ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

https://www.vipercard.net/

by moltensyntax • 8 years ago

444 137 8 years ago

I wonder how much material design is influenced by Hypercard. I know the web was partially inspired but it looks like with material design the language is sort of extended. Or maybe it was all integrated into the design language for the web.

Karunamon• 8 years ago

What I find amazing is that early B&W GUIs were more usable than modern material design. Most takes on Material that I’ve seen take poor use of screen real-estate, poor conveyance, and distracting/hard-to-read color choices to an art form.

dman2• 8 years ago

In case some UX / HCI experts read this thread, are there any credible studies of information density in user interfaces plotted over time?

jaysonelliot• 8 years ago

I've been very interested lately in the idea of monochromatic interfaces.

Aside from being easier on the eyes (especially an amber or red interface), they force UI designers to make careful choices, and potentially result in a cleaner, more useable interface.

It's not a project for me yet, just a series of notes and concepts, but I'd like to turn it into a proof of concept at the very least.

scroot• 8 years ago

Once we get usable and affordable e-ink monitors designers will have to revisit this territory seriously.

zitterbewegung2• 8 years ago

I have done material design somewhat badly. I would mean a design directly from Google not someone’s reinterpretation of it. You can use it to justify your sloppyness but you could do the same thing in HyperCard.

Torwald• 8 years ago

I had an equivalent multimedia authoring system on the Amiga, called Hyperbook. http://obligement.free.fr/articles/hyperbook_beta.php

It was very much influenced by HyperCard, obviously. They didn't try to hide it, to the contrary, so much so that they hacked the UI-controls to make them more "Macintoshis" I guess.

Except it came in colors. The multimedia aspect of the Amiga, remember?

ken• 8 years ago

HyperCard on the Apple IIgs fully supported colors. :-)

meatsock2• 8 years ago

this is great, but how do i hit option on an android to draw multiple?

moltensyntax6• 8 years ago

The UI was so mouse-centric that I haven't tried it much on mobile. If the menus work ok on mobile, it might make sense for "draw multiple" to be switched on in the menu like the way "draw wider lines" is now.

meatsock2• 8 years ago

minivmac does a good enough job of it on the android port, and the in-browser mac emu at the archive too. looking forward to seeing where this project leads.

wruwew8uu9• 8 years ago

Many happy memories. Can we make it full-screen please ?

moltensyntax6• 8 years ago

The closest I could get so far is to set the browser zoom to 200%, click in the url bar, and hit F11. Looks pretty good in Chrome.

tc7• 8 years ago

Aw man. So much nostalgia. <3

notthegov• 8 years ago

I used to make Hypercard stacks back in 7th grade when I was learning from Quantum Link (Q-Link) hackers like Mobeius from the Pan-American Information Network (#hellonearth).

And AOL hackers and soical engineers like HappyHardcore, creator of AOL4Free & the Master Blaster, the famous Da Chronic, creator of AOHell and KT (Shameer) who first taught me social engineering in 1995-

http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/

Koceilah Rekouche aka Chron, photo from the 1990s-

https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating/3816111466/

shaunxcode2• 8 years ago

I love hacker news right now. Been a long time since I felt "home".

endlessvoid942• 8 years ago

this really takes me back.

shaunxcode2• 8 years ago

this pleases me greatly. I hope the $1000 level is reached ASAP so it can import existing stacks!

freesort• 8 years ago

This is my first experience with HyperCard and I love it!

dangoor4• 8 years ago

This is cool, but I wonder if anyone has made a modern, browser-based variation of HyperCard? Something with a model akin to HyperCard's but exporting stacks in a form that can be easily put onto a page.

There's Amber Smalltalk, but that's more powerful and the simplicity of HyperCard is part of its charm.

walterbell• 8 years ago

Not modern, but the original in a browser via emulation: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...

moltensyntax6• 8 years ago

I'm still kind of awestruck by this. Hosting an OS inside a browser. It's great as a time capsule to perfectly see the past. But because it's an emulator, it would be difficult to add a more modern feature, like ViperCard's share-url-to-stack and save-stack-as-json.

kowdermeister• 8 years ago

How does it work? The http://hypercardonline.tk only accepts new uploads and a card archive is an iso file (https://archive.org/details/hypercard_twin-peaks) that the emulator can't seem to run.

haraldooo• 8 years ago

Not browser based but a „modern implementation“: https://livecode.com/ - the website is a little „marketingy“ but you can download a open source version of their „hypercard succesor“

bartread2• 8 years ago

At the risk of courting controversy, arguably that's what Flash was: ActionScript, for example, being based on HyperTalk. Certainly it included many of the concepts originally found in HyperCard. Of course, that too has been superseded, and ironically - after many years of holding Flash in some degree of contempt - I have to admit to being rather saddened by the fact.

dangoor4• 8 years ago

I knew about ActionScript's relationship with ECMAScript, but I hadn't been aware of the HyperTalk connection. Very interesting!

The Flash authoring tool was always, imho, pretty nice. The runtime had lots of issues, though.

misterdata• 8 years ago

I did, still a WIP: https://dialogiconderzoek.nl/designer/demo.html

dangoor4• 8 years ago

Neat! Layout is definitely one of those interesting questions around such a thing. HyperCard got away with simple absolute positioning, which isn't so awesome in our multi-device world but is unbelievably easy for users to understand.

Good luck!

mikekchar4• 8 years ago

If I remember correctly, the only reason Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is because HyperCard was discontinued. He was apparently writing CRC cards and storing them in HyperCard (which seems like a completely reasonable thing to do...) He wanted something that was as convenient for doing that kind of thing.

klenwell• 8 years ago

That's interesting. I find the wiki concept truly transformative. One of the first things I've done with almost every job I've had is set up an internal MediaWiki wiki. It's always been worth the effort even if I was the only one who bothered to contribute it for the most part.

Playing with this, I was trying to figure out a practical application for it. Is it fair to say it has largely been obsoleted by things like wikis?

mikekchar4• 8 years ago

Back in the olden days, I was actually paid to work on a couple of HyperCard applications. One that sticks out in my mind was training material for using the university's astronomical observatory. My job was to write a plugin to show an actual star field animation so that the students could practice finding objects in the classroom before they got to try on the real equipment. The HyperCard stack had a whole interactive simulation where you could walk into different rooms, see the control panels, click on buttons and activate knobs, etc.

I'd have a hard time thinking of anything current that's general purpose and would be able to do something of that scope. Probably Flash would be the thing you would use, but without Flash I'm not sure. The nice thing about HyperCard was that the vast majority of the work could be done by people who weren't programmers. Even for my bit, I was still a student and it wasn't really that difficult to write the plugin (stupid Mac Pascal compiler bugs aside... :-P).

shagie• 8 years ago

In his own words: Ward Cunningham, Inventor of the Wiki WikimediaFoundation https://youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4 at about 3:00 and on for a minute. There was a release of hypercard in ‘98 - four years after he was working on the wiki.

mikekchar4• 8 years ago

Thanks for that! That's a great video!

peterburkimsher• 8 years ago

I taught myself AppleScript when I was 13, to parse HTML and make 1000-character iPod Notes. I'd used LogoWriter in school since I was 7, but never got a copy of HyperCard. I heard many good things about HyperCard, but never thought it would be worth starting an emulator just to use it.

I just opened ViperCard, and the GUI is totally intuitive. The scripts used by buttons share a lot of syntax with AppleScript. This is the GUI for AppleScript I always wanted. Now I know why people love it. If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer.

jacquesm• 8 years ago

If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer.

Lucky you.

dmix• 8 years ago

AppleScript, for those who don't know, was heavily inspired by HyperCard. And apparently was one of the (many) core language inspirations behind Javascript too.

ashleyn• 8 years ago

HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like.

It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these syntactically-sugared programming languages. HyperTalk reads just like English; it very much seemed like the next generation of the niche BASIC aimed to fill. Because computers of that era typically opened right into a development environment (e.g. a simple BASIC interpreter), there was even brief discussion of HyperCard potentially replacing Finder as the default Mac OS environment.

caf2• 8 years ago

Isn't https://scratch.mit.edu/ a modern incarnation of this style?

setpatchaddress• 8 years ago

Scratch is nothing like HyperCard.

themodelplumber• 8 years ago

I'd be interested to know what circumstances made the concept flourish. Massively popular yet difficult-to-program devices sitting in every home?

If I could go back in time I would have stuck with QBasic for at least another five years before moving to C. I wasn't close to ready for the briefly exciting dive into "real" coding, which led to abstract CS concepts, the thick books with exciting illustrations on the covers, the CS classes which were so boring. Meanwhile I believe I could have actually been shipping software had I stuck with QB. Gar to admit but true.

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

I was lucky to have started in 8 bit machines, and having used Basic and Pascal compilers before ever touching C.

There wasn't a single new concept regarding low level hardware programming that C teached me, on the contrary, I got to learn how not to do it.

And I wasn't infected by the "micro-optimize each line of code as it gets written" culture, rather I was shipping software that was fast enough to keep its users happy.

schoen• 8 years ago

People have written a lot about programming languages that try to use natural-language syntax, but one idea that I remember is that both HyperTalk and AppleScript are a lot easier to read than to write, because you can relatively easily use your knowledge of English to understand what the code is doing, but you can't easily use your knowledge of English to figure out how to phrase instructions in a way that the interpreter will understand. And your own praise of HyperTalk mentions its being easy to read, not easy to write. :-)

One way to experiment with this distinction might be to look at the Wikipedia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operatio...

and read through the examples and see if you follow them. I'm sure you will.

Now, close the page and try to write a valid loop, and a valid user interaction, and a valid test for the existence of a file. I don't think you're likely to succeed unless you've actually programmed in HyperTalk recently.

But I could readily imagine that many people can learn HyperTalk more quickly or comfortably than a language without the natural language elements. Maybe part of that is the low psychological barrier to using a system that looks like it makes sense semantically, compared to learning special meanings for lots of symbols.

slededit2• 8 years ago

The way "normal" people tend to enter into programming is by starting with some example code and modifying it to their purpose. In this sort of scenario readability is very much a benefit.

kkylin• 8 years ago

Like many commenters here, I loved HyperCard and used it quite a bit in middle through high school (and even college years). For me, it never was the syntactic-sugar-laden language, but the entire environment: it was really easy to create an interactive, custom GUI to do more or less what one wants. And since every Mac shipped with HyperCard, a stack can run anywhere (unless it depended on specific extensions).

JulianMorrison2• 8 years ago

Inform 7 ( http://inform7.com/ ) is a modern programming language with "English like" syntax. And as someone who's tried to work from their manual (it has only "shallow end" and "learn by example" formulations) when you actually want to do the thing, one particular English-like construction will compile and a very similar English-like construction will be rejected and it's awfully hard, except by repetition, to learn which one will work.

karmelapple• 8 years ago

Considering code is read more frequently than it is written [0] [1], seems like a trade-off that could be helpful... I wonder if autocomplete to a language like this would help a lot. There was nothing like that for HyperCard.

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070406-00/?p=... [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/when-understanding-means-rewri...

endlessvoid942• 8 years ago

I totally agree - QBasic was my first language (after DOS batch files!). The fact that it was an interpreter meant you could read all the code for any program you found. Which, IIRC, was via floppy disks from my neighbor and a friend from school.

The web has some of that, but the technology is just so much more complex. The difference between reading the .bas file for SNAKE vs. using the web inspector to understand how gmail works is astronomical.

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

The fact that it was an interpreter meant you could read all the code for any program you found.

This wasn't a granted thing back then.

GW-BASIC source needed to be explicitly saved in ASCII mode.

efdee• 8 years ago

To be fair, the difference between Snake and GMail is astronomical in itself.

mmjaa5• 8 years ago

forgotten realm of democratising programming

This phrase reminded me of a thought I once had, that the removal of the compiler as a first-class application in user-centric OS distributions was an imperial gesture to enforce class hierarchies among end-users: you were either a user, incapable of making your computer do new things, or you are a developer, who must be convinced to make computers do new things using rules and policies (and tools) that were forced upon you by the Powers That Be™.

I think one thing we should be demanding, as computer power users/developers, is the return of software development tools to the forefront of the computing experience. It is unacceptable that computers are being shipped today without the means of making them productive, other than participation in a walled garden.

I know its a tall order, but I'd love to see an OS vendor make a serious point of making their users better developers, not worse.

nailer• 8 years ago

I'd like to see development democratised as well, but I think the reason for the change is that not expecting users to be developers made software easier.

Not just the failure of desktop Linux, but also Windows, which still asks regular users if they want to 'debug' a crashing app. To most people, 'debug' means 'fix' and the button just doesn't work.

icebraining2• 8 years ago

No computers actually come without the means of making them productive; they all have a JS engine. It's how I learned programming, almost twenty years ago - IE5 on a public computer.

That said, I do agree that programming should be made more accessible. Bret Victor and others seem to be exploring new ways of doing that, besides making computing more physical:

https://dynamicland.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15962730

II2II• 8 years ago

I suspect that there were a number of things going on:

- The bundled development tools were usually still there, but they took a form that those of use who grew up with computers in the 1980s were less likely to acknowledge. Consider how web development took off soon after more traditional languages were removed.

- People are more interested in programming when new technologies appear. There are more itches to scratch, opportunities available, and the barrier to entry is lower.

- Programming simply became more complex. It used to take one line of code to do something. Between the OS and languages requiring more (initialization, boilerplate code, etc.), programming became less appealing. While tools like HyperCard addressed some of this, the distinction between "real" programs and these environments was quite clear.

All of this is driven more by the end user than by industry. And if end users are less keen on programming, why should businesses make the investment in creating tools for them?

tomc19853• 8 years ago

The culture behind this went away with the advent of mobile. Now that tech is mainstream the majority of users see their computing devices as appliances, not tools.

I personally think this tools vs. appliances distinction explains a lot about tech culture nowadays and I would love it with we nerds could collectively exile the computing "mainstream" to mobile so we power users can have our tools (computers) back.

Microsoft, Google, and Apple et al are muddying the waters, by trying to shove mobile square pegs into desktop's round holes

gregknicholson• 8 years ago

even your aunt

I think you may be making a couple of unsavoury assumptions there.

A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like.

But I do agree wholeheartedly with your point. I'd love to see more people embrace hackability over shininess, and become more than just consumers again.

zeveb• 8 years ago

HyperCard is why I'm a developer today, and it's precisely because it was such an egalitarian tool. I was a (human) language geek as a child, but I loved using computers. I downloaded a bunch of neat stacks other people had made, and I was able to open them up and see how they ticked — eventually I realised that I could make my own stacks, and make the computer do things for me, too!

I do worry that HyperTalk ruined me in the same way the Dijkstra asserted BASIC ruined programmers of his era, but I have a good job and seem to write good software so I don't worry about it too hard.

I really worry for kids these days: JavaScript + HTML is nowhere near as friendly an environment as HyperCard was. What's a clever kid going to use as a programming environment now?

tomcam• 8 years ago

www.livecode.com is a cross platform updated Hypercard descendant. Their free Community edition is GPL

moltensyntax6• 8 years ago

I liked Runtime Revolution. I wish the broader coding community would taken environments like this more seriously, is the text editor sacred? I left the platform before they added more mobile+online support, I'll have to see what they have added recently.

tluyben2• 8 years ago

Livecode is great for creating tools on most platforms very fast. Literally a few hours to create quite functional frontends to commandline applications for instance. The batteries included way of working is breath of fresh air compared to what other environments have, but the reach of the platform seems limited. Mostly because to make applications actually release ready for ‘the world’ takes insane amounts of effort. However that does not diminish the power of the system for me; being able to whip up prototypes and ‘good enough’ helper/tool applications is something I only know from Tcl/Tk (especially with Visual tcl). Delphi/VB are fast but not as fast as these. I create mostly write-only software with it but for what I need it for, it is good and I do not know anything that matches that kind of productivity.

icebraining2• 8 years ago

is the text editor sacred?

No, it's the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

cocktailpeanuts• 8 years ago

why is this flagged?

chris_wot• 8 years ago

Why has this been flagged?

drivingmenuts• 8 years ago

Ironically, it does not work in Safari. :(

moltensyntax6• 8 years ago

It looks like Safari implements regular expressions slightly differently, and it leads to the parser behaving differently. Hope to be addressed by the end of the week.

ddingus• 8 years ago

Irregular expressions

moltensyntax6• 8 years ago

This should now be resolved, Safari should work fine.

dbcurtis• 8 years ago

I'll show my age here, but back when I took AI, I wrote a (toy, homework-size) expert system as a Hypercard stack. There is actually a lot to be said for Hypercard as a framework for quick UIs.

dredmorbius• 8 years ago

Hypercard was the inspiration behind much of the early Web. In particular the Viola browser suite.

http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html

dfex• 8 years ago

Wow! This takes me back! HyperTalk was probably my second language after Applesoft BASIC and boy did it seem powerful at the time.

Hypercard overall was just great at getting out of the way and letting you get things done. Looking back, if Apple had realised how powerful networking was back then, Hypercard may have morphed into the browser one day, but they missed that boat.

I remember reading somewhere a while back that Hypercard plus some XCMDs were used to control the lighting system in Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar... actually here we go: https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-go...

buserror• 8 years ago

In 88 (I was 19) I was a 'professional mac developer' and wrote a stack in hypercard to convert huge list of points to polygons, and split them with other polygons.

The project was to split the parcels of land from Lille to Paris with the track of the TGV (high speed train) to calculate the expropriation the state was doing to the poor guys who'd end up getting their huge field cut in two, and would have to drive 20 miles to go from one side to the other :-)

Seriously. Hypercard was pretty cool to throw together something quickly, with a UI and more importantly it gave the client the impression they could go an tinker with it afterward.

It was also excellent to mockup UIs and 'processes' and other bits of Mac apps before committing to making them, so even internally at apple, Hypercard (and Supercard) were used a lot for mockups.

There was a huge ecosystem around hypercard, and it lasted for a very long time.

Oh, and Atkinson is still my hero!

gm-conspiracy2• 8 years ago

...and Myst.

djsumdog• 8 years ago

Wait, was Myst in hypercard? I remember watching videos where they talked about how everything was only in 256 colors with adaptive pallets, plus they had Windows, 3DO and Plyastation ports.

Angostura3• 8 years ago

I know the original You Don't Know Jack was also prototyped in Hypercard

coldcode• 8 years ago

I used Hypercard a lot for prototyping UI back then. Of course the UIs were not in color but it was a great tool. Supercard came from Silicon Beach which added more functionality to the basic Hypercard.

MR4D• 8 years ago

“Mobile and tablet are not yet supported”

Well, heck. Now I can’t even see what is causing so much commentary on the memories of HyperCard.

jackvalentine• 8 years ago

I've always thought that OneNote would be better as some kind of hypercardesque application. Everything I wish my notebook could do it kinda does, but with very poor linking to data or calendars.

Angostura3• 8 years ago

Ironically, doesn't support Safari :)

Cyberdog• 8 years ago

Click the "Click here to continue anyway" button. Like most sites that advertise that they don't work on Safari, it actually works just fine.

(Reminder: If you're doing browser feature detection via User-Agent string, you seriously need to re-examine your life.)

gergles• 8 years ago

This reminds me of my favorite story about old-school Macs. All Macs shipped with Hypercard after its release for a while. Then, eventually, Apple spun off Claris, who got HyperCard as part of the deal, and Apple decided to ship a nerfed version of HyperCard that had most of the stack authoring tools disabled.

However, you could open up a command console in this neutered version of HyperCard, type in 'magic', and you'd be able to unlock the full set of authoring tools.

Magic indeed.

intrasight• 8 years ago

I had a early Mac in 1984 (still have the damn thing - sentimentality). Showing people Hypercard was often the thing that convinced them to purchase a Mac.

soapdog• 8 years ago

For those that like HyperCard, I really recommend looking at LiveCode (www.livecode.com), it is a modern version of it that is able to generate standalone applications for MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and the Web.

They have a FOSS version behind that confusing website, the livecode.org site has access to the GPL version, you can download without acquiring a membership. It is just a bit hidden.

jlebrech2• 8 years ago

there needs to be ways to jump into code without being bogged down with installing compilers and tools and configuring minifiers and choosing frameworks. just code straight away.

something that works for kids but also scales all the way into enterprise.

gglitch• 8 years ago

Racket?

zokier2• 8 years ago

open about:blank, right click, inspect element, start hammering code into console. You can still get pretty far with plain JS these days without touching the quagmire that is modern webdev world.

Sure there are some other issues in picking JS, but it is both readily available and (somewhat) scalable to "serious" projects.

jlebrech2• 8 years ago

nothing can compare to saving a .bas file on a floppy to learn how to code.

zokier2• 8 years ago

Considering the enthusiasm at display here, I feel like this project would deserve bit better demo video for people like me who do not really understand HyperCard.

tomc19853• 8 years ago

I would think "Hypercard Reimagined" would finally cast off the iron chains of its black-and-white, ancient Mac UI heritage...

edit: to clarify, even back in the day those were the two things that I really disliked about HyperCard. No color and no Windows

ada1981• 8 years ago

I wrote a program called Virtual Journal 1.0 that was simply an infinite paged, password protected text journal app.

I put it into AOL's ftp area as shareware and got checks from around the world for $2. I was about 8 years old!

EDITED: I'm offering a $100 reward if anyone can find a copy of this software in an archive or old shareware disc somewhere! I'd love to find it again. Also, bonus points for finding my OneClick Palette called "AOL ROVER".

SpikeDad• 8 years ago

Kind of ironic they "don't support" Safari, the browser for macOS.

Seems to work anyways.

m8rl• 8 years ago

HyperCard was about empowering users, the opposite of what many tech companies want today, including Apple. It was a "predecessor" to the web (hypertext, HyperTalk scripting language), of Flash (animations, graphics), of user programmable databases (ok, Filemaker is older). It enabled users to smoothly dive into programming, as it not only offered a simple but extremly powerful concept of document-applictions called "stacks", drag-n-drop setup of your own graphical user interfaces, but behind all this a very powerful, extendable object oriented programming language with kind of "real" objects, as every item of your stack could have it's own method. Thankfully we have web technology today, else computer technology would miss its most democratic tool. But still HyperCard was the only way to simply have your own data on your own computer in your own application and not relying to a server, cloud or even paid service.

GRobLewis• 8 years ago

As for the problem with languages like HyperTalk and AppleScript being read-only, the solution isn't to change the syntax, it's -- wait for it -- AI! If Google can figure out what you want from a spoken free-form inquiry, then a smart interpreter should be able to figure out what you're trying to say in a line of code, even if you don't get the syntax quite right. And if your code is ambiguous, it can ask you confirm your intentions. Why haven't we seen more of this?

ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

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