Hypercard 2.4

Rating:
Summary: HyperCard: The "Swiss Army Knife" Nobody Knows
Review:    HyperCard is an application unlike most others. What it does is, it lets you build your own tools. For your own purposes. The way you want them to work. It wouldn't be inappropriate to compare HyperCard to MS Visual Basic, because both of them *do* pretty much the same thing; the difference is *how* they do it.
   Visual Basic veils its power behind cryptic dialog boxes and unforgiving syntax; HyperCard goes out of its way to make its power *accessible* to the user, with a minimum of fuss and bother. With Visual Basic, you're pretty much *required* to muck around with a semi-arcane programming language if you want to get *anything* done; with HyperCard, the English-like language (HyperTalk) is something you can *choose* to delve into when you decide you want to do *more* than you were already doing.
   Here's a concrete example of the HyperTalk languge; a "handler" (mini-program) which lets you move something around by clicking and dragging.

  on mouseDown
    repeat until the mouse is up
      set the location of me to the mouseLoc
    end repeat
  end mouseDown

   As I said, HyperTalk is rather English-like. If you can figure out how and why this handler does its thing, congratulations -- you're ready to start "rolling your own" with HyperCard! Bad news: Sadly, Apple Computer has never really known what to do with HyperCard, and has never made any serious attempts to publicize nor sell (nor even support) the program. Good news: Feed the keyword "hypercard" into google.com (or whatever other search engine you prefer), and you'll find any number of links to the community of HyperCard users.
   Q: So after all that, what can you do with HyperCard?
   A: What do you *want* to do with HyperCard? People have used it to build games (most notably Myst), educational software, personal information managers, utilities, multimedia presentations, productivity applications, and God only knows what else.
   HyperCard. It might just have a place on *your* hard drive.

Rating:
Summary: The MOST intuitive of all creative solutions!
Review: I started with Hypercard 1.0 when it was bundled free with the first mac computers. I kept updating it until I felt that I had to move on and learn some of the new programs like LiveMotion. Still I kept going back to Hypercard to work on various ideas. I had written some of my own scripts -- some of them amazingly complex and nothing else could suit my needs. Other people have not been able to explain why Hypercard is so wonderful and I can't either -- all I know is that it is the MOST intuitive of all creative solutions! There is nothing like it! I wish the original Hypercard designers would read some of these reviews and begin updating it again by popular demand. But never mind, Hypercard 2.4 is exceedingly powerful.

Rating:
Summary: Oh, HyperCard!
Review: Oh, HyperCard! Alas, HyperCard! Poor, misunderstood, underappreciated HyperCard. It's a floor polish. It's a salad dressing. It's...(SNAP!) oops, sorry. Got a bit carried away there.

How to describe HyperCard is a problem which has perplexed better minds than mine. Suffice to say that if you're looking for a better way to create specialized applications for your Macintosh, you could do worse than to try HyperCard, Apple's amazing "Software Construction Kit". At first glance, HyperCard is a remarkably flexible database manager built on the "index card" metaphor. But with the judicious use of HyperTalk, HyperCard's built in scripting language, it's much more. Using myself as an example, with little prior programming experience I put together a simple but elegant application which I use to track and sort qualifying results and starting lineups for my local Speedway, and I'm currently working on an animated game to help teach my five year old son how to draw his letters. Others have done much more, and plenty of examples can be found all over the Internet. Most of these "stacks" you can use for free; such is the HyperCard developers' ethic.

Yes, HyperCard does have its limitations. Its color tools are somewhat lacking, and its last significant update was quite some time ago. Reports would have it officially "dead" as far as Apple is concerned, which for all intents and purposes means no further development. And while HyperTalk is rather intuitive, it is still a programming language with at least a slight learning curve. And programming can be WORK. Intellectually challenging, yes, but work nonetheless.

But so what? If you use only the stacks that come with it, you'll get your money's worth from HyperCard. And I suspect you'll do more, lots more. Its capabilities as a multimedia presentation tool should be more than obvious, and consider that the fabulous "Myst" was created using HyperCard. You'll likely find a use for it in most every portion of your computer life. And when you do, you'll question as so many already have how such a far-sighted company such as Apple could ever neglect such a useful, powerful, and--let's face it--inexpensive tool such as HyperCard.

Rating:
Summary: Software Erector set - easy to use, powerful results
Review: This is a great piece of software for many uses:

- learning fundamentals of programming

- creating your own custom software

- developing applications for profit

Very easy to learn:

- You can create simple software without writing any code

- The scripting language built-in is very powerful and also very intuitive (the syntax is very english-like)

- All of the objects and code are re-usable so you can repurpose works you have made and share (or borrow) from others

Polished, and powerful features:

- Integrate color graphics, sound, and quicktime movies (Myst was created with HyperCard)

- Control other software and share data

- Extend the language with a wide range of external commands and functions

Rating:
Summary: HyperCard: The "Swiss Army Knife" Nobody Knows
Review:    HyperCard is an application unlike most others. What it does is, it lets you build your own tools. For your own purposes. The way you want them to work. It wouldn't be inappropriate to compare HyperCard to MS Visual Basic, because both of them *do* pretty much the same thing; the difference is *how* they do it.
   Visual Basic veils its power behind cryptic dialog boxes and unforgiving syntax; HyperCard goes out of its way to make its power *accessible* to the user, with a minimum of fuss and bother. With Visual Basic, you're pretty much *required* to muck around with a semi-arcane programming language if you want to get *anything* done; with HyperCard, the English-like language (HyperTalk) is something you can *choose* to delve into when you decide you want to do *more* than you were already doing.
   Here's a concrete example of the HyperTalk languge; a "handler" (mini-program) which lets you move something around by clicking and dragging.

  on mouseDown
    repeat until the mouse is up
      set the location of me to the mouseLoc
    end repeat
  end mouseDown

   As I said, HyperTalk is rather English-like. If you can figure out how and why this handler does its thing, congratulations -- you're ready to start "rolling your own" with HyperCard! Bad news: Sadly, Apple Computer has never really known what to do with HyperCard, and has never made any serious attempts to publicize nor sell (nor even support) the program. Good news: Feed the keyword "hypercard" into google.com (or whatever other search engine you prefer), and you'll find any number of links to the community of HyperCard users.
   Q: So after all that, what can you do with HyperCard?
   A: What do you *want* to do with HyperCard? People have used it to build games (most notably Myst), educational software, personal information managers, utilities, multimedia presentations, productivity applications, and God only knows what else.
   HyperCard. It might just have a place on *your* hard drive.