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Apple's original software construction kit: HyperCard turns twenty-five years old today
Twenty-five years ago today, HyperCard was released at Macworld Expo Boston. Apple's software construction kit for the rest of us began shipping on every new Mac as of August 11, 1987; you could also buy it for $49. It required 1 MB of memory (yes, one megabyte) and a pair of 800K floppy drives, or one floppy drive + a hard disk. (Announced at the same time: the ImageWriter LQ, the Apple Fax Modem, and MultiFinder.) Times have indeed changed. For those who haven't been playing along at home for quite that long, HyperCard was an application where you could develop (or download, share or buy) all manner of 'stacks,' and those stacks used individual cards as the metaphor for a screenful of information. Linking those cards together in stacks was how you built things in HyperCard, whether they were stacks of all your recipes, basic presentation decks pre-PowerPoint, or, you know, one of the biggest selling PC games ever. I started dabbling with HyperCard because at one point on the school computers it was the last application I hadn't actually played with. It was sort of intimidating to look at by itself, but as I saw other stacks and figured out how to assemble them, I wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure-style story where you could navigate with buttons at the bottoms of the pages. I adored HyperCard. It let me feel like I had a tiny bit of control over one little piece of that Mac. I did like five or six stories, and then I built a recipe stack, and I played with a variety of other stacks, just to see what they could do. Part of what got my attention about RunRev's LiveCode development suite, when I saw it in action at MacTech this year, was when they mentioned converting HyperCard stacks into LiveCode projects. I'd convert all my old stacks, if I could just find them someplace... Ars Technica had a nice writeup earlier this year, and it prompted our own Steve Sande to reminisce about his experience with HyperCard as well. Speculation about why HyperCard was left to wither and die is also out there, as is a brief chat with creator Bill Atkinson about his feelings towards his brainchild (check out his iPhone PhotoCard app). Robin Sloan and Contents magazine made a web essay into a stack. There's even a HyperCard Twitter account. Sadly, Hypercard was removed from the Apple landscape in 2004, and emulating an environment for it gets fiddlier all the time. There are some similar products if you want to play around a little, including LiveCode and SuperCard. It's also a lovely reminder to the old school among us, because it doesn't seem that long ago until you see that it has been twenty-five years. Now I have to go chase those kids off my lawn...
Daily Update for May 31, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Ars looks at 25 years of HyperCard
Ars Technica has a wonderful writeup today about Apple's HyperCard, which would soon be celebrating its 25th birthday if it was still around. HyperCard was a wonderful tool; it provided a way for non-programmers to link "cards" of information with simple scripts and a variety of common Mac user interface elements. A button could play a sound, link to another card, or even perform calculations, so it was everyman's way of creating "stacks" of cards that could do amazing things. How important was HyperCard to the world? Although we don't hear much about it today, it was the first implementation of what Ted Nelson proposed as early as 1960 as "hypertext." Many of the early Web browsers borrowed heavily from the design and functionality of HyperCard, with Mosaic and Netscape being the progenitors of today's modern browsers. HyperCard was developed by original Mac team member Bill Atkinson and made it to market in 1987. Reading blogger Matthew Lasar's writeup on HyperCard brought back many memories for me. I can recall attending a seminar at an Apple office in Denver about HyperCard and its core scripting language, HyperTalk, shortly after its release. Author Danny Goodman ran the seminar and copies of his "Complete HyperCard Handbook" were handed out to everyone in attendance. That quickly became my favorite reference, and I began to create HyperCard stacks by the dozen. I actually made money selling HyperCard stacks through Heizer Software's "Stack Exchange," where I sold a variety of reference stacks I had created. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I gave a number of talks at the Institute of Gas Technology's annual Chicago IT conference talking about the use of hypertext and HyperCard in business. While HyperCard hasn't been included with Macs for quite a long time (it used to come on a set of three floppies with every new machine), its descendants live on. The World Wide Web, SuperCard, and RunRev all owe a lot to Bill Atkinson's brainchild.
Ultra-rare Apple WALT up for grabs on eBay
TUAW readers who are into collecting Apple devices are going to love this eBay find: a prototype of an unreleased product from 1993. The Apple WALT (Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone) was introduced at Macworld Boston in '93, the same venue where the ill-fated Newton MessagePad first went on sale. WALT, like Newton, also had a touchscreen, a stylus, and handwriting recognition. It was designed to be a companion to a home landline phone, and was designed in cooperation with BellSouth. Built into WALT were services like an address book, fax (remember that technology?), caller ID, custom ringtones, and online banking. To interact with all of these services, users worked with a customized version of System 6 with a HyperCard GUI in place of the Finder. According to the seller's description, "Back in 2008 PC World published a list of the "Top 15 Vaporware Products of All Time". The W.A.LT. was #1." While WALT was ogled by the public at Macworld Boston 1993, the device never went into production. This prototype, complete with a full printed user manual (so much for ease of use), is being sold by eBay user russel400. The WALT is priced at US$8,000 -- note that you'd better be handy with a soldering iron if you want to get it back to working order, as it has a few "loose connections" that have rendered it unusable. Of course, you could also spend that eight grand on sixteen brand new third-generation iPads...
Daily iPad App: Demibooks Composer
One of the great Apple products many years ago was HyperCard, which allowed non-programmers to easily build interactive "stacks" with many linked pages (cards). Now a new iPad app, Demibooks Composer (free) brings a similar capability of easy creation to anyone who would like to publish an interactive iPad book and sell it on the App Store. You can learn the basics of Demibooks Composer in just a few minutes through a built-in tutorial. Once you're done with the tutorial, looking at the three built-in projects is a great way to learn even more about how certain effects were accomplished. The sample projects include two interactive children's books and a chess puzzle game, all using sound, graphics, and element physics in different ways. While HyperCard required some coding to achieve fancy effects, Demibooks Composer is completely code-free. Objects are moved and resized through standard gestures, and at any time during development of a project, you can preview how things are going to look or act with just a single tap on a preview button. For people who are thinking of developing a lot of projects, Demibooks Composer thoughtfully provides Dropbox support for online backup or sharing of project files. Once your project is completed, it can be published on the App Store through an upcoming service called "PrintShop." Prices will vary depending on the level of service you want, starting at US$499. You'll also need to have an Apple iOS Developer account. There's a overview video of the app below that shows just how easy it is to use Demibooks Composer to create interactive projects, but the best way to get familiar with this powerful creation app is to download it. It's available for free during the introductory period, so get it now and see if it's right for you.
Bill Atkinson part of the Google+ team (Updated: Apparently not)
Update: The San Jose Mercury News got this one wrong and the info has been redacted in their original story. While Mr. Atkinson is a user, he's not a part of Google's team. Thanks to everyone who brought this to our attention and Mike Swift for the correction. Bill Atkinson, the developer of HyperCard, MacPaint and a number of other goodies in the early days of the Mac OS, is now part of the Google+ team as Andy Hertzfeld reported to his Google+ profile a few days ago. Atkinson's recent work includes PhotoCard for iOS, and he spoke about interface design at this year's Macworld. We don't know what Atkinson has contributed to Google+ thus far, unlike Hertzfeld whom we know contributed to the architecture of the new product. [via San Jose Mercury News]
TidBITS celebrates 20 years of online publishing excellence
Although the Apple blogging community is fairly tight-knit, we usually don't go out of our way to laud our competitors. This week, however, we're making an exception. Back in 1990, Adam and Tonya Engst jump-started the online publishing world with TidBITS. Initially, TidBITS was distributed as a HyperCard stack filled with Mac news, reviews, and opinion articles. Later it became a text-based publication, then moved to the Web. Adam was responsible for getting many Mac users connected to the Internet in the early days through his classic book The Internet Starter Kit for Mac, which provided step-by-step instructions in how to connect to the 'net in the days before Wi-Fi and broadband. Many of the writers at TidBITS are well-known names in the digital world, and TidBITS has also spawned its own publishing house: Take Control Books. This week marks the 20th anniversary of TidBITS, and (fitting for a digital publication) issue 1,024 -- that's 2 to the 10th power for those of you who don't play with numbers. From all of us at TUAW to all of you at TidBITS, congratulations!
revMobile: write iPhone and iPad apps without knowing Objective C
One of the biggest barriers to entry for people who want to develop their own iPhone apps is the requirement to actually know how to program in Objective C. Runtime Revolution (AKA RunRev) has been developing and marketing a HyperCard-like development environment since 1997. To quote the company's site, "Rev uses plain-English words and phrases for most of its operations, eliminating the obscure symbols and complicated structures required of other programming languages. Rev is easy to learn and use, requires 90% less code, and can deliver a 10-fold increase in productivity over traditional languages." What does this have to do with developing for iPhone and iPad? The answer is simple -- the company is stretching the development environment to the mobile computing market with a new product, currently in pre-alpha, called revMobile. For developers who want to market their products to the widest possible range of mobile devices, revMobile not only supports the iPhone and iPad world, but Nokia's Maemo platform and Windows Mobile 7 as well. Since apps can also run on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, this represents a very robust development environment. The video at the top of this post shows a simple game being conceptualized, designed, and written in a little over 3 hours. RunRev has always been compiled at runtime, but for the purposes of getting RunRev apps into the App Store, revMobile apps are going to be compiled at build time so that a single executable is available for submission. You can find out more about revMobile, including pricing and availability, at the RunRev website.
Show floor video: Tilestack aims to bring HyperCard stacks into the future
Sometimes the most interesting ideas are ones that fall out of favor and come back again years later. Witness Tilestack, a technology preview on the floor at Macworld that allows importing and instant web-enabling of vintage HyperCard stacks, as well as advanced interactive web applications with minimal coding. Check out the video and the Tilestack site for more info (video after the jump).
Vintage Apple books and software
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Vintage_Apple_Software_and_Books_Gallery'; Mad props to my parents for keeping our basement an Apple museum! Aside from a pristine Apple //c (with monochrome monitor), vintage Apple ][ ,and Mac SE/30 (with a color monitor card) they kept most if not all of our Mac and Apple programming books from my youth. A few games even survived, although my addiction to Wasteland forced my dad to ship several of the more fun games to my French cousins. So I took some quick pics and made a vintage Apple books and software gallery. Enjoy the trip down memory lane-- and if any of the authors of these books are around, let us know in the comments.Some of my favorites: Chipwits - one of my favorite edutainment titles ever (and the original authors are trying to bring it back) Jeeves - before he hit the web he was your personal assistant Adventure Construction Set - taught me a lot about game design Using HyperCard - oh how I miss HyperCard The Elementary Apple - notable because of the binding, which was really useful when trying to type in programs The Halley Project - who didn't freak out when they heard their Apple start talking? For some reason my copy of Racter is MIA.%Gallery-6187%
Hypercard's history
SiliconUser takes a short look at ye olde Hypercard technology, Apple's precursor to the concepts that eventually became HTML and the World Wide Web. The project was originally created in 1985 as an easier way to create programs on the Macintosh-- it consisted of a "cards and stacks" metaphor, as in you created one card that linked to another card in the stack, and so on. Early Hypercard stacks just worked as organized information databases, but eventually Hypercard ended up doing more and more-- cards could work as applications in themselves, and the links between them served as a precursor to hyperlinks and what we know as the Internet today. Personally, I only used Hypercard very minimally, and it's hard for me to imagine as much functionality coming out of Hypercard as we've got with CSS, HTML, and PHP today. But Hypercard faithful (of which the numbers seem to be not quite known), held onto the application for a long time.Hypercard's downfall came arguably not because it failed to stand up to new concepts, but because Apple, in a blunder, passed the program away to Claris, who tried to sell it rather than include it free in Macs. By the time Apple took it back, in 1993, the momentum was lost, and after a short period with Apple's Quicktime division, Hypercard was discontinued in 2004. Previous to that, Hypercard 3.0 was shown at WWDC 1996 (including the ability to display Hypercard stacks in a web browser, which might have been the key to keeping Hypercard alive), but that release never came. There are a few traces of Hypercard left on Apple's site, but as a technology, it's as dead as dead gets.Thanks, Thomas!
Making music with Hypercard
This post combines two things we love: inventive geeks and vintage Macs. Peter Jungers and Josh Burker worked together to write several HyperCard stacks to compose their music, which you can listen to here. That's a trio of 68K Macs you're listening to (though it reminds me of a scene from Suspiria). On their site you can listen to all of the music, watch a video of the Macs in action and download their HyperCard stacks for use in your own weekend projects. Well done, Peter and Josh!
Apple leads PC World's 50 Best Tech Products of All Time
Everybody likes lists and rankings; there's just something that fascinates people about them, and they're always good for an argument or, as the case may be, selling magazines. Squarely in this latter camp is PC World's list of the Best 50 Tech Products of All Time, which editor Harry McCracken writes in to tell us features seven Apple products, more than any other singe company. These are: #2 - Apple II (1977) #6 - iPod (2001) #14 - Mac Plus (1986) #21 - iTunes 4 (2003) #30 - OS X (2001) #34 - Original Airport Base Station (1999) #41 - Hypercard (1987) One thing that jumps out of this list to me is that only one of them, Hypercard, came out of Cupertino during the period that Jobs was gone from Apple (well maybe the Mac Plus, too). In any case, it clearly shows how much Apple has been on a roll since Jobs' return. I also think that at least one more product should be there: the original Powerbook 100, which more or less established the notebook computer form factor we have to this day. So let the debates begin, dear TUAW readers, what did the PC World editors screw up?
Rig of the Day: HyperCard and model trains
We like this one a lot. Flickr user rudolf_mittelmann has posted a nice shot of his PowerBook Duo 280c running a custom-built HyperCard stack that controls the train you see zipping past. Classic Macs running classic software to complete atypical tasks make us happy."PowerBook Duo 280c" posted by rudolf_mittelmann. For the month of April, the theme for our Rig of the Day will be "Vintage Macs" in honor of Apple's anniversary. If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply upload photos into our group Flickr pool. Let's see your vintage Macs (Apples and Newtons, too)! We'll select an image every day to highlight.
A blogging tool in Hypercard?!
People loved Hypercard. People still love Hypercard. Tantek has built a blogging tool using Hypercard (that's him in the picture showing it off to some folks).Sadly there isn't too much info about this marvel on Tantek's website, but just knowing it exists makes me happy.[via vedana.net]
