
HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002) - jacquesm
https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-what-could-have-been/
======
anonsivalley652
The game _Myst_ was originally written in HC, and a game engine (Mohawk) had
to be written for Windows to provide similar functionality in order to port
it. There's a documentary about it:
[https://youtu.be/EWX5B6cD4_4](https://youtu.be/EWX5B6cD4_4) Definitely one of
the rare indie game success stories. They really poured themselves into making
it as awesome and expansive as technology would allow. IIRC, they're still
writing games for fun.

~~~
rubicon33
Such a great documentary. Really recommend it to anyone considering. Myst /
Riven were both awesome games.

------
betamaxthetape
I maintain the 'HyperCard Online' collection[1] at the Internet Archive, where
over 3,500 stacks are able to be run directly within the browser.

We're always looking for more stacks, and have an upload form[2] for stacks to
be added to the collection. If you've got some old stacks lying around, they'd
be a great addition to the collection.

Extracting stacks off old Macs, floppy disks and SCSI hard drives from the 80s
/ 90s isn't always the easiest, but I'm always happy to help people with this
- my email is hypercardonline@gmail.com .

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks](https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks)

[2] [http://hypercardonline.tk/](http://hypercardonline.tk/)

~~~
DonHopkins
Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard
SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck
Farnham?

SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout,
released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15,
and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal
Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in
it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex,
etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on
Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-
the-21st-...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-
century-hypercard-stack/)

>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of
HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade)
of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a
fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of
Chuck's Weird World fame.

>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino,
even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.

>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the
spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that
they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered
several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment.
Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which
sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks
available at the show.

[https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl...](https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorld_9008_August_1990_djvu.txt)

Page 69 of
[https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990](https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990)

>Famham's Choice

>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this
column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in
Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital
Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal
Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes
in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a
personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your
name. I am not making this up.

>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The
problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like
Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say
you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God
and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”

>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.”
This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort
of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman
with a disappearing bikini.

[https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer...](https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputerExpress110_djvu.txt)

Page 18 of
[https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110](https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110)

>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was
released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s
embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans
of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator,
was also a hit.

------
invaliduser
When young 13-year old me discovered hypercard, it gave me a feeling of
awesomeness, and HyperTalk, the programming language of HyperCard, was a lot
of fun.

I think that if hypercard had been the engine of the web instead of html/css,
we would have had the current state of the web (ie. with client-side dynamic
applications) a lot sooner.

Wether Hypertalk would have been a better choice than javascript to program
the web, this is another story :)

For the curious, the Hypertalk entry in wikipedia contains a lot of code
examples:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk)

~~~
masswerk
ViolaWWW (at least in version 3.0) was much like this (mostly thanks to an
object-based, entirely scriptable layout engine based on vertically and
horizontally spreading, nested panels). An alternative history opportunity for
the Web, but probably also a security nightmare.

[http://www.viola.org/](http://www.viola.org/)

~~~
DonHopkins
Apple's OpenDoc based browser, CyberDog, was also quite amazing and flexible,
because it was completely component based and integrated with OpenDoc. But
that plane never got off the ground, because Steve Jobs rightfully focused on
saying "No" and "put a bullet in OpenDoc's head".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog)

>Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based Internet suite of applications, developed by
Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as
a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version,
Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997. It worked with later versions of
System 7 as well as the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 operating systems.

>Cyberdog derived its name from a cartoon in The New Yorker captioned "On the
Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-
no-s...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-steve-
jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0)

>“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97. As sad as it was, Steve
Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.

As was Sun's original "HotJava" browser, implemented in Java of course, which
was less formally component based than OpenDoc (since Java didn't have a
comparable user interface component system like OpenDoc at the time, but it
was at least very object oriented, modular, and extensible). HotJava served
the purpose of opening a lot of people's eyes to the possibilities of Java and
the web, but, like CyberDog, it was ahead of its time, and wasn't fully
developed into a viable product, and served more as a technology demonstration
and source of inspiration.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava)

>HotJava (later called HotJava Browser to distinguish it from HotJava Views)
was a modular, extensible web browser from Sun Microsystems implemented in
Java. It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's
demonstration platform for the then-new technology. It has since been
discontinued and is no longer supported. Furthermore, the Sun Download Center
was taken down on July 31, 2011, and the download link on the official site
points to a placeholder page saying so.

Unfortunately, neither CyberDog nor HotJava (nor Netscape, until JavaScript
finally arrived on the scene) had scripting languages built in, which I
believe is an essential ingredient to the success of web browsers and
component systems (and text editors like Emacs, and user interface editors
like HyperCard or HyperLook or Bongo, or content management systems and
blogging tools like Frontier and Radio Userland, etc). Even something as
terrible as Microsoft OLE, which evolved from Visual Basic VBXs, was
successful because it was built around a scripting language (Visual Basic for
VBX, but OLE opened it up to any language via
COM/IDispatch/ActiveX/IScriptingEngine/etc).

------
based2
[https://stacksmith.org/](https://stacksmith.org/)

[https://github.com/PierreLorenzi/HyperCardPreview](https://github.com/PierreLorenzi/HyperCardPreview)
See HyperCard stacks in Mac OS X

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253435)
HyperCard Users Guide (1987) [pdf]

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14985604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14985604)
HyperCard On The Archive

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052)
HyperCard Adventures

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit)

macintosh font manager

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16550308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16550308)
Is there an open-source hypercard equivalent?

[https://www.luna-lang.org/#Features](https://www.luna-lang.org/#Features)

[https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/198036/](https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/198036/)
[https://scratchx.org/](https://scratchx.org/)
[https://medium.com/@hiroyuki.osaki/how-to-develop-your-
own-b...](https://medium.com/@hiroyuki.osaki/how-to-develop-your-own-block-
for-scratch-3-0-1b5892026421)

[http://www.kogics.net/sf:kojo](http://www.kogics.net/sf:kojo)

~~~
tluyben2
[https://livecode.com/](https://livecode.com/)

~~~
soapdog
don't forget [https://livecode.org](https://livecode.org) which is the GPL
version. ;-)

~~~
tluyben2
Ah! I did not know they were on different domains, but I should've mentioned
there is an open source version yes!

------
kick
From all of the interviews I've read of Atkinson, he seems like one of the
most humble programmers of all time.

 _" I have realized over time that I missed the mark with HyperCard," he said
from his studio in Menlo Park, California. "I grew up in a box-centric culture
at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard
might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me
from making HyperCard the first Web browser."

"If I thought more globally, I would have envisioned (HyperCard) in that way,"
he said. "You don't transfer someone's website to your hard drive to look at
it. You browse it piecemeal.... It's much more powerful than a stack of cards
on your hard drive._

No pussyfooting around it, no "My idea was so much better, it should have
taken off," no "It has been demonstrated repeatedly that what _has_ happened
was bad," just flat out: "I messed up, and missed the boat."

So much better than almost everyone who _also_ nearly struck the same gold
mine as Berners-Lee.

~~~
bobbiechen
I got to see Bill Atkinson at a guest lecture for a class I took last year
(recording available online [1]), and this is so true.

He talks about General Magic, which shipped basically an early smartphone in
1994:

 _I co-founded a company called General Magic, we wanted to make personal
communicators that would be intimate devices, with you all the time... we
wanted to do something smaller that would be in your pocket and with you all
the time, and we failed. We really couldn’t - the components were too
expensive, there wasn’t a good capacitive touch sensing that you could do
gentle swipe...

And the meteoric rise of the Internet drew the attention away from it and all
our partners kinda went to work on the Internet. And yeah, they were right to
do so.

We were just ahead of our time. I’m pleased to see some of the ideas that we
had bore fruit in the long run, and that’s really what I saw, and the first
iPhone was hey - somebody’s finally done the personal communicator._

The lecture also has one of my favorite lines from any lecture I've attended:
_You know, I’m not like advocating that every software designer should go out
and take LSD, but it worked for me._

[1]
[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=25053106-2187-4cde-9981-a9eb002aa4e8)

~~~
DonHopkins
Thanks for posting that! Also, here's a link to scans of Bill Atkinson's
photos that he showed in the guest lecture for Brad Myer's UI class:

[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atki...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atkinson_Photos/)

And here are some more links to the original interview with Leo Laporte, the
Mondo 2000 article, and some other stuff about his talk, that I posted to a
previous HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779399)

Bobbie: Was Brad really serious when he said "no hands" were raised in
response to Bill's question??! Kids these days, sheez! ;)

>Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the
impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the
transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire
class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No
hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of
their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD
HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.

>See video of Bill's talk:

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=25053106-2187-4cde-9981-a9eb002aa4e8)

>The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized
by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by
conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you
ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw
HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description
of how important and amazing HyperCard was.

>See video of Don's talk:

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=f0600d9d-282e-4b83-a6f4-a9f2003ad407)

>Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques
class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe
method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie
menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%2250285cc6-431b-4b7e-af35-a9eb00287eec%22)

~~~
kick
Thank you so much for sharing, Don!

------
simonw
TIL Bill Atkinson has an app in the iOS App Store!
[https://apps.apple.com/app/bill-atkinson-
photocard/id3332084...](https://apps.apple.com/app/bill-atkinson-
photocard/id333208430)

~~~
Austin_Conlon
He's looking to offload it to someone else:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911573).

------
mproud
Must read (with plenty of Bill):

[https://folklore.org](https://folklore.org)

~~~
amatecha
Yeah I love this site! So much to take inspiration from.

------
jv22222
I think the first thing I ever coded was a simple game in Hypercard. It was a
racetrack and you moved your mouse around the track.

While your mouse was hovering over the track it was an icon of a race car.

I used 4 different icons so that the car was pointing in the right direction
as you moved around the track.

If you moved out of bounds you lost.

To be honest I didn't even know that it was "programming" as far as I was
concerned Hypercard was just another app I was using like paint etc.

In retrospect it was very intuitive and might be the best version of "zero
code" I have seen to date!

------
gnufx
Concerning the Sun/networked remark: There was a later networked HyperCard-
influenced system in the SunOS4 world -- HyperNeWS (calling Don Hopkins!). I
can't remember how structurally similar it was to HyperCard, to the extent I
knew HyperCard, but probably not very.

The WWW before it had escaped from CERN, and you weren't on a NeXT system,
looked terribly primitive when you already had networked hypermedia like NeWS,
particularly when you didn't understand the significance of the WWW protocol
and addressing.

~~~
DonHopkins
Thank you! Here's an article I wrote about HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee
GoodNeWS)) [as it went through several revisions over the years, and the name
kept changing each time]. The article is actually just an early draft that I
haven't had time to finish and polish, and is kind of rambling, meandering,
incoherent, and unfocused, but I hope you'll get the drift.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-
nee-g...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-
goodnews-99f411e58ce4)

>SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee
GoodNeWS))

>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting
plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together
to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!

[...]

>The Axis of Eval: Code, Graphics, and Data

>We will return to these three important dimensions of Code, Graphics and Data
as a recurring theme throughout this article. But which way to go from here?

>Alan Kay on NeWS:

>“I thought NeWS was ‘the right way to go’ (except it missed the live system
underneath). It was also very early in commercial personal computing to be
able to do a UI using Postscript, so it was impressive that the implementation
worked at all.” -Alan Kay

It was indeed deeply inspired by and indebted to HyperCard, but of course had
networking built in thanks to NeWS, and used PostScript as the data format and
networking protocol (like XML and JSON are now used), and as the scripting
language (which is more like Lisp than HyperTalk), and as the imaging model
instead of pixels (including a nice built-in structured graphics editor
component that supported EPS and raster images too, which you could use to
build your own apps, property sheets, and editors, like the editable Clock
component the article shows).

Another significant difference between HyperCard and HyperLook is that
HyperLook used its own "stacks" to implement its own user interface for
property sheets, etc. HyperCard just used the traditional Mac Toolbox for its
user interface, instead of property sheets and dialogs being stacks. So you
could edit and customize HyperLook property sheets and dialogs, and define new
classes of HyperLook widgets, and then build your own seamlessly integrated
property sheets for them (or just customize the property sheets of existing
components). For example, I defined some NeWS Toolkit OPEN LOOK components
like sliders and buttons and menus to support SimCity, all configurable with
their own property sheets. The property sheets could use as many PostScript
graphics editor components as they needed: for example, the editable clock
component's property sheet let you edit its clock face, minute hand, and hour
hand, which it rotated and drew around the clock. ...But it was just too slow
to practically redraw a second hand once per second, so I left that out! Then
you could copy and paste your custom clocks into any HyperLook stack, in case
you cared what time it was.

However, this feature did enable "user interface vandalism", so HyperLook has
a non-editable runtime system with the editors stripped out, that you could
ship with apps:

[http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/TalkRunTime.gif](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/TalkRunTime.gif)

In case you don't like PostScript as much as I do, Arthur van Hoff also wrote
"PdB", an object oriented C to PostScript compiler that you could use to write
classes and scripts. Later, after working on Java at Sun and leaving to found
Marimba, Arthur wrote Bongo in Java, which was inspired by HyperCard (and
called the Java compiler he wrote at Sun to dynamically compile scripts), and
Danny Goodman wrote the book on Bongo! (He also wrote the book on HyperCard.)
Arthur's working at Apple, now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff)

[https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-
Goodman/...](https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-
Goodman/dp/1575212544)

[https://books.google.nl/books?id=NToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.nl/books?id=NToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=arthur+van+hoff+bongo+barimba&source=bl&ots=5mHIQrcNKM&sig=ACfU3U1igsKV7s-djUU9ulwdd-
apAtx4xA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiiytqq6cTnAhUFCuwKHc-
pCNoQ6AEwAXoECAwQAQ#v=onepage&q=arthur%20van%20hoff%20bongo%20barimba&f=false)

I've included links to a bunch of brochures, articles, product info,
documentation, and SimCity README and manual at the end of the article. Here's
the link to the HyperLook product info, which summarizes it pretty well, and
the HyperLook SimCity manual, which has a lot of screen snapshots and shows
what it can do.

HyperLook Product Info:

[http://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-Product-
Info.pdf](http://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-Product-Info.pdf)

HyperLook SimCity Manual:

[https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-SimCity-
Manual.pdf](https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-SimCity-Manual.pdf)

Also here's an illustrated transcript of a HyperLook SimCity demo (that shows
all kinds of other HyperLook and NeWS stuff too, and includes a link to the
original video):

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-
transc...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-
transcript-17f627eab14a)

Imagine a window manager built on top of something like HyperLook, where users
can not only edit the "chrome" in the window frames to make them look and
behave any way they prefer, but also compose custom task-oriented interfaces
by copying and pasting components from different parts of the same app, or
even different apps, and integrating them by scripting, so you don't have to
flip between different windows and navigate to different parts of multiple
apps, and you just have all the controls you need together in one place,
without any unnecessary junk. For example, SimCity came with an audio mixing
server that other apps could use by sending messages to it, which would be
mixed with SimCity's sounds, so you could make a button that went "PING"
whenever you pressed it, then copy and paste it into any other HyperLook
stack, and it would work! Or you could make a custom "SimCity Surveillance"
window by copying three different map views into the same window:

[https://miro.medium.com/max/556/0*XknyNX0FMotAR7y_.gif](https://miro.medium.com/max/556/0*XknyNX0FMotAR7y_.gif)

>The neat thing is that this view here itself is just another user interface
component, and I can copy and paste that, and have multiple views. Each one of
these animated scrolling SimCity editors, once I’ve made one, I can put them
anywhere. This window, you can click here to get three of them.

~~~
DonHopkins
For another interesting approach to sampling, customizing, and remixing
existing user interfaces, check out Morgan Dixon's PhD thesis on "Prefab"!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15327767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15327767)

>Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's work is truly breathtaking and eye
opening, and I would love for that to be a core part of a scriptable hybrid
Screen Scraping / Accessibility API approach.

>Screen scraping techniques are very powerful, but have limitations.
Accessibility APIs are very powerful, but have different limitations. But
using both approaches together, screencasting and re-composing visual
elements, and tightly integrating it with JavaScript, enables a much wider and
interesting range of possibilities.

>Think of it like augmented reality for virtualizing desktop user interfaces.
The beauty of Morgan's Prefab is how it works across different platforms and
web browsers, over virtual desktops, and how it can control, sample, measure,
modify, augment and recompose guis of existing unmodified applications, even
dynamic language translation, so they're much more accessible and easier to
use!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520967)

Web Site: Morgan Dixon's Home Page.
[http://morgandixon.net/](http://morgandixon.net/)

Web Site: Prefab: The Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering Toolkit.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130104165553/http://homes.cs.w...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130104165553/http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mdixon/research/prefab/)

Video: Prefab: What if We Could Modify Any Interface? Target aware pointing
techniques, bubble cursor, sticky icons, adding advanced behaviors to existing
interfaces, independent of the tools used to implement those interfaces,
platform agnostic enhancements, same Prefab code works on Windows and Mac, and
across remote desktops, widget state awareness, widget transition tracking,
side views, parameter preview spectrums for multi-parameter space exploration,
prefab implements parameter spectrum preview interfaces for both unmodified
Gimp and Photoshop:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lju6IIteg9Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lju6IIteg9Q)

PDF: A General-Purpose Target-Aware Pointing Enhancement Using Pixel-Level
Analysis of Graphical Interfaces. Morgan Dixon, James Fogarty, and Jacob O.
Wobbrock. (2012). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems. CHI '12\. ACM, New York, NY, 3167-3176. 23%.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010941/http://homes.cs.w...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010941/http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mdixon/publications/mdixon-
prefab-chi2010-final.pdf)

Video: Content and Hierarchy in Prefab: What if anybody could modify any
interface? Reverse engineering guis from their pixels, addresses hierarchy and
content, identifying hierarchical tree structure, recognizing text, stencil
based tutorials, adaptive gui visualization, ephemeral adaptation technique
for arbitrary desktop interfaces, dynamic interface language translation, UI
customization, re-rendering widgets, Skype favorite widgets tab:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4S5ZtnaUKE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4S5ZtnaUKE)

PDF: Content and Hierarchy in Pixel-Based Methods for Reverse-Engineering
Interface Structure. Morgan Dixon, Daniel Leventhal, and James Fogarty.
(2011). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems. CHI '11\. ACM, New York, NY, 969-978. 26%.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010931/http://homes.cs.w...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010931/http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mdixon/publications/mdixon-
content-hierarchy-chi2011-final.pdf)

Video: Sliding Widgets, States, and Styles in Prefab. Adapting desktop
interfaces for touch screen use, with sliding widgets, slow fine tuned
pointing with magnification, simulating rollover to reveal tooltips:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LMSYI4i7wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LMSYI4i7wk)

Video: A General-Purpose Bubble Cursor. A general purpose target aware
pointing enhancement, target editor:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46EopD_2K_4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46EopD_2K_4)

PDF: Prefab: Implementing Advanced Behaviors Using Pixel-Based Reverse
Engineering of Interface Structure. Morgan Dixon and James Fogarty. (2010).
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
CHI '10\. ACM, New York, NY, 1525-1534. 22%

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010936/http://homes.cs.w...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010936/http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mdixon/publications/mdixon-
general-purpose-target-chi2012-final.pdf)

PDF: Prefab: What if Every GUI Were Open-Source? Morgan Dixon and James
Fogarty. (2010). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems. CHI '10\. ACM, New York, NY, 851-854.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20141024012013/http://homes.cs.w...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141024012013/http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mdixon/publications/mdixon-
prefab-workshop-chi2010-final.pdf)

Morgan Dixon's Research Statement:

[http://morgandixon.net/morgan-dixon-research-
statement.pdf](http://morgandixon.net/morgan-dixon-research-statement.pdf)

Community-Driven Interface Tools

Today, most interfaces are designed by teams of people who are collocated and
highly skilled. Moreover, any changes to an interface are implemented by the
original developers and designers who own the source code. In contrast, I
envision a future where distributed online communities rapidly construct and
improve interfaces. Similar to the Wikipedia editing process, I hope to
explore new interface design tools that fully democratize the design of
interfaces. Wikipedia provides static content, and so people can collectively
author articles using a very basic Wiki editor. However, community-driven
interface tools will require a combination of sophisticated programming-by-
demonstration techniques, crowdsourcing and social systems, interaction
design, software engineering strategies, and interactive machine learning.

------
somesortofsystm
I have and maintain a retro computing collection, and have had a minor public
exhibit of it in 2019. I have a lot of machines from the 70's to the 21st
century, and have made it a bit of a passion to demo these things to folks.

I'm now unpacking and trying to work out how to proceed with further
interaction in 2020, and the one machine that keeps crossing my scope is an
old Macintosh Powerbook, the first with a trackball, which has indeed been
loaded up with HyperCard stacks.

Now, one thing I must add to this discussion, as someone who has had to demo
these things to a modern audience, is that the person you are showing it to
should _always_ be the one doing the driving. Never try to show someone a
stack - always just describe them doing it for themselves.

Stacks are delightful. Get yourself an emulator, and explore them. Its a
pretty good way to get some context on your newly-gained modern chops.

------
Wowfunhappy
> Atkinson still uses HyperCard every day. His address book is a big HyperCard
> stack, and he has written a number of custom programs to help him with his
> photography and to maintain his website.

I wonder if he still does in 2020? Or if not, when did he stop?

~~~
lispm
SuperCard would be a kind of replacement:

[https://supercard.us/index.html](https://supercard.us/index.html)

~~~
jedieaston
Unfortunately, that one doesn't have 64-bit support (requires a full rewrite
to get off of carbon). So no Catalina, but it is very impressive it works on
Tiger through Mojave with no hitches! That's 10 versions of the OS.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Just as an interesting technical note, MacDraw Retro is another one that
supports Tiger through Mojave.

And of course, there's a lot of small programs that support the range as well,
sometimes just by chance (a Tiger-era program just happens to work), but
you're right it's rare for bigger, more-complex stuff.

------
DonHopkins
1987 Computer Chronicles: HyperCard

An introduction to Apple's Hypercard. Guests include Apple Fellow and
Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson, Hypercard senior engineer Dan Winkler, author
of "The Complete Hypercard Handbook" Danny Goodman, and Robert Stein,
Publisher of Voyager Company. Demonstrations include Hypercard 1.0, Complete
Car Cost Guide, Focal Point, Laserstacks, and National Galllery of Art.
Originally broadcast in 1987. Copyright 1987 Stewart Cheifet Productions.

[https://archive.org/details/CC501_hypercard](https://archive.org/details/CC501_hypercard)

------
dang
A thread from 2008:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730997)

------
vearwhershuh
Hyperview is a mobile framework inspired in part by HyperCard:

[https://hyperview.org](https://hyperview.org)

------
tpmx
In what way does the original web architecture (HTTP/URL/HTML) not supersede
and mostly independently improve on Hypercard?

~~~
ken
Anyone who can click a mouse could make a HyperCard stack. You could draw like
in MacPaint, and create connections between cards almost as easily. You could
create template pages, and save data in the stack itself. You could send it to
your friend, or back it up, simply by copying one file.

These days Apple is promoting "progressive disclosure" as a feature of Swift.
HyperCard was an excellent example of that!

The web isn't. Doing these with the web requires at least a server, a
programming language, and a database. Anyone can easily view a webpage, but
you need a separate editing system to be able to easily create. Even then,
there's probably no "View Source" for most of it. Without a big fancy editing
system, there's a _huge_ learning curve between "hello world in HTML" to
sharing with your friend, creating a template shared between pages, or saving
data between sessions.

Of course, that's _modern_ web architecture. The " _original_ web
architecture" had no XHR, or even JS. It was 5 years before you could click
somewhere on the screen and have it do anything other than "go to another HTML
page".

~~~
tpmx
Well, I still think that allowing Javascript onto the web was a fatal mistake.
HTTP/URL/HTML and eventually also CSS was a fantastic combination. This stack
was progressively learnable via self-discovery.

Once the Javascript-coders infected the web it almost immediately turned into
a write-only medium.

I worked at a browser vendor whilst all of this was happening. I was busy with
the mechanics of building a particular browser. Couldn't make sense of the
javascript/webstandards stuff in detail, but I trusted these people were smart
enough. I did notice the people who were running this stuff (they were making
the formerly kinda static html/css web standards dynamic by defining vast
amounts of javascript API:s) were all _very_ young people. Probably a median
age of 21 or so. (Some "wunderkids" around 17 or so.) The average age of the
people actually implementing stuff was closer to 28-30 in this company.
Nothing against young people in general.. they can bring new thoughts etc..
but.. they do tend to lack experience.

In retrospect I regret that I didn't engage with this young crowd more. In
general I wish there had been more discussion between these two camps.

------
JoeAltmaier
I never "got it" (hypertalk). Tried to write an app to put up some menus, get
some input, read and write some files. Could never figure out how to get off
the ground.

------
mjksingh
hehe;

