Ask HN: Modern Day Equivalent to HyperCard?

1

Scratch

#Kids Education #Programming #Coding 558 social mentions

2

Bubble.io

2. Bubble is easy for non-coders. https://bubble.io/.

#No Code #Application Builder #Website Builder 429 social mentions

1. Decker is the closest modern equivalent https://beyondloom.com/decker/.

#Game Development #Game Engine #IDE 9 social mentions

4

Twine

I think you and your kid would have fun designing a Choose Your Own Adventure game in Twine. https://twinery.org/ FWIW, there are a bunch of simple modern GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web, but none of them are <i>popular</i>, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit. When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts. Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look <i>exactly</i> like that everywhere." The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem. As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

#Visual Novel Engine #IDE #Conversion Optimization 276 social mentions

5

Pyspread

That sort of thing makes me wonder why pyspread isn't more popula: https://pyspread.gitlab.io/ and if mito will become popular: <a href="https://www.trymito.io/">https://www.trymito.io/</a> and whether maybe Jupyter Notebooks aren't the solution to this sort of thing.

#Spreadsheets #Office Suites #Project Management 5 social mentions

6

Snap

Take a look at Snap. It was originally a scratch mod, but does allows for all sorts of advanced things. https://snap.berkeley.edu.

#Game Development #Kids Education #Developer Tools 28 social mentions

7

Blockly

If your kid is already doing Scratch, Blockly is a really easy next step. https://developers.google.com/blockly Critically, Blockly can emit JavaScript and Python, plus it supports plugins for extended functionality. So the kid can stay inside the blockly universe for as long as they like, but easily peer under the hood and get into Python or JavaScript as soon as they like.

#Developer Tools #Web Frameworks #JavaScript Tools 30 social mentions

8

Inkscape

Agreed. It would be nice if more apps would build scripting in. Krita has: https://scripting.krita.org/lessons/introduction while for Inkscape there is: https://inkscape.org/~pakin/%E2%98%85simple-inkscape-scripting.

#Graphic Design Software #Digital Drawing And Painting #Art Tools 484 social mentions

9

Godot Engine

If he wants to advance in the game space then he can either keep in the "visual coding" area using something like https://www.construct.net/en or start heading down the text coding path with https://godotengine.org/ or https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php.

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 447 social mentions