To a much lesser extent, I feel like Flash (the animation program, not the player) kind of gave me that feeling the first time I used it. Flash was so immediately approachable compared to trying to figure out something like C++ with OpenGL or SDL or something, and it was just downright fun to create things with it.

I've really not found anything since Flash that I've had as much fun developing in. Gamemaker is cool and still pretty fun, but I still don't feel like it's quite as streamlined and it doesn't give me the same "anything is possible" feeling Flash did. Maybe I'm just getting old.

When I discovered Flash I was a literal child (12 years old), so it's not like I was reading license agreements regardless, but even if I were an adult, I could still enjoy the software simply because it's fun to use.

I certainly don't have many nice things to say about Adobe as a company, I hate that they moved to a subscription model, and I hate that they didn't open source Flash Player, guaranteeing an expiration date on the tech, but that really doesn't detract from how much I really enjoyed using the software.

Photoshop is Adobe's product, so they get to charge for it however they please, but that's textbook rent-seeking. You could argue that they're improving Photoshop and deserve the rent, but what if I don't want those new features and I'm happy with Photoshop 2024, but regardless of that, I'm still only renting Photoshop (and the rest of the suite) from them these days.

Reading the [review and seeing GIF examples][1] of the workflow of Dorico music notation software made my jaw drop as a college student. I still want to brag to other people at work about the things I can do with it (and believe me, they do not care).

There's other software that delights me from time to time, but I've been using Dorico for probably five years now (took awhile after it came out for it to be ready for my day-to-day use) and I still can't believe music notation software can be this good.

[1]: https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/dorico-is-here-a-review/

That said, last time I spent some time on just playing with software was with the Pico-8 virtual console and its intentionally constrained development tooling.

I do think that Flash was more fun for me just because it was "animation-first", instead of "programming first". It felt like I could easily make "real" cartoons, and then make a game out of it, instead of trying to bolt on a bunch of PNGs into a gaming framework. I know it wasn't for everyone, but for a kid like me, it was kind of magic.

I remember that Shockwave came first and Flash followed. I also remember how the HDD would thrash whenever a website called on the Macromedia plug-in to be loaded. It would thrash with that, and with Java!

I pirated a copy of Flash so I could draw dumb animations, I would then convert looping animations into movie clips, and then I sort of accidentally figured out that you can attach code to those movie clips, and then I figured out how to make basic games. None of my games were that impressive, but it was ridiculously fun for me.

I like P5, I've played with it, but the integration with the animation tool is what really made me love Flash. I miss it.

HyperCard also came with an extensive set of stacks that contained premade buttons and fields with useful scripts, and you could copy and paste those objects into your own stacks or modify entire "template" stacks into customized applications without necessarily even looking at the scripts.

The general idea was to provide users with a smooth ramp: no code -> using someone else's code -> tweaking someone else's code -> writing your own code.

Flash went away faster than a replacement emerged. When Flash went away, it was very clear to me that if HTML5 at that time was the future and it's immediate replacement, we were screwed.

If you're looking for something that could build next, Flutter seems to be carrying on the promise of one codebase to run on everything similar to Flash.

The other techs that I'm bullish on and are still developing are WebAssembly, and to some degree Rust.

I think what I liked about Flash was that it was a drawing/animation tool first, and there were easy ways to bolt things onto the drawings and animation. It was slow and Flash player had a lot of issues, but I don't think P5 is really a direct replacement for that.

Flex was cool because it gave you a more traditional framework for making Flash apps (XML-based layouts and forms and remoting stuff), but I found it only about 1/8th as fun as Flash, because it felt more like "boring" programming, which is still fun, just not as fun to me as drawing cartoons.

We also got our first computer (an Apple II GS, the precursor to Mac. With a full color monitor!) via the "Apple for a Teacher" program where teachers were able to buy them at a significantly discounted price. I had won a creative writing contest for 3-2-1 Contact magazine where the prize was 5 games of my choice, and I was able to convince my parents I needed a computer to play them on during the rest of the year.

I'm still trying to figure out how to start with a clean slate deck, though. My skills are definitely rusty.

I wonder how feasible it'd be to create an entire hypercard based website with this thing.

There was one that was basically an interactive storybook about a black cat, that I forget the name of now but I know is on Macintosh Garden. 99% sure that one is HyperCard.

My dad gave me a program called Soroban that was basically just an abacus, I think it gave you simple arithmetic problems and you'd do the calculations on the abacus to figure out the answer. He actually may have written that one himself, I'm not sure. (unfortunately I don't remember how to use an abacus today)

Interested to hear about what kinds of obscure HyperCard programs you all encountered back then...

And, it was literally right there if you had a Mac. After selling it briefly as a standalone product for $49.95, Apple started bundling it with every new Mac for about a decade. If your Mac came with System 6, 7, 8, or 9, you had HyperCard. It also came with the Apple IIGS during that time. (Great machine, BTW!) Despite its limitations, I even remember seeing a couple of nontrivial apps implemented with it.

More than anything, HyperCard made personal computing personal again, in a way it hadn't been since computers would boot straight into a BASIC interpreter, and that was a very good thing.

If my little spiel wasn't convincing enough, take a look at this excerpt: http://www.cvxmelody.net/HyperCard%20IIGS%201.1%20-%20The%20...

Oh! Good to hear this from someone else.

I imagine that Inform 7 has been a net positive for accessibility over older "code"[1] Inform syntax (personally, I bounced right off Inform 6 as a kid), but there were times where it felt like I needed a great understanding of the underlying model that would have been more self-evident from the "code" syntax.

That said, that's my experience from many years ago. Might be better now.

[1] Inform 7 is code too in a sense, but I mean syntax that doesn't look like natural language.

The full story here is:

Bill Atkinson went on an LSD trip and had the idea for HyperCard (literally according to his own account), and wrote it. He gave it to Apple in return for the promise that they would bundle it with every Macintosh for free.

Eventually Apple realized that selling and giving away Macintosh software like MacWrite, MacDraw, etc, undercut their attempts at getting people to write software for the platform, so they spun off their software division as Claris, which coincided about the time of HyperCard 2.0 releasing, which became a paid Claris product. From then on, every Macintosh shipped with a copy of HyperCard Player, which just let you run stacks other people made but not author them yourself.

There were ways around the Player issue though. The copy of HyperCard on our family Mac somehow had the HyperCard application from 2.0, but the Home and other stacks from HyperCard 1, leading to me always being confused with reading any documentation, it took me literally years to realize what was going on (we didn't have AOL or anything back then, all I had were two HyperCard books from my uncle)

The last major update to HyperCard was in 1992, after which it was abandoned (but still sold, with no updates, for another decade)

There was an effort to rebuild HyperCard as a new interactivity layer for QuickTime 3.0 so that you could build multimedia applications and host them cross-platform on the web with the QuickTime plugin. This made it to an early alpha that was demoed at WWDC. Steve Jobs came back, and hated Bill Atkinson since he was a traitor who stayed at Apple instead of going to NeXT, so killed it.

There's another (to me more plausible) story. Steve Jobs had plans for a 20MB hard drive, but marketing could not find users who wanted that much space. So Steve asked Bill to create an application full of graphics and sounds/media where people would build huge documents making floppy discs too painful.

And in a way it hasn’t been since, either. Web browsers and Javascript just aren’t the same. Javascript, shell, even Emacs Lisp are just too low-level. HyperCard gave one a GUI builder and a simple yet powerful language to get things done in, and it was everywhere.

I'm pretty sure Apple stopped development of it before System 8, and I'm certain it wasn't bundled. I'm also pretty sure (but not absolutely certain) it wasn't bundled with System 7.1.

Hypercard 2 (1990) definitely required a separate purchase (I had to talk my parents into buying it), but I think we had Hypercard 1 from being bundled with System 6.

I think Hypercard was one of last gasps of the idea that computer users should have the tools to create their own applications.

Interestingly, for Riven (Myst's sequel) they were still using Hypercard to author the game, but the game no longer ran through Hypercard; instead, it ran on a custom C++ engine which ran on the data files output by the Hypercard authoring tools.

I think what drove them away from being HyperCard-native for Riven was the difficulty in producing a Windows version

You could learn HyperCard by reading an article in a magazine, and you could share your stack with the rest of the world.

There has been nothing like it before, or after.

It was a well-done Smalltalk-like language with a RAD component that made making, albeit limited, GUIs about as complicated as using PowerPoint.

You could give it to a "smart" kid, and they could, at the very least, make interactive fiction with it with very little instruction. The vast majority of HyperCard stacks could be considered to be non-linear PowerPoint slide decks---cards with buttons that called goto statements that jumped to other cards.

Once I got into the Mac ecosystem, it was stunning how quickly you could build sophisticated (for the time) GUIS, demos etc. It sure beat trying to build interfaces using curses on a traditional unix box and was a lot cheaper than a Sun box or a Lisp machine!

Edit: A bunch of takes from a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40294301

My favorite hypercard game is Manhole.

I remember it being called object oriented programming, and putting things together like jigsaw puzzles.

It was 1991, my family had just bought a Mac LC, and I was 8 years old. I had learned BASIC from reading an old book from 1978 that a co-worker of my dad had given me when I expressed interest in computers. That same friend said I should try HyperCard.

It literally changed my life. It is hard to explain to people who have grown up with the internet, but at this point my family had no internet access at all (we didn't even get a modem for a few more years) and I didn't know anyone who knew how to program. Everything was self taught from reading books that I either got from my dad's co-worker or from the library.

HyperCard was so easy to learn for me as a kid. For one, it was all visual. If you wanted to add a button for someone to click, you would select "Add Button" and drag it to where you wanted it to be. In addition, you could learn how to do things from other HyperCard stacks by clicking on various buttons and reading what the script for those buttons did.

Since I was self taught (and very young), I didn't know anything about data structures or algorithms. However, HyperCard made everything intuitive to me. To persist data, you could output it into 'fields' (which like buttons, could be created by clicking 'new field' and placing it where you wanted). While I later learned how to make these fields invisible, when I first started I would just make them really small and put them in a corner behind something else. I would then write data to them from button scripts, allowing me to persist data.

Since I didn't know about data structures, I would treat everything as strings that I would store in these fields. I didn't know what an array was, so I just would create a long string of comma separated values that I would read in, act on, and then write back out to the fields. I created primitive databases by having each line of the field be a different record... I had never heard the term 'csv' at the time, but it just seemed natural to me.

Debugging was easy; I could just expand the fields into my visible view to see what was being written to them. Things being 'object oriented' was very natural, since everything in HyperCard is a visual object you can interact with.

I learned SO MUCH hacking around with HyperCard. It made me love programming, and it was so much fun. I didn't even realize how much I was learning until much later in life; I avoided majoring in computer science because I feared ruining my favorite hobby if I pursued it as a career. Later (after not finding an alternative to pursue after graduating college) I decided to give software development a try, and I realized how much I already knew just from HyperCard. Event driven architectures just made sense, because that is how HyperCard always worked. I had a pretty good grasp of data structures because I had created them visually as I needed them, without realizing what I was doing.

33 years later, I still get a thrill from programming that HyperCard instilled in me.

So yeah, HyperCard changed my life.

It was essentially MacPaint with a few controls and a scripting language. While fundamentally it was persistent cards with fields, buttons, and actions, as presented with the assorted demos, it was graphically rich.

And myself, I am not graphically rich. Hardly. I find it intimidating. I find the web intimidating for the same reason. I really struggle trying to make a web page, even with a zillion templates. For whatever reason, it’s very hard for me.

It’s a cool system. It was a bit hamstrung later on by being trapped with its original card size. Even as screens got larger.

HyperCard never felt like it does designing a web page... i just placed buttons wherever, and they were never properly lined up in my stacks. All slightly different sizes, not aligned, horrible UI choices all over the place... but I never really concerned myself about it because I very rarely shared my projects. They were for myself.

That said I have made a couple web apps for personal & work use (and I have a Neocities) and it is certainly a freeing experience to write them without giving a crap about aesthetics or design. I get the job done, it's not pretty, but once the functionality's there I'm happy.

Fighting with CSS to make things align properly is the least fun aspect of this, but it is pretty fun to figure out the logic to generate the HTML, interact with the backend, have some JavaScript for basic interactivity, etc.

> It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.

But HyperCard was not ported to OSX, now MacOS; which has Slides and TextEdit for HTML without MacPorts, or Brew,.

HTML is Hypertext because it has edges and scripting IIUC.

Then there was Flash by Macromedia, which also created Dreamweaver for HTML editing before Adobe acquired Macromedia.

By now there are Open Web Standards like HTML5 and ECMAscript (ES (JS not JavaScript)), WebSockets, WebRTC, WebGL, WebGPU, WASM, and various UI-to-state bindings, as Flash called what e.g. React is used for today.

Instead of the DOM and JS addEventHandler, with React/preact you call setState(attr, val) to mutate the application state dict/object so that Components can register to be updated when keys in the state dict are changed with useState() https://react.dev/learn/adding-interactivity#responding-to-e...

The HyperTalk language has a fairly simple grammar compared to creating a static SPA (Single Page Application) with all of JS and e.g React and a router to support the browser back button and deeplink bookmarks with URI fragments that "don't break the web": https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/hypertalk/H...

TodoMVC or HyperTalk? False dilemma.

After finding out that this stack still exists, I also found it on archive.org. It works correctly (although slowly) on the Archive.org emulator: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_hc_10th_anniversary

I notice that this simulator doesn't load XCMD and XFCN plugins; I distinctly remember using an XFCN to include graphics in pop-up windows and my stacks running in the emulator don't trigger that functionality. It doesn't affect the main stack functions but no one will ever find the easter eggs in my stacks without them.

Decker is an open-source standalone application which is similar in some ways to HyperCard, but differs in many details, including the use of a unique scripting language descended from APL. Decker is not designed to be compatible with HyperCard stacks.

The author (who is super responsive to questions) is clear that they liked the look of the dithered black and white from the early Mac era. So it's more of a homage to that than a hypercard.

It's fun to play with once you get the basics down. Simple drill and practice is easy to build (ie States and Capitals). I'm sketching out how to do the Ham Radio technician license test practice in it. I'd like to be able to do the math for some of the examples on the screen.

HyperCard's real strength was that it allowed mere users (not programmers) to create their own apps (or "stacks", in the HyperCard parlance) through pointing and clicking, plus an English-like scripting language (HyperTalk).

We have largely abandoned the idea that users should be able to create their own apps, so there is no popular, modern analogue to HyperCard, though some people keep trying. For instance, LiveCode is a commercial product that is directly inspired by HyperCard. And CardStock is an open source HyperCard clone that swaps out something English-like for Python as the underlying scripting language.

https://livecode.com/

https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock

When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.

Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."

The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.

As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

HyperCard came about in an era where personal computer users were still being inculcated into what using a computer even meant. That was the moment to let end-user programming and malleable systems like HyperCard take over. (A somewhat similar thing might be said of OpenDoc, but that's a bit different)

From a corporate perspective, what even was HyperCard? A way computer users could just make their own basic applications? How do you continuously make money? What about your computer's dev community? Because of these and other commercial concerns, both the way users today engage with personal computing _and_ the tools we have to manipulate our computing environments are strongly determined by a consumption model -- and there exists a strong bifurcation between users and programmers.

We have no true HyperCard equivalent today because personal computing went in a different direction.

Even if you stick to only HTML, it's not nearly as fun to make.

Someone put a whole lot of effort into this and it shows, it's genuinely a great way to present the data.

It's weirdly refreshing to see something that so much passion went into. It's got the same energy as the early days of the internet.

The whole point should be to make the environment operable on the "cheapest computer" a person may have access to - an old Android mobile.

As for the color, it’s there now. It imports any stack resources from the old AddColor extension, the buttons and fields support both color and bevel level properties in the picker, and you can use any online image as a button icon you want.

there's an active community and people use it in very different ways