Remember HyperCard? It was all the rage back in the day. For me, HyperCard was one of my first Mac experiences in middle school. When the public internet and hypertext links and sites came along a few years later, I was impressed by how ahead of it’s time HyperCard really was.
HyperCard Clone Or Wannabe?
HyperCard is no more, of course, dying a slow, agonizingly painful death back during Apple’s dark ages.
Today, there are a handful of HyperCard clones and wannabes. My retro toy is BayCard, something of a clone, but more of a wannabe. It comes with stack templates to get started.
There’s games, notes, serial number collector, to-do list, CD and DVD collection app, and an empty blank template.
The templates are not bad, but they’re not like the HyperCard stacks of yesteryear.
BayCard comes with a few dozen widgets. These are the elements that make a stack template do what you want it to do. These include buttons, boxes, image boxes, text and movie fields, web pages, lists, tables, number fields, and much more.
What’s nice about BayCard is that a finished stack looks and works like a Mac app. That makes it a good way to get kids involved in programming, or create an app that does just what you want and nothing else.
My problem is that I’m slow at putting the pieces together, and take forever with constant tweaking. Add up the time I spend creating any stack and I’d be better off buying an app to do what I want.
BayCard isn’t really a HyperCard clone, but some of the experience, especially when using the widgets, is the same.
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