[HN Gopher] The Complete Hypercard Handbook ___________________________________________________________________ The Complete Hypercard Handbook Author : lubesGordi Score : 94 points Date : 2021-05-07 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (archive.org) (TXT) w3m dump (archive.org) | BaldricksGhost wrote: | The first useful application/database I ever wrote was in | Hypercard. I loved that app. 33 years later I still work in IT. | peterchane wrote: | This book changed my life in that it introduced me to | programming. Thanks archive.org for keeping it around! | zqfm wrote: | I still have this book on my shelf, it got me started programming | as a youngin'. Good times! | thrownout wrote: | So I had to post that excellent comment from DonHopkins as seen | here two days ago "" | | DonHopkins 2 days ago | parent [-] | on: LSD, cargo shorts and | the fall of a tech CEO | | I don't know how it affected Steve Jobs, but Bill Atkinson | handled his LSD pretty well. | | https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp... | | >The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson. | | >In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium | dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete | park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. | | >I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred | billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion | reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my | life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone. | | >I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of | consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. | But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of | creation. | | >It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. | Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the | universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the | cosmic birth of consciousness. | | >But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness | and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I | lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, | each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before | the next lamp. As above, so below. | | >The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of | discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by | distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, | physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists | all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from | sharing and finding the deeper connections. | | >My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the | curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity | toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the | very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each | of us is a leader or captain of the "Blue Marble" team. | | >How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were | captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work | on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend | extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper. | | >It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is | wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to | change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we | seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative | futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom | myself. | | >Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the "How" connections | between pieces of information, the cause and effect | relationships. How does this action bring about that result. | Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "How" | connections. | | >Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger | perspective of the "Why" connections between pieces of knowledge. | Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one | future over another? | | >I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between | different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture | would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a | trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to | wisdom. | | >This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia | authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share | ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks. | | >Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, | interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or | stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a | library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based | scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use. | | >It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this | mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it | free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard | stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, | and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created. | | >HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except | chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later | Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in | HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience. | cmdrriker wrote: | I have this book! I loved Hypercard and spend many hours making | silly and functional programs with it. | | I wish that somehow it was continued and not sent out to the | pasture at Claris. | protomyth wrote: | In a lot of ways, my ideal product would be a HyperCard / Excel | combo that could output Java (or some other source code). | tomcam wrote: | Something close to that was tried in Microsoft when I was | there 1996-2000. It was extraordinarily hard to keep the | visual forms designer and the output code in sync, especially | when users tried to edit the code. | protomyth wrote: | I don't think it needs to return trip for it to be useful. | Most of the value is allowing programmers to get the | business logic that expert users generate. | blacktriangle wrote: | Sometimes when I'm drinking at 3am I like to imagine a world | where somebody wrote a hypercard server and we were all | developing web apps as hypercard stacks instead of our current | abomination. | ksec wrote: | Something like CardStack? | | https://cardstack.com | disqard wrote: | Would you give https://www.blockstud.io a try? | | I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. | | Thanks! | outofpaper wrote: | I thought the site was pretty cool. What's your take on using | Blockstud.io over Snap or Scratch? | protomyth wrote: | They also have the 2.0 book and his AppleScript handbook which | was really helpful. | | https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Goodman%2C... | dstainer wrote: | Hypercard, now that is a name I've not heard in a long time | evaneykelen wrote: | This book was so big (5-6 cm) I had to cut it into three parts to | turn it into a manageable desk reference. | tobr wrote: | > GOODMAN: But we can expect to see additions? | | > ATKINSON: Lots of improvements. This is not going to be | abandoned like MacPaint was. Pretty much Apple put me on | something else and gave the maintenance of MacPaint to someone | else and then kept shuffling that from one person to another, and | MacPaint never got maintained. | | As far as I understand that's almost exactly what would happen to | HyperCard over the next few years as well. | setpatchaddress wrote: | Yup. It was abandoned almost exactly like MacPaint was. Real | shame. | betamaxthetape wrote: | HyperCard did get a fairly substantial upgrade with HyperCard | 2.0. Indeed, the second version of The Complete HyperCard | Handbook included another interview with Bill Atkinson, | discussing some of the changes made and the direction HyperCard | was heading in. | | The real trouble for HyperCard came when it was moved to the | Claris subsidiary, who started charging for it [1]. No longer | was the full version bundled with every Mac sold, which had | helped HyperCard become ubiquitous until that point. | | [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-lost-decade- | hypercard-a... | ryanmarsh wrote: | This is great, disappointed that the site won't let me download | it though. | [deleted] | mimixco wrote: | https://archive.org/download/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook... | gdubs wrote: | Well, there goes my weekend. Happy to see the Hypercard love is | still out there. I think about it a lot. I love the idea of a | coffee shop or a bicycle shop that's run on a Hypercard stack on | an old Mac. | | In case you've never seen it: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg | w0mbat wrote: | I bought the first edition when it came out, read it straight | through like a novel. This is what ignited my change in career | direction from a photographer who dabbled with his dad's Mac SE | to programmer. I eventually learned many languages beyond | HyperTalk and moved to Silicon Valley. I may have written part of | this web browser. | almost wrote: | What I wouldn't have given for a copy of this back then! | | The samples that came with HyperCard where good enough though :) | alexchamberlain wrote: | Has anyone made a serious attempt to recreate HyperCard for | modern systems? Would Apple try to block it? | cmdrriker wrote: | I think Supercard is still going, its sorta like a souped up | version of Hypercard | blacksmith_tb wrote: | I haven't used it in a looong time, but yes[1] it is, | apparently. | | 1: https://supercard.us/ | chris_wot wrote: | Does not work on Catalina and Big Sur. | phonon wrote: | https://livecode.com/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-07 23:00 UTC)