This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.
By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.
HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.
Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.
The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.
The demand for this was huge.
All you have to do is get people to try using it.
It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.
> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.
And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.
If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?
I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.
https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/organizations-ww-chose-apex
In that IDC survey it's the most popular low code product, over 2 million apps and half a million developers.
There's a SaaS version at apex.oracle.com with a free tier if you want to try it, and you can self-host it as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...
A solution would probably be Airtable.
The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was being added.
But I’m sure there are more examples in the wild than I would have seen. I was curious what the larger HN community has seen or has experience with.
I mean, for me, I’d probably put something in a SQLite database and build a simple web GUI on top of it. But I know that’s an option. What does a typical office worker do these days? Put everything in Excel? (That’s probably the answer)
While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with either, you can create table, get a navigable (and perhaps other features), and a CRUD detail screen in just a few minutes of drag and drop.
And it's right there, on your machine, no cognitive load about, well, anything, and ready to go. Another 10 minutes and you have a printable report spewing out on your laser printer.
It's quite a first step to go beyond the wizard based stuff into BASIC and such, but the fundamentals are there. And the fundamentals are useful out of the box.
You can set up a usable Access DB and MS Word Mail Merge in probably 1/2 hour of reading some tutorials.
Finally, out of the box, the screens look "ok". Your collection of fields conveniently fill the window nicely. You don't have a 21" x 12" white, barren canvas with Name, Address, C/S/Z and two buttons crammed up in the upper left corner. "Gee why is the font so small?" So now you don't have to fall down the rabbit hole to try and make your simple form even baseline "presentable".
It is curious that MS (afaik) does not have a way to drag and drop an Access application and have it "deploy" to the web, and (afaik), Access isn't part of Office 365 either.
It is about as expensive as it ever was.
A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting.
In terms of hardware, a Macintosh Plus vs a MacBook Neo / Mac mini. End of story.
There's a zillion of under/over-developed solutions. Too much fragmentation for something to get enough traction to reach critical mass? Tricky space.
Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments)
Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments)
Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)
I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice
I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.
There are over 300 games, zines, visual novels, and toys built with Decker on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker
Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the...
We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.
A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.
Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.
They never hacked color into HyperCard 2 since their plans for HyperCard 3 were too grand - it was going to be a part of QuickTime, so that HyperCard stacks would be multimedia applications delivered as QuickTime movies, including embedding on the web. This was when Apple was spiraling though and it got cut.
To me, a properly modern "Hypercard" would be something like if Marimo and Pygame had a baby, and that baby was IDLE except it didn't suck.
Which answer after searching is yes and no:
You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets
For example, "WigglyKit" offers several contraptions which operate on a shared convention for representing animated images:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/wigglykit.html
You can also represent composite data as a series of cards in a deck, or use cards as encapsulated "objects" that you communicate with via events:
http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html#cardsarerecords
In a pinch, you can also easily encode arbitrary data in fields as a JSON superset with their ".data" attribute.
https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html
We also recently gained a library for working with vector-based text:
“classic Mac OS”
not
“classic macOS”
This is beautiful. I loved Hypercard when I was a kid. If they added networking to it, it would have been superior to web browsers!
Please people, have some joy and stop taking people down a peg for vibe coding apps. Let people have fun again for once.
As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.
People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications.
And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.
This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.