A Multimedia Sketchpad
2 days ago
- #Decker
- #HyperCard
- #Programming
- HyperCard was a highly influential software, embodying the Macintosh spirit with its visual, immediate, and accessible programming environment.
- Modern tools claiming to be successors to HyperCard vary widely in structure and concept, often focusing on different aspects like low-code development or note-taking.
- Many modern HyperCard-inspired tools resemble Microsoft's VisualBasic, emphasizing drag-and-drop form creation and imperative programming models.
- HyperCard blurred the lines between programs and documents, developers and users, offering a softer, more pliable medium.
- Decker, inspired by HyperCard, retains the stack of cards metaphor and emphasizes being a painting tool, organizing content like index cards.
- Cards in Decker and HyperCard have a fixed size, encouraging breaking down large ideas into manageable, rearrangeable units.
- HyperCard and Decker feature built-in drawing tools, allowing users to create custom graphics directly within the environment.
- Non-linear navigation between cards can be achieved through links, buttons, or scripts, making cards nodes in a graph or states in a state machine.
- Decker uses a message-passing system, where interactions with widgets produce messages handled by scripts, enabling flexible and modular design.
- Cards in Decker can function like objects in Smalltalk, encapsulating state and code while exposing a message-passing interface.
- Interactive elements on cards can be used to build ad-hoc tools, simplifying specific tasks without needing general-purpose solutions.
- HyperCard's stack of cards metaphor scales from simple data collections to complex program-like constructions, offering modularity and malleability.