Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.

By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.

HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.

Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.

The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.

All you have to do is get people to try using it.

It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.

> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.

Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.

And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.

The demand for this was huge.

I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

https://tiddlywiki.com/

https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/organizations-ww-chose-apex

In that IDC survey it's the most popular low code product, over 2 million apps and half a million developers.

There's a SaaS version at apex.oracle.com with a free tier if you want to try it, and you can self-host it as well.

A solution would probably be Airtable.

There's a zillion of under/over-developed solutions. Too much fragmentation for something to get enough traction to reach critical mass? Tricky space.

I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice

    on click do
    
    end

    on click do
     myname.text:alert["What is your name?" "string"]
    end

Decker has a similar Widget -> Card -> Deck event bubbling hierarchy to HyperCard, and in my opinion retains much of the same directness and simplicity for simple applications. The differences in approach won't please everyone, but they are all carefully considered, and have been refined over time based on feedback from the user community. Decker is a living, growing platform!

There are over 300 games, zines, visual novels, and toys built with Decker on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker

Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the...

We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.

A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.

Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications:

http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets

For example, "WigglyKit" offers several contraptions which operate on a shared convention for representing animated images:

http://beyondloom.com/decker/wigglykit.html

You can also represent composite data as a series of cards in a deck, or use cards as encapsulated "objects" that you communicate with via events:

http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html#cardsarerecords

In a pinch, you can also easily encode arbitrary data in fields as a JSON superset with their ".data" attribute.

https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html

We also recently gained a library for working with vector-based text:

https://beyondloom.com/decker/hershey.html

Just don't put it in production or in a work flow where there could be consequences if (randomly) nondeterministic.