Art Bits from HyperCard | Hacker News Reader

Art Bits from HyperCard

archives.somnolescent.net

Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260306224042/https://archives....

Ah, that'll be useful. The hardest thing about adding a new project to my site is finding a new HyperCard/System 6 icon. https://mk.gg/

Hey, I really loved the fonts on your website.

For the past 10 years I've being using terminus bitmap font, so I have strong opinions about it. The only reason I prefer Firefox is because it supports bitmap.

Reading your website on my phone made my day! Lovely fonts/aesthetics

Wow, I must be in my 40s because I love your site :)

Did you find the "hot corner" though?

omg immediate nostalgia. I can still picture the After Dark floppies!

I get that I'm critiquing you within your apparent wheelhouse, but this aesthetic also matters a lot to me.

  img[data-astro-cid-vnzlvqnm] {
    width: 48px;
    height: 48px;
    image-rendering: pixelated;
    object-fit: contain;
    margin-bottom: 0.5rem;
  }

I understand the goal here, but it works really poorly IMO when the source images are generally 32x32 (and some of them are smaller to arbitrary degrees because the content has been cropped — this doesn't seem to distort aspect ratios, but e.g. the "eye" icon gets stretched to fill the space, and thus scales with a bespoke 48/25 factor). Meanwhile the hover cursor looks pixel-precise, but definitely too big compared to the icons. (It seems to have been scaled 2x ahead of time, from an authentic 16x16.) The background scale is also pixel-precise (I don't know whether it's 2x scaled just to scale it, or to look like a 2x2 "pattern") so the difference in approaches is just really jarring to me.

(I think the font is also doing some anti-aliasing; probably can't really control that. It looks really cool, though.)

I would really recommend not cropping to content, and either using integer-scale boxes or just accepting some sampling interpolation. Or just leaving everything at 1:1 scale. It'd be noticeably physically smaller than authentic for typical desktop displays, but that's just hardware doing what it does. (And as it stands, it might be bigger than authentic!) Bonus points for a `@media` query on device resolution to make the choice.

(Edit: after reading through https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P... I'm not really sure Firefox is working as advertised...? But I think x1.5 scaling for pixel art is always going to involve compromise.)

As I mentioned, images are the hardest to do because beyond the core icons, the available graphics vary massively in size. Displaying them at "actual size" makes them far too small to be usable on a modern screen. I think you're also probably misremembering the scale of the cursor. It's not perfect, but it's not meant to be 16x16. Take a look at https://hcsimulator.com/

The approach I took is the best I could manage without hand-modifying every image. You're right that some of them are not as good as they should be. The ones that I did hand-make (the background, as you noticed, and the window chrome) are the ones that are pixel-perfect.

The fonts took a lot of work to control the anti-aliasing. You'll see they vary quite a bit between monitors, OSs and browsers. Generally they look best in Firefox on a Mac retina display, because that's what I created them in.

> Displaying them at "actual size" makes them far too small to be usable on a modern screen

Man, I have ancient (er, well, that's a bit awkward in context!) stuff, I know. But these things are still just fine at ~96dpi IMO.

> I think you're also probably misremembering the scale of the cursor. It's not perfect, but it's not meant to be 16x16.

I recall 16x16 cursors (System 6 CURS resource) and 32x32 icons, so I expect the cursor to be visually 1/2 the height/width of the icons. You have it effectively at 2/3.

> on a Mac retina display

These basically don't exist in my world. But again (or maybe I was unclear?), @media queries can check for dpi and not just viewport size.

We need a modern HyperCard, I want to see more creative computing

Have you seen Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/

there's a great blogpost explaining the creator's inspirations in hypercard also: https://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html

in progress ;)

I'm working on it, Breadboard[0] is a visual app builder that mixes Figma-style UI design with Shortcuts-style logic.

[0] https://breadboards.io/

I recently enjoyed this episode of Mac Folklore Radio.

A surprising prescient discussion on HyperCard and hypertext.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/mac-folklore-radio/id1...

There is this thing called the World Wide Web that does most of that.

The web is sort of like hypercard, but it's not the same; in particular, the ease of creating things in hypercard is the important thing about it, and AFAIK that remains unmatched.

Exactly - the Web is a PDF. Hypercard is a Word document.

As someone who knows rather a lot about HyperCard: it was never allowed or positioned to fulfill its potential. There were easily fixable security issues ruining the opportunity to be the center of OS scripting. The UI was never rewritten for color and to match the Mac UI, which would not have been complicated either. The code must have been very difficult to upgrade, either technically or organizationally, because the entire upgrade run past 2.0 was so meager. It was a piece of genius, but in the end, only a piece.

LiveCode is its spiritual successor IMHO. Cross platform too. https://livecode.com/

Doesn’t really seem to get “it” to be a successor, or even a new VisualBasic.

A long term goal of mine, but I would create a desktop application as I don’t think there’s enough focus on those any more.

I would love a local-first app, publish to web sure! but local first editor would be fantastic imo

HyperCard was definitely my first taste of what would become my career in web software development.

I wasn't a Mac user at home, but school had them and I absolutely loved what I could create with HyperCard, there was nothing like it on Windows.

I also recall switching to SuperCard simply for the COLOR support, what a time.

My favorite fact about HyperCard was that the game Myst was built using HyperCard:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#:~:text=The%20game%20was%...

Also sources: the Myst making-of video included on the Myst CD-ROM, and the Cyan team members who made it!

Thanks for the reminder!

Feel like I saw this many years ago but totally worth a re-watch.

I so wish the author had made their screenshot at the top an image map so you could click on the icons to jump to each section below. But so cool!

I loved playing with HyperCard in elementary/middle school before I moved on to coding and saw what was possible there. But HyperCard will always hold a special place in my heart.

EDIT: Ok, I couldn't help myself, this [0] will inject the image map into the page (paste it into your console). Don't worry, it's simple and easy to read what it's doing). Video of what it looks like once injected: https://cs.joshstrange.com/t1T3KGxF

[0] https://gist.github.com/joshstrange/6ea1fb4b64b39ee410e2bd6f...

I wonder if these were created by Susan Kare.

now I need an emoji font in this 90s style of those 'small treasures'

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