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HyperCard Gone for Good
Second to Last HyperCard Goddess writes "HyperCard has finally been removed from the Apple website. Read some comments about the passing. I read about HyperCard's demise on the RunRevolution list. It's pretty sad; the unexpected part was that it remained for sale at the Apple Store for six years without an update. Although we've all moved on, we'll certainly miss it." I won't.
Don't know anything about it - just followed the links.
There may be others...
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 ExperienceMy inner self is ineffable, so don't eff with me.
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.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
This should help
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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