Sometimes the most interesting ideas are ones that fall out of favor and come back again years later. Witness Tilestack, a technology preview on the floor at Macworld that allows importing and instant web-enabling of vintage HyperCard stacks, as well as advanced interactive web applications with minimal coding. Check out the video and the Tilestack site for more info (video after the jump).Posts with tag hypercard
Show floor video: Tilestack aims to bring HyperCard stacks into the future
Sometimes the most interesting ideas are ones that fall out of favor and come back again years later. Witness Tilestack, a technology preview on the floor at Macworld that allows importing and instant web-enabling of vintage HyperCard stacks, as well as advanced interactive web applications with minimal coding. Check out the video and the Tilestack site for more info (video after the jump).Continue reading Show floor video: Tilestack aims to bring HyperCard stacks into the future
Vintage Apple books and software
Mad props to my parents for keeping our basement an Apple museum! Aside from a pristine Apple //c (with monochrome monitor), vintage Apple ][ ,and Mac SE/30 (with a color monitor card) they kept most if not all of our Mac and Apple programming books from my youth. A few games even survived, although my addiction to Wasteland forced my dad to ship several of the more fun games to my French cousins. So I took some quick pics and made a vintage Apple books and software gallery. Enjoy the trip down memory lane-- and if any of the authors of these books are around, let us know in the comments.Some of my favorites:
- Chipwits - one of my favorite edutainment titles ever (and the original authors are trying to bring it back)
- Jeeves - before he hit the web he was your personal assistant
- Adventure Construction Set - taught me a lot about game design
- Using HyperCard - oh how I miss HyperCard
- The Elementary Apple - notable because of the binding, which was really useful when trying to type in programs
- The Halley Project - who didn't freak out when they heard their Apple start talking?
For some reason my copy of Racter is MIA.
Gallery: Vintage Apple Software and Books
Hypercard's history
SiliconUser takes a short look at ye olde Hypercard technology, Apple's precursor to the concepts that eventually became HTML and the World Wide Web. The project was originally created in 1985 as an easier way to create programs on the Macintosh-- it consisted of a "cards and stacks" metaphor, as in you created one card that linked to another card in the stack, and so on. Early Hypercard stacks just worked as organized information databases, but eventually Hypercard ended up doing more and more-- cards could work as applications in themselves, and the links between them served as a precursor to hyperlinks and what we know as the Internet today. Personally, I only used Hypercard very minimally, and it's hard for me to imagine as much functionality coming out of Hypercard as we've got with CSS, HTML, and PHP today. But Hypercard faithful (of which the numbers seem to be not quite known), held onto the application for a long time.Hypercard's downfall came arguably not because it failed to stand up to new concepts, but because Apple, in a blunder, passed the program away to Claris, who tried to sell it rather than include it free in Macs. By the time Apple took it back, in 1993, the momentum was lost, and after a short period with Apple's Quicktime division, Hypercard was discontinued in 2004. Previous to that, Hypercard 3.0 was shown at WWDC 1996 (including the ability to display Hypercard stacks in a web browser, which might have been the key to keeping Hypercard alive), but that release never came. There are a few traces of Hypercard left on Apple's site, but as a technology, it's as dead as dead gets.
Thanks, Thomas!
Making music with Hypercard
This post combines two things we love: inventive geeks and vintage Macs. Peter Jungers and Josh Burker worked together to write several HyperCard stacks to compose their music, which you can listen to here. That's a trio of 68K Macs you're listening to (though it reminds me of a scene from Suspiria).
On their site you can listen to all of the music, watch a video of the Macs in action and download their HyperCard stacks for use in your own weekend projects. Well done, Peter and Josh!
Apple leads PC World's 50 Best Tech Products of All Time
Everybody likes lists and rankings; there's just something that fascinates people about them, and they're always good for an argument or, as the case may be, selling magazines. Squarely in this latter camp is PC World's list of the Best 50 Tech Products of All Time, which editor Harry McCracken writes in to tell us features seven Apple products, more than any other singe company. These are:- #2 - Apple II (1977)
- #6 - iPod (2001)
- #14 - Mac Plus (1986)
- #21 - iTunes 4 (2003)
- #30 - OS X (2001)
- #34 - Original Airport Base Station (1999)
- #41 - Hypercard (1987)
Rig of the Day: HyperCard and model trains
We like this one a lot. Flickr user rudolf_mittelmann has posted a nice shot of his PowerBook Duo 280c running a custom-built HyperCard stack that controls the train you see zipping past. Classic Macs running classic software to complete atypical tasks make us happy.
"PowerBook Duo 280c" posted by rudolf_mittelmann.
For the month of April, the theme for our Rig of the Day will be "Vintage Macs" in honor of Apple's anniversary. If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply upload photos into our group Flickr pool. Let's see your vintage Macs (Apples and Newtons, too)! We'll select an image every day to highlight.
A blogging tool in Hypercard?!
People loved Hypercard. People still love Hypercard. Tantek has built a blogging tool
using Hypercard (that's him in the picture showing it off to some folks).Sadly there isn't too much info about this marvel on Tantek's website, but just knowing it exists makes me happy.
[via vedana.net]
