Happy Birthday, Hypercard

31 May 2012

Ars Technica has a short article for HyperCard’s 25th Birthday.

I’m not sure I quite buy the notion of HyperCard as proto-web-browser. But I totally buy Atkinson’s original goals with it:

“Simply put, HyperCard is a software erector set that lets non-programmers put together interactive information”

It was not the first thing I wrote software in – that honour goes to GW-BASIC, I think – but it was the first tool I made something useful and unprovoked in. I was eight or nine when I discovered it at school. It made it possible to realise what was in my head, not what was in a book.

And it was the first thing that made designing the visual interactions of software easy for me. Software isn’t just arithmetic and lines of code – it’s something people use. HyperCard made sure that the visual end of software was usually the first part of a stack you made, not the last. (I was always disappointed that Visual Basic looked like it did this, but it didn’t quite live up to expectations).

Look at XCode now, with its integrated Interface Builder; that’s one of the many legacies of HyperCard. It showed the average computer user (not the average programmer) that interaction and interface was important to great computing experiences, and gave them the tools to poke around.

It is a tiny percentage of the reason I do what I do now, but a memorable one.

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  • "Topics like linear algebra, topology, graph theory, and machine learning are becoming vital prerequisites both to doing daily work in these fields and, more importantly, to inventing, popularizing, and teaching the new creative tools that are rapidly arising. Without them, artists are forced to wait for others to digest this new knowledge before they can work with it. Their creative options shrink to those parts of this research selected by Adobe for inclusion in prepackaged tools. Instead of the themes and concerns of creative work driving the selection of tools from a growing technical cornucopia, artists find themselves turned into passive users of tools that are already curated, contextualized, and circumscribed by others.

    So, I want to do something about this. I want to figure out a way to teach myself and others these more advanced mathematical and computational concepts with a specific eye towards applying them in creative technology."

    This is going to be very good. (I'd quote the whole post if I could, but this leapt out at me hardest.) And: on the day Greg's book arrived.

    (tags: gregborenstein programming art creative maths )
  • "Micro-frameworks are definitely the pocketknives of the JavaScript library world: short, sweet, to the point. And at 5k and under, micro-frameworks are very very portable. A micro-framework does one thing and one thing only — and does it well. No cruft, no featuritis, no feature creep, no excess anywhere. Microjs.com helps you discover the most compact-but-powerful microframeworks, and makes it easy for you to pick one that’ll work for you." Ooh, nice.
    (tags: javascript code programming libraries frameworks )
  • "It’s okay if they don’t completely understand how a program works after they’ve played with it a little. Very few ideas are completely original. The more material you give your students to plagiarize, the wider the range of derisive works they’ll make from them." Perhaps my favourite point in this very good piece. (Though I've found GameMaker way less of a "kit" than it makes out). But yes: no-one wants to learn to program (for its own sake). People want to learn to make things for screens; programming is incidental.
    (tags: education programming learning teaching )
  • "HyperCard effectively disappeared a decade a go, making way for supposedly bigger and better things. But in my mind, the end of HyperCard left a huge gap that desperately needs to be filled – a space for an easy to use, intuitive tool that will once again let average computer users make their own tools. Such a project would have huge benefits for all of us, wether we are artists, educators, entrepreneurs, or enthusiasts." Lovely piece by Jer Thorp on Hypercard. I've mentioned Hypercard is quite formative for me, right?
    (tags: mac hypercard programming software )
  • "Every time you throw in a quick fix for something because it’s Getting Late(tm), stop and see if you can fix it correctly right then. Pragmatism says it might not be possible in the time remaining, and that’s ok; “Real artists ship” and all that but a ruthless artist will fix the problem first thing in the next release so they can keep shipping again and again and again." Unhuh.
    (tags: programming development ruthlessness )
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