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Comment by inimino | Hacker News Reader

> if Python and Javascript work well enough on a Mac.

They absolutely do not. Even getting started with a GUI app is a major undertaking in either one of those ecosystems.

And that term "ecosystem" indicates the problem, HyperCard was an application for making applications when "application" was just a fancy word for a program with a GUI. Nobody wants to download and learn an ecosystem just to build an app. There should be an app for that, but there's not. We don't have app-building apps on every iPhone because Apple chose not to put app-building apps on every iPhone. It's not hard to see why.

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On Android, the closest thing to an "app building app" is Tasker. It's meant for end-user automation, scripting without much typing, but it's powerful enough to build whole GUI apps (and it wisely offers an option to export such creations as standalone .apks).

It's definitely not Hypercard, but it shares its spirit, and is still a very useful thing. Like, e.g. last weekend I though I'd like to run a sampling profiler on myself - i.e. every now and then pop up a notification to record what I'm doing at any given moment, and store that data in a format I could later use for analysis. I managed to build one in 30 minutes in Tasker - complete with showing the list on a smartwatch and recording to CSV; after first spending the same amount of time looking for existing solutions and failing to find any. That's to show how easy it is to do, straight on your smartphone. It's something you could easily do on a bus or a train - and more importantly, it's something a regular non-tech person could do too.

FYI, there is an existing solution that does pretty much what you describe: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bsoule.tagtime...

Thanks. Interesting, looks like it's being developed by the Beeminder people. I probably would've given it a go if I found it (discoverability of PlayStore sucks), but now my 30-minutes solution is actually more feature-full than this (in particular, it works on a smartwatch).

Ooh, any way we could entice you to describe that in the TagTime forum? https://forum.beeminder.com/c/tagtime

Thanks. This is fascinating.

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