6 ms·

HyperCard was ahead of its time, and I still don’t think we’ve seen a solution as approachable and flexible.

analog31 5y ago
Aside from Bill Atkinson simply being a genius, a shining trait of HC is that it didn't try to do everything. There was a successor to HC called SuperCard (which I used to create a printed circuit board drawing app). SC added all of the features "missing" from HC, such as a large variety of different window types. In the process, it became harder to use, for not very much gain. Having both HC and SC on my computer, I invariably reached for HC, even when it meant that my programs didn't look quite as snappy. For me, HC was what made it tolerable to use a Mac. I did some pretty outrageous things with it, such as controlling a primitive custom machine tool. I did have to create some "code resources" in Pascal or C to access my hardware interfaces, but those codes were often on the order of a couple dozen lines, and rarely needed to be maintained. Visual Basic made the same mistake. The more "professional" it became, the harder it was for the people who were actually interested in using it. I stuck with VB5 long after VB.NET came out.
- gcanyon 5y ago
  That's an interesting point about not doing everything. Livecode is a more powerful, capable tool very much based on HC, and while it has a great power-to-complexity ratio, I don't think it's (made up numbers) 5x more powerful, but 8x more complex. https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  This reminded me of the comments i've read online from modders about the modding tools for Neverwinter Nights 1 vs those of Neverwinter Nights 2. Both are very moddable games but the NWN1 tools were actually designed as part of the product (for many the official campaign was just a demo for the tools) and were very simple to use - but also very limited (e.g. areas could only be made by placing prefabricated tiles - though you could make your own tiles with external tools and also add additional objects on top of them, most of the area work was placing tiles together). On the other hand NWN2 was more freeform, had better visuals and features, allowed arbitrary terrain sculpting, etc but that also made it much more complicated to use. As a result NWN1 has a ton more modules (campaigns/mods) for it than NWN2 and many people who spent considerable time on NWN1 never moved to NWN2 due to the increased complexity. To this day i often find comments about how simple and easy the NWN1 tools were, but i don't remember ever reading anything like that for NWN2 :-P.
uberman 5y ago
Way ahead. The original "greatest game of all time" Myst was implemented in Hypercard at least for the initial Mac release.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Didn't know that, but not surprised. When I got to play with Hypercard in elementary school, I drew houses and paths and put buttons on the paths to navigate between the screens, with some text to tell a very simple story (wish I still had it, but it's long gone. I only vaguely remember what a couple of screens looked like). If I had more time with it maybe I might have been able to turn it into a proper game. Not on the same level as Myst, though, of course.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
klyrs 5y ago
Flash seemed like an evolved form of HyperCard, and the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise. I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.
- Shared404 5y ago
  > the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise Agree. > I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools Hard agree. > on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity. Wait what? Wouldn't you want it to be implemented at the very least on something like Godot, which is open source? Aside from that, I think we are in full agreement on this - though my dream would be something like this on uxn (because I love the concept of uxn, I don't know that it would actually be feasible to do so - I suspect it wouldn't.)
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Sorry, Unity was the first that came to mind, I forgot it was closed. Good call. Though, I should clarify... the missed opportunity with Flash is that there was no good reason for the .swf format to be closed. IIRC, there were a few attempts made at making non-Adobe Flash players, but they were always terrible because of the necessary overhead of reversing the format. Even if the initial version was built on Unity, as long as the creations were saved to an open and well-documented file format, alternative players could be written which would be a boon to the ecosystem.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      That seems reasonable. Honestly, I think open formats and protocols are more important in general than open code -- which is of course why we see them less and less these days :( .
  - entaloneralie 5y ago
    Uxn should be able to host something like Hypercard, the hypertalk language would probably look something like akin to Postscript. Uxn's Noodle software is inching toward something like Macpaint. A software that ties it all together as a game making tool would in Uxn would be very nice indeed!
freemint 5y ago
Look at the paper: Implementation of Label Metaphor Using Shared Interaction Object Architecture by Koshizuka and Sakamura.
- lioeters 5y ago
  Implementation of Label Metaphor Using Shared Interaction Object Architecture https://sci-hub.st/10.1109/tron.1994.378614 https://sci-hub.st/10.1109/tron.1994.378614
gcanyon 5y ago
Not as approachable, but similar to HC and you get much more functionality for the learning curve: https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/
based2 5y ago
Others Macintosh gems: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontographer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontographer and later - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  And: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit

Aside from Bill Atkinson simply being a genius, a shining trait of HC is that it didn't try to do everything. There was a successor to HC called SuperCard (which I used to create a printed circuit board drawing app). SC added all of the features "missing" from HC, such as a large variety of different window types. In the process, it became harder to use, for not very much gain. Having both HC and SC on my computer, I invariably reached for HC, even when it meant that my programs didn't look quite as snappy. For me, HC was what made it tolerable to use a Mac. I did some pretty outrageous things with it, such as controlling a primitive custom machine tool. I did have to create some "code resources" in Pascal or C to access my hardware interfaces, but those codes were often on the order of a couple dozen lines, and rarely needed to be maintained. Visual Basic made the same mistake. The more "professional" it became, the harder it was for the people who were actually interested in using it. I stuck with VB5 long after VB.NET came out.

gcanyon 5y ago
That's an interesting point about not doing everything. Livecode is a more powerful, capable tool very much based on HC, and while it has a great power-to-complexity ratio, I don't think it's (made up numbers) 5x more powerful, but 8x more complex. https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/
badsectoracula 5y ago
This reminded me of the comments i've read online from modders about the modding tools for Neverwinter Nights 1 vs those of Neverwinter Nights 2. Both are very moddable games but the NWN1 tools were actually designed as part of the product (for many the official campaign was just a demo for the tools) and were very simple to use - but also very limited (e.g. areas could only be made by placing prefabricated tiles - though you could make your own tiles with external tools and also add additional objects on top of them, most of the area work was placing tiles together). On the other hand NWN2 was more freeform, had better visuals and features, allowed arbitrary terrain sculpting, etc but that also made it much more complicated to use. As a result NWN1 has a ton more modules (campaigns/mods) for it than NWN2 and many people who spent considerable time on NWN1 never moved to NWN2 due to the increased complexity. To this day i often find comments about how simple and easy the NWN1 tools were, but i don't remember ever reading anything like that for NWN2 :-P.

uberman 5y ago

Way ahead. The original "greatest game of all time" Myst was implemented in Hypercard at least for the initial Mac release.

cableshaft 5y ago
Didn't know that, but not surprised. When I got to play with Hypercard in elementary school, I drew houses and paths and put buttons on the paths to navigate between the screens, with some text to tell a very simple story (wish I still had it, but it's long gone. I only vaguely remember what a couple of screens looked like). If I had more time with it maybe I might have been able to turn it into a proper game. Not on the same level as Myst, though, of course.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

klyrs 5y ago

Flash seemed like an evolved form of HyperCard, and the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise. I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.

Shared404 5y ago
> the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise Agree. > I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools Hard agree. > on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity. Wait what? Wouldn't you want it to be implemented at the very least on something like Godot, which is open source? Aside from that, I think we are in full agreement on this - though my dream would be something like this on uxn (because I love the concept of uxn, I don't know that it would actually be feasible to do so - I suspect it wouldn't.)
- klyrs 5y ago
  Sorry, Unity was the first that came to mind, I forgot it was closed. Good call. Though, I should clarify... the missed opportunity with Flash is that there was no good reason for the .swf format to be closed. IIRC, there were a few attempts made at making non-Adobe Flash players, but they were always terrible because of the necessary overhead of reversing the format. Even if the initial version was built on Unity, as long as the creations were saved to an open and well-documented file format, alternative players could be written which would be a boon to the ecosystem.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    That seems reasonable. Honestly, I think open formats and protocols are more important in general than open code -- which is of course why we see them less and less these days :( .
- entaloneralie 5y ago
  Uxn should be able to host something like Hypercard, the hypertalk language would probably look something like akin to Postscript. Uxn's Noodle software is inching toward something like Macpaint. A software that ties it all together as a game making tool would in Uxn would be very nice indeed!

freemint 5y ago

Look at the paper: Implementation of Label Metaphor Using Shared Interaction Object Architecture by Koshizuka and Sakamura.

lioeters 5y ago
Implementation of Label Metaphor Using Shared Interaction Object Architecture https://sci-hub.st/10.1109/tron.1994.378614 https://sci-hub.st/10.1109/tron.1994.378614

gcanyon 5y ago

Not as approachable, but similar to HC and you get much more functionality for the learning curve: https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/

based2 5y ago

Others Macintosh gems: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontographer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontographer and later - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools

JKCalhoun 5y ago
And: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit