Posted by tosh 3 hours ago
As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.
People used the same building primitives to make real blown games or stuff like accounting applications.
And the best part - at that team it didn't looked cheap.
This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments)
Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments)
Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)
If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?
I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.
A solution would probably be Airtable.
I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.
A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.
Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.
There are over 300 games, zines, visual novels, and toys built with Decker on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker
Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the...
We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.
You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets
For example, "WigglyKit" offers several contraptions which operate on a shared convention for representing animated images:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/wigglykit.html
You can also represent composite data as a series of cards in a deck, or use cards as encapsulated "objects" that you communicate with via events:
http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html#cardsarerecords
In a pinch, you can also easily encode arbitrary data in fields as a JSON superset with their ".data" attribute.
https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html
We also recently gained a library for working with vector-based text: