept of message passing introduced everyone to object oriented programming, which at the time was the Next Big Thing. So, we got to focus on programming strategy and technique, without getting buried in data types, calling conventions, syntax, etc. The class was a preparation for specific programming language classes, and it worked very well; I've found the practices and methodology I learned to be very helpful whenever I've had to take on small programming projects in PHP or Perl

--
Please help metamoderate.

Re:Alas, HyperCard dead at 53 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-02 07:23 · Score: 0

Umm, let's see -- you remind me of an idiot instructor I recently had who insisted that Hypercard was a 'cheap rip-off of VB' (of course, he also thought that VBA stood for 'Visual Basic Analog').

Hypercard: b. 1987
Visual Basic: b. 1991

You do the math, bright boy...

I used it for my final project in 2001 by MrBlackthorne · 2004-04-02 07:40 · Score: 1

I actually scripted a multithreaded shoot-em-up in HyperTalk for my final project in my operating systems class. Used a lot of queuing theory, etc for it. It came out pretty well, and ran surprisingly fast considering the speed of HyperCard...

Rick

And _The Manhole_ before Myst by WillAdams · 2004-04-02 09:53 · Score: 1

Described as, ``Where Alice would have gone if Alice had Hypercard''.

All sorts of fun on a b/w compact Mac.

William

--
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

HyperCard by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-02 21:01 · Score: 1, Interesting

In 1989, I took a graduate course in curriculum research and design. Class time was spent on theory, and each of the 15 students in the class had a copy of Danny Goodman's HyperCard book in order to design education materials. None of us had ever programmed: All of us were able to create something. (I got my master's degree with my stacks.)

I can still remember the first time I used the "ask" command and the dialog screen appeared. I felt so empowered. My creativity was my limit... (and the 32K script and I could make things: games for my kids, class stacks/courseware, and a kiosk for my college.

I love Apple, but I hate the fact that they dropped HyperCard all those years ago... leaving teachers like me in the lurch. I'm taking a Java course now and I have Xcode installed. I know the combination of Java with a developing platform of Xcode are much more powerful than HyperCard... but I'm nearly finished with the semester and I haven't made anything yet.

I can only wonder what if... if Apple had continued to develop HyperCard... the projects I could have completed this semester with HyperCard 10.3.3...

Still bitter,
Mark

Hypercard = = Xerox Notecards in 1987 by Ocelot+Wreak · 2004-04-03 08:59 · Score: 1

I too miss HyperCard, but I also used Xerox's Notecards software BEFORE Bill invented Apple's version for the Macintosh. Google "Xerox Notecards" to read some history of where the concept and OO implementation originated. Poor Xerox - they invented so much but couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag. A lot of educators were very impressed with Notecards and wanted at their universities real bad. The military loved it for buiding real-time visual simulations. I wanted to use it for building bond trading software. Unfortunately Xerox workstation cost $30K apiece at that time!

I remember arguing with Andy Hertzfeld at the '87 MacWorld Expo where HyperCard was announced and demoed on the sexy new Mac II. He was adamant that HyperCard bore no resemblance to Notecards, but grudgingly agreed that he HAD seen Notecards at Xerox and knew what it was. Hmmm...

I think I'll pull an old stack or two off a dusty backkup floppy tonight, and run it as a proper tribute/remembrance, and a fond farewell.

-Ocelot Wreak

--
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?

... Well, I will miss it. by cookiej · 2004-04-03 15:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

Hypercard was the tool that drew me into the Apple fold.

It was 1989 and I was managing a team creating instructional material. Our Instructional Designers would write their scripts into a Word document, print them and hand them to the programmers for coding (and re-typing.) I was tired of the programmers having to be responsible for retyping, so I started looking for a new, cheap tool. I knew what I wanted but neither Word or Wordperfect (at the time) could provide what I wanted.

I came across Hypercard and within two weeks of cannonball coding (and learning Hypertalk) I built an application that allowed the Instructional Designers to place text and paste images. Once they were done, the app would generate the code into a single file with the text appropriately placed, leaving the programmers to do the stuff they were good at. We cut our development time from 3 weeks to 1 week per course. We got all the developers Macs and never looked back.

IIRC, there is a product called "Toolbook" which was supposed to be somewhat of a PC version of Hypercard/Supercard.

I always thought hypercard was a pain in the ass by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-03 15:24 · Score: 0

I should have paid more attention

oh well, RIP

When I was 10.... by ReyTFox · 2004-04-05 15:27 · Score: 1

It was 1995, and the library at our elementary had a whole bunch of Macs, times being what they were. I believe they still had the IIes around at that point, but with the only software for them being 10+ years old, their days were numbered...my high school kept theirs around longer because there was a great grammar practice program series for various languages...corrected your mistakes and everything, unbeaten even by the newest ones. So anyway I used the Macs cause they had software I hadn't seen before, being a PC user, which naturally made them more interesting to use.

I came across Hypercard at some point, but I remember wondering what the point of it was. I set up simple "click-through" tests but I never discovered the magic scripting powers everyone describes. It was all hidden to me, and so Hypercard seemed like nothing more than a toy, though it stuck in my mind quite a while, since I did find it quite interesting. I knew there was more there but I couldn't get at it(if only I had had a manual...) Probably I would have figured it out if I had spent enough time in there, but that wasn't to be. One can sneak into the library during lunch hours only so many times.... ;)

Are there any OSS RAD tools? by 1iar_parad0x · 2004-04-11 05:07 · Score: 1

Are there any cheap open-source RAD tools? Something like VB for the intelligent, or HyperCard for Linux? Are there any budding projects for building such a tool?

--
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....

Hypercard games by nova20 · 2004-04-13 05:09 · Score: 1

Back when I had my old 80MHz "Power" mac, I remember a guy that made a HC game called Arena. Basically, you step into an arena and fight different opponents... kinda a Final Fantasy fighting style: wait for your clock to count down and then either "Attack" or "cast spell" or numerous other things.

Everyone lauged at him, but I thought it was a pretty cool game. Simple, but amusing.

/nova20

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