What is a modern successor to HyperCard? | Hacker News Reader

What is a modern successor to HyperCard?

13 pointsWillAdams9 comments

Livecode went closed source and is out of the reach of most folks due to pricing.

Decker is too like to the original in being limited to b/w pixel graphics.

Flash afforded vector graphics and scripting, but is moribund.

Scratch only makes games and game-like things, with no ability to make traditional GUI elements.

Tcl/TK and Python/Tkinter lack integrated graphical development environments where one could just draw, while tools such as Lazarus and QTdesigner are too integrated with traditional textual programming. Processing similarly lacks a graphical representation of code or a drawing environment.

Nodebox and Ryven and so forth separate pretty graphics made of standard components and output.

If a naïve user wanted to express themselves by integrating drawing and numbers and code, what modern environment facilitates this?

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I think Scrappy may have been mentioned on HN a few weeks ago, not sure if that fits what you’re looking for.

https://pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/

I think you win the internet today --- I missed that discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118159

(this discussion seems to have aged out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040642 )

and it's almost exactly what I want (just needs to be a stand-alone desktop app, and have tools for arc and Bézier curve (so that a user could extend arc into a circle, and I assume line into a rectangle) --- if it added Flash-like deforming line-drawing (see Wick Editor for an implementation) that would be icing on the cake.

Thanks!

I have been following HyperCard clones for years. It would take me some time to gather what I found, but the short answer is to download a Mac OS 9 emulator (it works) and load up HyperCard 2.4.1 and have fun.

Emulators page with links to versions for MacOS and Windows.

https://mendelson.org/emulators.html

Hypercard 2.4.1 is available at the Macintosh Repository

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2632-hypercard-2-4

I had bought it long ago and used it in my work to make simulations with graphical output (via XCMDS) and to output EPS files for tech pubs. I think that the in-house use of HyperCard was vastly under-reported.

I'll update in a reply if and when I find the best standalone HC clones in my search.

Naturally, the full-blown emulator and HC are not for kids, unless you install it for your kids. I let my daughter have some fun with the original HyperCard, and I keep a MacCube with MacOS9 for sentimental reasons, though it's boxed right now.

Sightly off-topic, Processing offers highly graphical coding.

https://processing.org/

And gcompris offers lots of educational apps that one might have written in HyperCard.

https://www.gcompris.net/index-en.html

I mentioned Processing --- there isn't an interactive graphical front-end --- it's a text editing/result window pair. Another concern is the last time I looked into it I couldn't get the precision necessary --- has that changed?

Probably I should just use Hypernext Studio:

https://tigabyte.com/

but I don't like that it's closed source/very small company (one person?) and not really cross-platform.

Decker supports color.

https://beyondloom.com/decker/color.html#Index

Does it support standard UI elements? Can one make an application which looks like a normal app?

Decker has a range of primitive UI widgets like buttons, fields, sliders, spinners, and grids. Decker's font editor[0] is a moderately complex application which uses a variety of widgets.

It's also possible to build new widgets with arbitrary appearances and behaviors like date pickers, radio buttons, or tab-bars via "Contraptions"[1]. The community forum has a collection[2] of Contraptions to suit various applications; sharing or re-using them across decks is as simple as copying and pasting a widget.

[0] https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html#font

[1] http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#contraptions

[2] https://itch.io/t/2690007/the-contraption-bazaar

Lots of good past HN submissions and discussions on this topic (a topic which is near and dear to my heart! :).

IMHO, there are so many interesting past submissions on this subject that I suggest inspecting the compendium directly:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=hypercard

As a kid trying to learn how to program HyperCard helped me a lot. I think if I tried to do that today I would either go for web technologies or SwiftUI so I guess I probably wouldn't choose an all in one environment.

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