[Pythoncard-users] "Why I Use HyperCard..." posts

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

Some of the info below has been covered on the list before, but I thought as
we approach the end of the year, it would be good to get some inspiration
from the "spirit of HyperCard".

Early in 2001, a plea went out to HyperCard users to tell Apple why
HyperCard should be brought back to life. Many of the online responses are
at the two URLs below.

  http://homepage.mac.com/iHUG/WhyWeUseHC.html
  http://homepage.mac.com/iHUG/WhyWeUseHCd2.html

What struck me as I read through these responses is the diversity of both
the people that use or used HyperCard and the types of applications they
created. We may never reach the ease-of-use and level of integration of the
HyperCard environment that allowed so many people, even non-programmers to
create such a wide variety of applications, but it is a nice goal.


A little more about the demise...
HyperCard, while still available, is a dead product and there is no plan to
revive it for OS X. The closest thing users are going to get from Apple
appears to be AppleScript Studio
  http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/ascript_studio/

There were a few articles about the demise of HyperCard, including this one:
  http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/03/29/mac_dev.html
(some of the comments at the bottom are interesting)

While Apple won't be reviving HyperCard, another company has a product
called Revolution
  http://www.runrev.com/
and you can even download a free trial that runs on the Mac classic, Mac OS
X, Windows, and Linux
  http://www.runrev.com/revolution/downloads/downloads.html

It is worth checking out for environment ideas to see what you do and don't
like. Please post any comments you have to the list.


In case this email just seems confusing...
The main goal of PythonCard (at least for me) continues to be the creation
of an open source, cross-platform GUI framework and environment for building
desktop applications. The framework is written in Python and the apps
produced use Python for the scripting language. I don't want to use
HyperTalk, some other xTalk variant, TCL, Perl, or JavaScript, I want to
leverage the Python language and the large number of quality libraries for
Python. Even if PythonCard ends up not having much in common with HyperCard
when we're done, I'll continue to draw inspiration from HyperCard. I'll get
back to work now :)

ka