

Ask HN: Is there any product like Hypercard? - nshankar

Hypercard celebrated its 25 years of existence, but doesn't exist now. Many say, it was a precursor to the hypertext protocol.<p>I still don't see what hypercard did 25 years ago. It gave non-programmers an ability to build quasi-programmed documents, called cards. As I see now, hypertext protocol and its usage is limited to authoring mails and seeing some pages built by specialists, called as web developers. Many web developers (including me) can not give proper justice to the hypertext powered documents, so called sites.<p>Can we celebrate Hypercard's 25th anniversary by creating web authoring tool that non-programmers can use to create beautiful sites containing images, videos and off course formatted (styled) text content? I know there would be many claims to such an ability. But looking at what Apple's world view of creating something that is easy to use and JUST WORKS, I don't see any web tool can ever come anywhere near to Hypercard.
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cstross
Yes, HyperCard spawned a number of clones, notably Supercard:
<http://www.supercard.us/supercard/index.html> and MetaCard:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacard>

(The latter evolved considerably, was acquired by Runtime Revolution
<http://www.runrev.com/> and is now called LiveCode; it's sold as a rapid
application deployment platform on desktop OSs, iOS and Android.)

Supercard is noteworthy because it supports direct import of Hypercard stacks
(the Supertalk language is a superset of Hypertalk).

There are other Hypercard like systems out there. For example, on iOS/iPad
there's NovoCard -- a Hypercard like system for iOS that uses JavaScript for
scripting: <http://plectrum.com/novocard/>

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RRWagner
HyperStudio was the most successful authoring environment inspired (not
cloned) from HyperCard, and allows for project creation without scripted
programming. With continuous use since 1989, it exports to html 5, and runs
under both Mac OS X and Windows. <http://bit.ly/HSTestDrive>

