the many uses of HyperCard

[Thank The Cheese]

I was listening to a podcast recently where they were reminiscing about HyperCard. This got my very nostalgic myself and thought I'd pose the question:

What did you do with HyperCard?

I used hyperCard to create animations when I was very young. I would create hundreds of slides -- each being 1 frame -- then would play through the stack as fast as the Mac would allow, hence creating a cartoon (no sound of course). I created over a hundred of these little 1-2 minute animations.

after a while i got fancier, adding buttons and scripts to give the cartoons 'choose your own adventure' functionality. Good times

The only problem was when we upgraded from the Classic to the LC, suddenly they would play too fast, and would zip through the stack in a matter of seconds, so I would have to adjust it for each computer.

If only I had iShowU back then to record the screen

[Mikuro]

Originally Posted by Thank The Cheese

The only problem was when we upgraded from the Classic to the LC, suddenly they would play too fast, and would zip through the stack in a matter of seconds, so I would have to adjust it for each computer.

Hehehe. Yes, I remember that happening with a good number of my stacks. This really wasn't a problem with HyperCard, but it was very easy for a novice like me to make that kind of mistake without thinking twice. It sure made me impressed with the speed of my first Power Mac, though! It took me a few years, I guess, to think of doing simple time checks for every frame.

I made mostly fun things for me and my family, like animations and trivia games, along with some utilities for things like indexing floppy disks. I remember what my HyperCard stack folder looked like, and there were dozens of items in it, but I don't remember what most of them actually were.

None of my stacks were especially elegant, code-wise, but they got the job done. I remember one time a method of mine exceeded the 32KB limit, and I was panicking. Then my brother, who was a bit more advanced than I was at the time, came in and reduced it to something like 30 lines. It's amazing what loops can do! What's more amazing is that back then I had the patience to do such things without loops!

I still miss HyperCard's music-playing command (I don't recall what it was, but I'm guessing it was "play" or "play note"). It was so easy to write little tunes and play them and tweak them. Try doing that in...well, anything else!

I still can't believe Apple let HyperCard die. If you ask me, HyperCard made the Macs of 10-20 years ago more creatively stimulating than today's with all their iStuff (of course, if I'd been 10 years old when I was introduced to iMovie, I might feel differently). I'm sure it also gave rise to quite a few loyal Mac developers. That has to be good for Apple.

Bring back HyperCard! Bring back HyperCard!

[icemanjc]

I remember using it once or twice, but I never really was crazy about it, it was to complicated for me back then.

[chevy]

PowerPoint is a better HyperCard when you use the navigation tools. You can write it very fast with the Outline view and then add navigation.

[chevy]

PowerPoint is a better HyperCard when you use the navigation tools. You can write it very fast with the Outline view and then add navigation.