I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: HyperCard was the single best application ever devised for personal computers. I understand the practical and philosophical reasons why it became outdated and eventually abandoned, but it still sucks.
And I can’t find anything that’s come in and filled the void. It’s kind of like a database, but I can’t find a cheap or free database with as nice a front-end. It’s kind of like TrueBASIC or Visual Basic, or even Python with extensions, but if I’m going to be putting that much effort into an app, I might as well use XCode and the developer tools and learn Objective C. PowerPoint and Flash are just overkill for any of the puttering-around-the-house apps I’ve got in mind. And I’ve yet to see a rapid-application-development environment for the Web that has the right level of abstraction – they’re either behemoth apps like FrontPage, or rock simple slideshow or homepage generators that end up looking ugly and don’t do what I want.
The best aspects of HyperCard were:
[ul]
[li]It was free with every Mac[/li][li]It let you build a database without ever thinking of it as a database; the implementation was totally hidden from you[/li][li]It had a scripting language that was as high-level (“put my name into x”) or as low-level (“x = x + value”) as you wanted[/li][li]It had presentation capabilities that were as simple as dragging, dropping, and drawing, instead of thinking in terms of custom controls[/li][/ul]
I know there are home-grown attempts to re-invent HyperCard, but they all seem to have stalled. I’m downloading evaluation copies of Revolution and Dreamcard, but they already seem to be not quite “it.” And Apple’s new Automator and Dashboard seem to be separate approaches at the same thing, but it doesn’t seem quite integrated, and it doesn’t seem to warrant spending that much money for another point upgrade.
I’ve replaced it with FileMaker for database stuff. There is a price to pay, but it is damn powerful, and meets my needs very well. What did you use it for?
That reminds me of the other thing I miss about the old Macs – the tool that let you see what was on your clipboard, so you could browse porn while working on other stuff!
And yeah, I’ve seen SuperCard before, but dismissed it because it’s kind of expensive and the trial version didn’t impress me. It just seemed like a more complicated HyperCard that just tried to throw more stuff into the mix without really getting what it was all about. The beauty of HyperCard is that it was exactly as complicated as it needed to be for what you were trying to do – simple tasks were simple, and when you wanted to do something more complex, it didn’t stand in your way. When I look at SuperCard or the Revolution packages, they just throw a lot of windows in my face and I have to start thinking about how I’m going to do something instead of what I want to do.
That’s the thing – I used it for everything. I used HyperCard to make an adventure game, a trivia game, a comic book database, a “real” book database, a presentation for a course I was taking, a light “Finder replacement” to use as an app launcher and document organizer, a couple of simple cartoons, a flash card tutor to help me with a French class, and a storyboard tool for an animated movie that I never ended up doing.
FileMaker is pretty neat and very powerful (it was used as a really fancy bug database for a previous job), but it’s too expensive for me to just be dicking around with. If I’m going to be spending that much money, I’d rather get a real rapid application development system instead of somethign that is tailor-made to be a database.
Well, in case you’re interested in playing with Supercard, I think I have an unopened box for some pre-OS X version of the Mac operating system lying around. Drop me an email if you want it and I’ll try to dig it out of the utility room.
