HyperCard: I remember being disappointed when it didn’t get the attention it deserved when color became so important in Mac OS 7.x. I don’t know why I quit creating stacks but I did. #marchintosh
#hypercard

I’m playing with it a lot in fully booted OS 9 (not emulated or in Classic mode on OS X). OS 9 screams on both my low end G3 and G4s and so does HyperCard. And now in 2025, the 1-bit icons and dithered images are delightful. Yes, I’ve reach the “vinyl” stage of my computing life.

(Remember when computers sounded so much warmer when we we used punch cards?)

New version of Decker, the Hypercard-like, with much improved non-English language support:

https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker/devlog/909655/decker-154

reading the Hypercard manual today for UI inspiration and found an ultra hot “tearaway” action I had no idea existed until today.

Announcing the availability of TalkCrawler for #GlobalTalk, the all-singing, all-dancing network scanning #HyperCard stack!

This tool scans the network for zones, machines, services and file shares, keeping statistics, drawing charts, calculating uptime & latency, and helping you discover new machines that showed up overnight, even when you were asleep! A database is kept of everything found that you can browse at your leisure.

Can be found in "#MARCHintosh Stuff" on Blackbird on BaroNet now!

thanks to many of your very inspiring hypercard stories and stacks, i finally tracked down a copy of v1 in its original box

my immediate impression is that apple's ambivalence toward the software is apparent all over the box. marketing/executives just didn't understand *what* hypercard was, and they didn't know how to sell it on its merits.

is it a "personal toolkit for information"? an "information manager"? what the heck could that possibly mean to anyone in 1987?

thank the sweet lord jebus bill atkinson pushed so hard to get hypercard packed in to every macintosh sold, because if this box was supposed to sell the product, it wouldn't have sold anything.

that being said - i love this box design. it's pleasantly understated in the off-white styling of 1987 apple products. that style would disappear for over a decade, before getting resurrected (in a much more visually striking manner) with OS X and Aqua.

Sometimes I tell young people about #HyperCard and they don't fully believe me.
http://scripting.com/2025/02/15/131146.html

bill atkinson's 25th anniversary of hypercard talk at the berkeley macintosh user's group does such a wonderful job of communicating how important it was to allow people to express themselves through software authoring, instead of leaving software development to programmers

"Some of the stacks I was most interested in were stacks that were really kind of ugly, but they did exactly what this person needed. There was no way in hell a programmer would have ever been interested. There was no market to write that for.

But this guy had something to do with his astronomy gear - something that helped him point his telescope. He knew what he needed; he wasn't a programmer, but he could make it.

Some of the stacks did not have a lot of aesthetic polish. I used to say: some of these stacks, only a mother could love, but those mothers loved them."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejdgTVj7ZG8

fellow hypercard authors and vintage mac enthusiasts -

we have great documentaries and books on the history of the mac and the newton

is there a book or paper(s) written on the history or hypercard and/or hypertalk? there are tons of technical books written on both, but i'm finding very little in terms of deep histories on them.

EDIT: It has found a home.
#Free to a good home: An original Apple user manual for HyperCard. Is it spiral bound.
#Macintosh #RetroComputing #VintageComputers #HyperCard #UserManual

Help me out, oh angels, demons, and jinn who watch the fediverse!

Someone has a copy to spare of the Harper Voyager edition of Susan Faludi's Backlash converted to a #Hypercard Stack.

I'd love to take it off your hands so I can also get a copy to the Internet Archive.

#PleaseBoost

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/5518478316

#HyperCard programming blog post.

https://ko-fi.com/post/Being-Selective-M4M818RL3R

former and current apple HyperCard, macromedia Flash/Director, and microsoft Visual Basic users: what features of these IDEs made them indispensable to you as a creative person?

i've been building a shareware development kit/IDE (https://exigy.org) that tries to be as user-friendly as possible, and i'd like to borrow the best and learn the most from other great toolkits.

when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal or HyperTalk. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.

for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and HyperCard and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.

i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.

i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.

https://exigy.org

i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.