This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by Keith Ray.
Original Post: WikiWikiHyperCard
Feed Title: MemoRanda
Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html
Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics.
[HyperCard] Stacks were already easy to edit. The fields were automatically WYSIWYG editors. But linking was a pain that involved moving between both cards involved. My Links field abandoned regular stack links and used search on demand instead. Operationally, one would just type links they might follow in the Links field. Each line had a button nearby that would take you to the card if it existed or beep otherwise. If you held the button down, it would relent and go make the card for you.
How did it work? It worked great. Lots of people came by to see HyperCard work. I'd show them a few graphic things and then pull out my stack. We'd get to poking through people and projects and so on when my guests would invariably say, "that's not exactly right." So we'd fix it right then and there. And we'd add a few missing links and go fix them too. The stack was captivating. We were often late for lunch.
One of the most impressive HyperCard stacks I ever used was one to teach the language Esperanto. It was a very well-structured piece of educational software. Particularly cool were sections that had prose in Esperanto, and if you clicked on one of the words, it would be replaced by the english equivalent.
HyperCard is orphaned, now, but there are some open-source and commercial replacements in development... see here for direct and indirect links. PythonCard looks interesting. (Is there no Smalltalk-based xCard?) Ideally, there could be a web-enabled HyperCard that's user-editable like a wiki, but more structured like HyperCard.
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