Decker – A HyperCard Replacement
beyondloom.com
beyondloom.com
I secretly wish the dominant aesthetic in computing was one where everything was mac-like 1-bit dithered graphics, and we only used color when absolutely necessary - when the black and white graphics just couldn't convey what was needed. Like if instead of throwing it away for color, we had just built on top of it.
Side note, I'm also often struck how 1-bit-ish graphics sometimes were used to great effect on the ZXSpectrum, another minimally graphically capable computer of the era. When the game developers were trying to use color the games often looked worse than if they had just stuck with a simpler scheme. Chase H.Q., Bombjack, Pang!, etc. all look amazing to my eye.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra...
Those first years of personal computing inspired so much amazing creativity like this.
Decker: A Multimedia Sketchpad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33478246 - Nov 2022 (7 comments)
Lil: A Scripting Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33393283 - Oct 2022 (28 comments)
Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)
We also don’t know what “index and ranking for search” would have looked like in a HyperCard-style web paradigm. Something like Google could work; it would have to be a sophisticated enough to parse stacks instead of HTML, but we’re already deep into an alternate universe, so I’ll stop here.
Also, “index and ranking for search” is probably a bad thing. SEO has absolutely destroyed the web.
The purpose of the Flash app was to make the site more beautiful, not to obfuscate the content.
Right. It's possible now because of things like Puppeteer. That's fairly recent. Nothing like that existed in the early 2000s to allow crawlers to index either Flash, Java embeds, Proce55ing apps or Javascript content. All scripting was a black box to Google as much as it was to Altavista. You had to place ancillary noscript content on each page to make it accessible to robots. That held true for Javascript apps well into the mid-2010s. My point is that we actually could index Flash sites now if we wanted to, just as we do with Javascript SPAs... however no one was making JS SPAs in the early 2000s, and search penalty was one major reason single page Flash sites fell out of use. The fact that JS SPAs have moved in now to occupy the empty niche left by ES4/AS3 really just proves it was a good and necessary idea for certain types of sites that was kneecapped by Adobe's closed source and the direction the web and search was taking.
Very interesting episode!
Decker doesn't use a forked filesystem, but still has "resources" in the form of various disembodied modular pieces that can be copied between decks: fonts, sounds, pattern/color palettes, lil modules, and contraption prototypes. When I designed the UI for managing and importing resources, I modeled it after the Font/DA Mover, and naturally called it the "Font/Deck Accessory Mover". :)