HyperCard Mailing List

Recently saw two articles that may interest some of you here:

Dave Winer (inventor of RSS):
http://scripting.com/2014/11/04/bringingBackHypercard.html#aITMFT <http://scripting.com/2014/11/04/bringingBackHypercard.html#aITMFT>;

It's time to revive HyperCard:
http://www.buzzcarl.com/its-time-to-revive-hypercard/ <http://www.buzzcarl.com/its-time-to-revive-hypercard/>;

Get your nostalgia on! ;-)

-- Uli
http://hypercard <http://hypercard/>.org

Funny how public perception of HyperCard waxes and wanes over time. When Jobs killed it, some people were gloating.

On November 4, 2014 10:17:02 AM CST, "Uli Kusterer Witness.of.TeachText@[redacted].net[HyperCard]" <HyperCard-Mailing-List> wrote:
>Recently saw two articles that may interest some of you here:
>
>Dave Winer (inventor of RSS):
>http://scripting.com/2014/11/04/bringingBackHypercard.html#aITMFT
><http://scripting.com/2014/11/04/bringingBackHypercard.html#aITMFT>;
>
>It's time to revive HyperCard:
>http://www.buzzcarl.com/its-time-to-revive-hypercard/
><http://www.buzzcarl.com/its-time-to-revive-hypercard/>;
>
>Get your nostalgia on! ;-)
>
>-- Uli
>http://hypercard <http://hypercard/>.org

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

As much as I loved HyperCard, that was a different era when there was far less software available and the web was much smaller, and many users were more geeky and comfortable with simple programming.



The HC clones don't seem to be huge sellers, Filemaker's Bento (an easy database) was recently cancelled, and iWork doesn't even have a database app.


There are a gazillion apps available for download so why make your own checkbook stack (or whatever), and why make a Star Trek stack when the info is already on a dozen websites?



I'd love to see HC return, but I'd be very surprised if it happens.

Jim.


Um, er, ahem. Have you seen LiveCode?


Craig Newman



-----Original Message-----
From: hcheaven@[redacted].com[HyperCard] <HyperCard-Mailing-List>
To: HyperCard <HyperCard-Mailing-List>
Sent: Fri, Nov 7, 2014 3:23 pm
Subject: [HC] Re: Articles on HyperCard






As much as I loved HyperCard, that was a different era when there was far less software available and the web was much smaller, and many users were more geeky and comfortable with simple programming.

> Have you seen LiveCode?


Craig, I'm not criticizing other products, I'm sure LiveCode is good.


I'm just saying that HyperCard in it's day enjoyed widespread appeal among Mac users, even kids and beginners (especially when it was free). I don't see that kind of widespread interest for HC-like products today.


Filemaker cancelled Bento and iWork doesn't have a database; I think it's because widespread interest just isn't there anymore.


But I would be happy to be proved wrong.

I was partly joking, assuming that you knew all about LiveCode, and was sort of talking about old times.


Have you really not looked at it? It is all that HC should and could have been. I was nostalgically reluctant to embrace it when I switched over about five years ago. I still use and code in HC, all the time. I run a good part of my business on it. But LC is incomparably better. Massively better. It is even more fun.


You already know how to use it. You just don't know that yet. It will take you about five minutes to author stacks with real substance, and about a week to get the hang of the very few differences there are at a base level.


Oh, and it's free. You even know dozens of old HC users who are regulars on the forum and use list.


Craig



-----Original Message-----
From: hcheaven@[redacted].com[HyperCard] <HyperCard-Mailing-List>
To: HyperCard <HyperCard-Mailing-List>
Sent: Fri, Nov 7, 2014 10:19 pm
Subject: [HC] Re: Articles on HyperCard






> Have you seen LiveCode?


Craig, I'm not criticizing other products, I'm sure LiveCode is good.


I'm just saying that HyperCard in it's day enjoyed widespread appeal among Mac users, even kids and beginners (especially when it was free). I don't see that kind of widespread interest for HC-like products today.


Filemaker cancelled Bento and iWork doesn't have a database; I think it's because widespread interest just isn't there anymore.


But I would be happy to be proved wrong.

On 08 Nov 2014, at 06:21, DunbarX@[redacted].com[HyperCard] <HyperCard-Mailing-List> wrote:
> Have you really not looked at it? It is all that HC should and could have been. I was nostalgically reluctant to embrace it when I switched over about five years ago. I still use and code in HC, all the time. I run a good part of my business on it. But LC is incomparably better. Massively better. It is even more fun.

“all that HC should and could have been”? I think I’ve elaborated on why I think that’s not true here a couple of times already, so I don’t want to bore you, unless someone would like to hear the whole thing again?

Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
“The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...”
http://zathras.de

> Have you really not looked at it?


To be totally honest, I don't need a HyperCard-like product anymore. These days I can easily find polished apps (or websites) to do almost anything I need. I rely heavily on Filemaker's Bento as my business database. It was cancelled but works fine with OS 10.9 (Mavericks).


If I was a developer it would be a different story, but I'm not a developer..


(So why am I still reading this newsgroup? Just habit, I guess.)


Jim

But Jim, you just started a thread that you missed such a product. Tell me again in short bullet points what you think is wrong and missing in LC.


Craig



-----Original Message-----
From: hcheaven@[redacted].com[HyperCard] <HyperCard-Mailing-List>
To: HyperCard <HyperCard-Mailing-List>
Sent: Sat, Nov 8, 2014 1:44 pm
Subject: [HC] Re: Articles on HyperCard






> Have you really not looked at it?


To be totally honest, I don't need a HyperCard-like product anymore. These days I can easily find polished apps (or websites) to do almost anything I need. I rely heavily on Filemaker's Bento as my business database. It was cancelled but works fine with OS 10.9 (Mavericks).


If I was a developer it would be a different story, but I'm not a developer..


(So why am I still reading this newsgroup? Just habit, I guess.)


Jim

too many livecode resources are online: when i am doing serious work the last thing i want is to be connected to the internet with its lolcats, its porn, its facebook, and god knows what else that distracts me from, you know, solving problems, building product, selling and shipping product.

also livecode has no lolcats, porn, facebook and god knows what else. see? I also do marketing, not just comedy!

> But Jim, you just started a thread that you missed
> such a product.


Craig, I was responding to the article links. I miss the good old days of HC, and if Apple came out with a new version of HC I'd give it a try, but frankly I think it's day as a consumer product is long past.


HC-like products are useful to developers, but dreams of reviving HC as a consumer product seem very unlikely to me.


> Tell me again in short bullet points
> what you think is wrong and missing in LC.


As I mentioned in a previous post, I don't use LC or other HC-like products anymore. I'm not a developer and there's plenty of nice software available for anything I want to do.


I'm starting to repeat myself, so I think I've said enough about this topic..

Some people wish that Hypercard had been deeper and more comprehensive. Others wish that it had been broader and able to reach more areas of computing.

Livecode took the first path. It's integrated into the OS more, and can make mobile apps. It probably does XML natively to support its built-in RSS feeder (I do not actually know if it does that). They paid for the depth by having to create a new language, which is camelCase, but not even close to Hypertalk because it's not semantically recognizable as Hypertalk...Uli has pointed that out enough.


The web took the second path. I can't think of a device sold nowadays that won't do the web. It's good for everything. Nothing HC did couldn't be implemented in an afternoon. It's JavaScript instead of Hypertalk, but I myself tossed off a xTalk->JS convertor app a couple years ago to settle some ideas I had about text parsing. I've taken it a lot farther than that since, but it's still nothing but a layer over HTML5.


The narrow path between would be something called CinsImp, which you can google for. That is a damn perfect HyperCard clone, and it's open source. Of course it's not useful as a consumer project, as Jim says. That kind of thing would be even easier to make in the new Swift language, but still fairly useless in and of itself.


The question is still what you need the stack to DO. Not the tool itself. If you just want to put information online, there are so many more options. HyperCard had a lot of brilliant ideas, but it's the wrong vector now to get stuff done.

Well, I disagree because for people working in languages and law, i.e. primarily with words rather than numbers, quasi-English xTalks are much easier and more convenient. I actually want non-programmers to be able to read my code, or at least the most relevant parts of it.

On 11/13/2014, 3:41 PM, dannygelder@[redacted].com[HyperCard] wrote:
> Livecode took the first path. It's integrated into the OS more, and
> can make mobile apps. It probably does XML natively to support its
> built-in RSS feeder (I do not actually know if it does that). They
> paid for the depth by having to create a new language, which is
> camelCase, but not even close to Hypertalk because it's not
> semantically recognizable as Hypertalk...Uli has pointed that out
> enough.

Well, no. There's no native RSS. The non-standard syntax is primarily
for communicating with externals (which xml is, among several other
things.) Most of the language uses the syntax you'd expect. As various
externals get integrated into the engine proper, the syntax goes back to
native xtalk (see the font embedding stuff, for example. That started
out as an external with the syntax you object to, but now uses syntax
like "start using font x".) As the open language initiative gets done,
there will eventually be no non-standard syntax for anything. That's
being implemented now.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

On 14 Nov 2014, at 00:32, 'J. Landman Gay' jacque@[redacted].com[HyperCard] <HyperCard-Mailing-List> wrote:
> As various
> externals get integrated into the engine proper, the syntax goes back to
> native xtalk (see the font embedding stuff, for example. That started
> out as an external with the syntax you object to, but now uses syntax
> like "start using font x".) As the open language initiative gets done,
> there will eventually be no non-standard syntax for anything. That's
> being implemented now.

That was one of the reasons I supported the Kickstarter (although Ill n
ever be able to look at the code). It is the right direction, and in a small way a return to the strengths of xTalk. Hopefully they'll take the same hard look at their object model and similarly return to the strengths that HyperCard had.

For various social, political and economic reasons, it seems many xTalks took a detour down a road where new features were only added as XCMDs (palette), or implemented in a way that avoided having to change the file format (HyperCard 2.x menus), or both (e.g. Color Tools or the Movie external). The English-like aspect of the language is just the tip of the iceberg. The real reason why xTalk was so easy to learn is that you did not have to learnprogramming concepts like classes, pointers or persistence. You just opened a stack and all the objects from last time were there, the way you left them. You didnt have to write code that, each time your application launc
hes, recreates the windows and text fields from last time. The metaphors were consistent and came from real life.

SuperCard got a lot of this right, and in a way, Bill Appleton really proved that he understood HyperTalk at least as much as Bill Atkinson. Backgrounds and groups were distinct entities, even though theyre probably the s
ame under the hood (a collection of parts that gets shown along with other parts on a card). Because they fulfil different functions, and the principle of least surprise dictates that you present a consistent metaphor from the users point of view, instead of exposing how the internals of the prog
ram happen to work.

But Im preaching and rambling again. Its good to see that the reason
for using so many externals and so much cryptic syntax in LC seems to havemostly been due to budget constraints affecting code maintenance, and not because people did not get HyperCard.

Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...
http://zathras.de

On 11/14/2014, 5:06 AM, Uli Kusterer Witness.of.TeachText@[redacted].net[HyperCard] wrote:
> That was one of the reasons I supported the Kickstarter (although
> Ill never be able to look at the code). It is the right direction,
> and in a small way a return to the strengths of xTalk. Hopefully
> they'll take the same hard look at their object model and similarly
> return to the strengths that HyperCard had.

The object model copies SuperCard for windowing, and groups and
backgrounds, but maybe you have something else in mind. Except for
groups I can't think of anything that doesn't comply. Even non-HC
objects like the audio/video player are objects that can have a script.

As an aside, I really hope you'll reconsider contributing to the code
base, you have a lot to offer. There must be something you could help
with that your own project wouldn't be using.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

Eric,

The code, then, should be a simple definition of what the code is doing. To be kind of redundant. Is classic x-talk still best for that? I am still not sure, as I get on in years. What would the code be for, in the fields of languages and law? (I like the word fields, it reminds me of number fields, which I do write some code for.)


Dan

---In hypercard@yahoogroups.com, <eric.engle@...> wrote :

Well, I disagree because for people working in languages and law, i.e. primarily with words rather than numbers, quasi-English xTalks are much easier and more convenient. I actually want non-programmers to be able to read my code, or at least the most relevant parts of it.

Well, *ideally* for social sciences such as linguistics, law, and literature the computer language should be as close to natural language as possible. Of course, there is much ambiguity in most natural human languages, so that ideal will always be imperfect. However, hypertalk / livecode are as close as I have ever seen, even closer than pascal.

Also I don’t see why people vilify camelCase.

As a trained jurist I can parse a sentence like
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." (VIIIth Addt. U.S. Const.)

and apply lots of interpretive methods to it to tell you just what it means; I like to model those sometimes for my students.

When so doing I prefer my code to reflect natural language so that jurists, who generally are not trained in computer science, can follow the logic, since sometimes there are fine points in my code which dont get expressed in my article. See, e.g.
http://www.uakron.edu/law/lawreview/aipj/archives/volume-5_1.dot

The other reason I prefer natural language in computer programs for social science is I can allow my user to input simple commands. I have not done that yet but I also haven’t written language teaching software.

Shameless self promotion: I have some computer science articles in economics, generative art, and game theory articles which I need to find an academic publisher for. I have much more experience publishing in law journals than in comp sci journals. If anyone has contacts in those fields I would be grateful to hear.