The demise of Hypercard from Apple’s support pages has not gone unnoticed, it seems; it made Slashdot, and Dan Hill reminisced about his experiences with it during his degree.

I too have fond memories of Hypercard. My school, unusually, had a computer room full of Macs (the first five Mac Pluses being supplanted with Classics, the odd LC, and by the time I left the senior school, iMacs left right and centre. We still ran the junior school server from a Mac Plus with 40mb hard disk in 1995…). As such, Hypercard came on everything. Some of the smart older kids started investigating it. Many had been exposed to Hypercard without knowing it; the popular edutainment game Manhole was basically a Hypercard stack. And so, for the geeks who spent their lunch break in the IT room, Hypercard proved to be a most interesting diversion.

The really interesting bit was the scripting – the way that it was quite easy to turn a flick book of cards into a real program, using a scripting language very similar to real English. This was pretty easy for eleven and twelve year olds to get the hang of. One guy produced a really superb – I mean it – point and click adventure; it had stylish graphics, subtle use of scripting for puzzles and some stylish scripted animation. I was never that inventive, and to be honest, I was about ten when I was really fiddling with it, but I still came up with some interesting things. I produced a rudimentary notepad/database. Rudimentary is the operative word: it consisted of a scrolling text field. I think you could create new pages with text fields in and flick between them; you could definitely print by clicking on a button that ran a little bit of Applescript. Basic; almost useless. Still, I was only ten and it was very satisfying to produce something that had the impression of usefulness. It combined a lot of things, too – a little bit of UI design, a little bit of scripting. I was far more successful in Hypercard than I’d ever been in QBasic. My last project, I believe, was an elaboration of the basic textfield notepad; it was to be a PDA called PDQ, with notepad, database, perhaps even a calculator. Basic, maybe, but I was dreaming.

Hypercard made it easy for people to realise dreams; you didn’t even have to be able to script to come up with some moderately functional stacks. The fact it was free with every Mac was a wonderful bonus. I only ever used it at school, and dearly hoped for a PC equivalent. I believe there might have been one, but it didn’t have the same feel as squinting at the little Classic screen and trying to get flickbook animation to work.

Much to my own disappointment, I was never much of a programmer. I tried so hard; I can do algebraic stuff, use programs as little scripting languages to calculate things, and can even pseudocode simple algorithms, but I don’t think like a programmer. I haven’t tried in a while, to be honest; markup’s more my kind of scene, anyhow. Every time I settled down with my book on learning C, I got so far and then hit a brick wall. Perhaps I was too young, but even BASIC floored me some days. I may never program – not properly, anyhow – but Hypercard gave me and many others the chance to write useful stacks and programs with disconcerting ease, and gave us, for a few scant minutes and hours, the sensation of really being a programmer – of creating something digitally. I now get that joy from the web, and am getting back into programming through my love of markup. I wouldn’t be surprised if trying to align buttons neatly in Hypercard has anything to do with this.

Thinking

30 March 2004

Lots of things to think about. Most consuming amounts of my brainpower inordinate to their scale. Some involve money, some involve a b0rken mail server.

But whilst I drop by to delete some comment-spam, allow me to share a delightful quotation from a work colleague on poring over a supposedly in-depth UBB based message board:

The worst part of it is… these people think they’re thinking”.

A delightfully apt summary of an all-too common phenomenon.

2logs

28 March 2004

A new Photovore: Two Logs. Something in black and white, for a change.

accesswoes

23 March 2004

“You idiot! Word is a spreadsheet program. Obviously, we somehow need to get this data into Excel”. Rory Blyth demonstrates why marketing types shouldn’t be let near whatever they think are “databases”.

Fast Forward

20 March 2004

And then: whoosh. Someone hit the fast forward button. News is: I am employed. Monday, London. Here I come. Hiatus over; everything’s going to be happening quite fast from now on. I’m very happy; I’m very lucky. Was quite glad to be out last night at home; a close friend, some beers, some old acquaintances. And remembering that even when you don’t want to dance, This Charming Man will force you to do so. Great fun.

So yeah: bright lights, big city, busy days, here we come. Very pleased to be moving forwards. Let’s see where this will go. infovore likely to undergo a slight renaissance – I’ve been slowly waking up for the past week. As my inboard brain gets back in gear, so will the outboard.

I’m happy, if you didn’t notice.

suntorytime!

19 March 2004

As if you are Bogie in “Casablanca,” saying, “Cheers to you
guys,” Suntory time!
” The Suntory whiskey shoot from Lost in Translation finally gets translated. Well worth a read.

ikatshirt

18 March 2004

God, I’m a geek. But seriously: I want a black Ikaruga t-shirt, and I want it now.

Pause Button

12 March 2004

I appear to be stuck inside a large hiatus cloud. Lots of things are waiting to happen, lots of things are just around the corner, lots of things could happen if i got up off my arse. But just when I nearly get around to something happenning… I hold back. In case something else happens in the meantime. Having had a fantastic month of full motion picture, things happening, things progressing, the picture of me developing, it feels like a pause button’s been hit.

So: not making a lot of progress. Doing better, slowly. The usual: declutting. Working on projects. Hunting for jobs. Repeating, ad infinitum.

I hope the play button gets hit again sometime soon.

newlogo

09 March 2004

Umm, yeah. New experiment in logo design, in part inspired by City of Sound, in part by the Sunday Telegraph. Enjoying the negative effect; apologies that it’s a gif, time constraints, etc…

stripepvore

09 March 2004

More Photovore; Stripe, an experiment in texture. I really like this one.