Tuesday, November 4, 2014; 11:46:55 AM Eastern
Bringing back HyperCard
- When people say we should bring back HyperCard now, I think we're actually quite close to it right now with the HTML and JavaScript. All you'd really have to do is:
- 1. Create a UI design toolkit that allows you to draw a user interface with divs that can have background-images that are bitmaps; and that's already a feature of HTML.
- 2. Create an object class accessible through scripts that mirrors the object structure of HyperCard. You just have to get out the manual and clone what they had.
- In other words, it's just a slight variant on the web. Definitely worth doing if there are people who would develop in this environment who find HTML-plus-JavaScript not easy enough to understand.
- I'm not in any way a good person to lead this, btw. I didn't spend much time with HyperCard, I was a C programmer at the time, and working directly with the Macintosh operating system, without an intermediate layer. I created a different environment, Frontier, that never got a graphic design tool (we tried) so when the web came along it was a perfect fit for us. In other words, I went in a slightly different direction in the early 90s.
- I think my friend Ted Howard tried to do this a while back??