Let’s re-imagine Hypercard

I’m going off on a tangent here from an interesting piece by Kevin Marks:

While talking about Flash on the iPad, Jobs said:

A more popular developer environment was HyperCard, we were OK to axe that[...] Hypercard was huge in it’s day because it was accessible to anybodyIndeed it was – many people miss it; Dale Dougherty says he wants a HyperCard for the iPad. I don’t think he does.

As Jobs himself says, we have a platform to build on for the future – it is HTML5. It’s an emerging standard that is not under the control of any one company, but is built on the Web as agreement. And even Steve Jobs can’t stop it.

Count me in as someone who still misses Hypercard, or at least what Hypercard represented. And as I’m reading Kevin’s piece, it suddenly struck me that perhaps it’s time to take a look at creating something like Hypercard again. Not Hypercard, but what it represented. What is that?

• A simple, accessible enviroment for quick hacks, simple projects and exploration.
• A place for proto-hackers and potential geeks to get started. In my day, it was Apple II’s basic. Later it way Hypercard. Today, where are the potential explorers getting their feet wet?

Today, if I need to do a quick geek, I tend to intall MAMP and haul out MysQL and PHP, or bring up terminal and write a quick perl script. I’ve been digging more into the HTML5/CSS/javascript world for some upcoming projects, though, and see a lot of potential as a geekable environment.

So what would it take to create an environment that would do these things and give people access to modern technologies? It seems like this is VERY possible. It could run cross platform, cross browser and no server needed. Take HTML, CSS, Javascript, wrap in some kind of editing/IDE/CLI environment, wrap in some libraries or a way to install libraries for things like graphics and displays… it almost feels like 90% of this project would be packaging and integration and documentation rather than coding, and most of the pieces are there.

Anyone interested in belling this cat?

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