What is a modern successor to HyperCard?
7 WillAdams 8 6/8/2025, 1:39:44 PM
Livecode went closed source and is out of the reach of most folks due to pricing.
Decker is too like to the original in being limited to b/w pixel graphics.
Flash afforded vector graphics and scripting, but is moribund.
Scratch only makes games and game-like things, with no ability to make traditional GUI elements.
Tcl/TK and Python/Tkinter lack integrated graphical development environments where one could just draw, while tools such as Lazarus and QTdesigner are too integrated with traditional textual programming. Processing similarly lacks a graphical representation of code or a drawing environment.
Nodebox and Ryven and so forth separate pretty graphics made of standard components and output.
If a naïve user wanted to express themselves by integrating drawing and numbers and code, what modern environment facilitates this?
Emulators page with links to versions for MacOS and Windows.
https://mendelson.org/emulators.html
Hypercard 2.4.1 is available at the Macintosh Repository
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2632-hypercard-2-4
I had bought it long ago and used it in my work to make simulations with graphical output (via XCMDS) and to output EPS files for tech pubs. I think that the in-house use of HyperCard was vastly under-reported.
I'll update in a reply if and when I find the best standalone HC clones in my search.
Naturally, the full-blown emulator and HC are not for kids, unless you install it for your kids. I let my daughter have some fun with the original HyperCard, and I keep a MacCube with MacOS9 for sentimental reasons, though it's boxed right now.
Sightly off-topic, Processing offers highly graphical coding.
https://processing.org/
And gcompris offers lots of educational apps that one might have written in HyperCard.
https://www.gcompris.net/index-en.html
Probably I should just use Hypernext Studio:
https://tigabyte.com/
but I don't like that it's closed source/very small company (one person?) and not really cross-platform.
https://pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118159
(this discussion seems to have aged out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040642 )
and it's almost exactly what I want (just needs to be a stand-alone desktop app, and have tools for arc and Bézier curve (so that a user could extend arc into a circle, and I assume line into a rectangle) --- if it added Flash-like deforming line-drawing (see Wick Editor for an implementation) that would be icing on the cake.
Thanks!
https://beyondloom.com/decker/color.html#Index
It's also possible to build new widgets with arbitrary appearances and behaviors like date pickers, radio buttons, or tab-bars via "Contraptions"[1]. The community forum has a collection[2] of Contraptions to suit various applications; sharing or re-using them across decks is as simple as copying and pasting a widget.
[0] https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html#font
[1] http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#contraptions
[2] https://itch.io/t/2690007/the-contraption-bazaar