![]() ![]() At least a word processor (either WriteNow or Word 5.1, mostly depending on the Mac’s age) and a text editor, such as BBEdit.My usual approach for my vintage Macs is to equip them with a base set of application software like this: Now that my Macintosh SE/30 has a working hard drive, I wanted to search my archives for some useful applications and utilities to put on it. These past three weeks or so, as you know, I’ve been doing a thorough check-up of my vintage Macs. There is Supercard still (I think), but Hypercard will be sorely missed.(Updated January 18 and January 20 with more About boxes) At this point, most of what I did can easily be replicated with the web, but it had a lot of potential that was never tapped. Hypercard was my second programming language, and I created a lot of great applications with it during high school. So, there are now apps that can do everything Hypercard could do (Filemaker strikes me as the one closest to it, though still much different and vastly harder to use), but not really any single thing that puts them all together and makes them as easy as Hypercard did. This sort of functionality can be replicated by Applescript, but again that is significantly harder to learn, and doesn't come with as easy a way to create a user interface. The closest modern equivalent, though, is Filemaker, but that's ten times more expensive and harder to learn.įinally, the built-in programming features (using a language that was even easier to learn that Applescript) could do everything from perform simple operations when you clicked to fairly fancy sequences of events. These capabilities can be recreated with a web frontend to a MySQL database, but that's a whole lot of work, and they can also be duplicated by specific applications (Address Book). on OSX 10.2! Still works just fine, shockingly enough. Since you could programatically create new cards, you could also sort of do database things-heck my boss still, to this very day, uses a Hypercard stack for his addressbook. The basic card-with-media-containers style was something like web pages of today, and a lot of informational hypercard stacks (which I made many of) were quite a bit like a nice looking modern website, and can easily be replaced by one. You could create clickable and editable objects on these cards, as well, and when the user clicked objects or did other things you could program the system to do various events. Each card could have a variety of media on it-text, images (later on color was sort of cobbled in), sound, and I believe even video. Hypercard was something like a mutant hybrid of a database, a simple programming language (or a scripting language, really), and a website.īasically, you created "stacks" of "cards". ![]() Nothing will ever substitute for the original. ![]() They are very similar to HyperCard, but don't have that magic Apple interface design. SuperCard and Revolution are still around and work well with OS X, allowing you to compile for other platforms. But how can you describe it, then? It's more like a database, really, than a traditional IDE. Calling it a programming tool scares a lot of people away who could make good use of it. I don't think Apple will ever incorporate it into iLife because they just don't know how to market it. When Apple released Keynote, some people had hope that it would eventually transform into a HyperCard-like application, but that doesn't seem like it will happen now. HyperCard still has a strong following, even though it is only truly fully functional under OS 7 and earlier. Even now that I use "more powerful" languages for everything, I still wish I had HyperCard around to create the simple programs. I have a lot of good memories using HyperCard and I'm still sorry Apple felt it had to kill it. Again, it is an example of how Apple created a whole new type of product, and it inspired many, many clones (SuperCard, MetaCard, WinPlus, Revolution, even REALbasic). HyperCard is truly the best piece of software ever created and is the only thing that initially made me buy a Mac. ![]()
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