Aside from Bill Atkinson simply being a genius, a shining trait of HC is that it didn't try to do everything.
There was a successor to HC called SuperCard (which I used to create a printed circuit board drawing app). SC added all of the features "missing" from HC, such as a large variety of different window types. In the process, it became harder to use, for not very much gain. Having both HC and SC on my computer, I invariably reached for HC, even when it meant that my programs didn't look quite as snappy.
For me, HC was what made it tolerable to use a Mac. I did some pretty outrageous things with it, such as controlling a primitive custom machine tool. I did have to create some "code resources" in Pascal or C to access my hardware interfaces, but those codes were often on the order of a couple dozen lines, and rarely needed to be maintained.
Visual Basic made the same mistake. The more "professional" it became, the harder it was for the people who were actually interested in using it. I stuck with VB5 long after VB.NET came out.
This reminded me of the comments i've read online from modders about the modding tools for Neverwinter Nights 1 vs those of Neverwinter Nights 2. Both are very moddable games but the NWN1 tools were actually designed as part of the product (for many the official campaign was just a demo for the tools) and were very simple to use - but also very limited (e.g. areas could only be made by placing prefabricated tiles - though you could make your own tiles with external tools and also add additional objects on top of them, most of the area work was placing tiles together). On the other hand NWN2 was more freeform, had better visuals and features, allowed arbitrary terrain sculpting, etc but that also made it much more complicated to use.
As a result NWN1 has a ton more modules (campaigns/mods) for it than NWN2 and many people who spent considerable time on NWN1 never moved to NWN2 due to the increased complexity. To this day i often find comments about how simple and easy the NWN1 tools were, but i don't remember ever reading anything like that for NWN2 :-P.
That's an interesting point about not doing everything. Livecode is a more powerful, capable tool very much based on HC, and while it has a great power-to-complexity ratio, I don't think it's (made up numbers) 5x more powerful, but 8x more complex. https://livecode.com/
Flash seemed like an evolved form of HyperCard, and the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise. I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.
> the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise
Agree.
> I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools
Hard agree.
> on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.
Wait what? Wouldn't you want it to be implemented at the very least on something like Godot, which is open source?
Aside from that, I think we are in full agreement on this - though my dream would be something like this on uxn (because I love the concept of uxn, I don't know that it would actually be feasible to do so - I suspect it wouldn't.)
GTK3 with Glade was a really great (albeit considerably more complicated) tool to do more or less the same thing with modern design paradigms and more complicated, capable widgets. Unfortunately, the GTK devs seem to be moving away from simple UI design with GTK4, making it pretty undesirable for building anything other than complex, hulking apps.
I still have a plethora of weekend projects made with GTK2/3 sitting around on my drives. Little MPRIS controllers, simple icon viewers, petname generators, hashing applications... I've got half a mind to fork GTK3 into a simpler UI design tool if I had the time for it.
Didn't know that, but not surprised. When I got to play with Hypercard in elementary school, I drew houses and paths and put buttons on the paths to navigate between the screens, with some text to tell a very simple story (wish I still had it, but it's long gone. I only vaguely remember what a couple of screens looked like).
If I had more time with it maybe I might have been able to turn it into a proper game. Not on the same level as Myst, though, of course.
analog31|4 years ago
There was a successor to HC called SuperCard (which I used to create a printed circuit board drawing app). SC added all of the features "missing" from HC, such as a large variety of different window types. In the process, it became harder to use, for not very much gain. Having both HC and SC on my computer, I invariably reached for HC, even when it meant that my programs didn't look quite as snappy.
For me, HC was what made it tolerable to use a Mac. I did some pretty outrageous things with it, such as controlling a primitive custom machine tool. I did have to create some "code resources" in Pascal or C to access my hardware interfaces, but those codes were often on the order of a couple dozen lines, and rarely needed to be maintained.
Visual Basic made the same mistake. The more "professional" it became, the harder it was for the people who were actually interested in using it. I stuck with VB5 long after VB.NET came out.
badsectoracula|4 years ago
As a result NWN1 has a ton more modules (campaigns/mods) for it than NWN2 and many people who spent considerable time on NWN1 never moved to NWN2 due to the increased complexity. To this day i often find comments about how simple and easy the NWN1 tools were, but i don't remember ever reading anything like that for NWN2 :-P.
gcanyon|4 years ago
klyrs|4 years ago
Shared404|4 years ago
Agree.
> I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools
Hard agree.
> on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.
Wait what? Wouldn't you want it to be implemented at the very least on something like Godot, which is open source?
Aside from that, I think we are in full agreement on this - though my dream would be something like this on uxn (because I love the concept of uxn, I don't know that it would actually be feasible to do so - I suspect it wouldn't.)
smoldesu|4 years ago
I still have a plethora of weekend projects made with GTK2/3 sitting around on my drives. Little MPRIS controllers, simple icon viewers, petname generators, hashing applications... I've got half a mind to fork GTK3 into a simpler UI design tool if I had the time for it.
based2|4 years ago
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontographer
and later
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools
JKCalhoun|4 years ago
uberman|4 years ago
The original "greatest game of all time" Myst was implemented in Hypercard at least for the initial Mac release.
cableshaft|4 years ago
If I had more time with it maybe I might have been able to turn it into a proper game. Not on the same level as Myst, though, of course.
gcanyon|4 years ago
freemint|4 years ago
lioeters|4 years ago
https://sci-hub.st/10.1109/tron.1994.378614
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]