Oh man, there is an absolute beauty with 1-bit graphics that I think is deeply underappreciated. When the right dithering algorithm is used, the graphics look like what characters in cyberpunk novels dream of. [1]
I secretly wish the dominant aesthetic in computing was one where everything was mac-like 1-bit dithered graphics, and we only used color when absolutely necessary - when the black and white graphics just couldn't convey what was needed. Like if instead of throwing it away for color, we had just built on top of it.
Side note, I'm also often struck how 1-bit-ish graphics sometimes were used to great effect on the ZXSpectrum, another minimally graphically capable computer of the era. When the game developers were trying to use color the games often looked worse than if they had just stuck with a simpler scheme. Chase H.Q., Bombjack, Pang!, etc. all look amazing to my eye.
Just to plug my own project here, or maybe for comparison: HyperCard Simulator at https://hcsimulator.com will import and run your classic HyperCard stacks as faithfully as possible.
Cool! But how is the scrolling supposed to work? I just read through the Seinfeld stack on my iPad (iOS 17, Safari) and the text of some cards was cut off at the bottom with no way to scroll down.
If the original stack allowed the field area to scroll it will, but it may not. I tried to get the fonts and sizes to match as well as possible but the Mac text is converted to UTF and is rendered as HTML; i spliced the dinosaur genetics with frog DNA.
I tried some of the examples on my phone but it ends up being basically microscopic because it's targetting a classic Mac resolution. I think it would help if it either did something intelligent with pixel doubling or some other scaling technique, or at least didn't disable the user's ability to zoom in when it's too small.
It (and Director, and Flash - and early javascript) were too hard to index and rank for search. The searchability paradigm crushed the creative paradigm in web, financially around 1999-2004 and ultimately culturally to the extent that the former model is barely remembered.
That’s not why it didn’t happen. The Web took off in 1995; Google was the first really good web search facility, and it arrived in 1998. There were earlier ones (I remember using AltaVista), but generally if you wanted to find things before Google you used either a directory like Yahoo or other web pages to find stuff.
We also don’t know what “index and ranking for search” would have looked like in a HyperCard-style web paradigm. Something like Google could work; it would have to be a sophisticated enough to parse stacks instead of HTML, but we’re already deep into an alternate universe, so I’ll stop here.
Also, “index and ranking for search” is probably a bad thing. SEO has absolutely destroyed the web.
Doesn't really check with how most modern SPAs flourish despite having basically the same problems as Flash of being incompatible with most web crawlers since more often than not you can't trust what they decide to put in the URL bar (if anything) actually links back to the state that is on screen.
Right. It's possible now because of things like Puppeteer. That's fairly recent. Nothing like that existed in the early 2000s to allow crawlers to index either Flash, Java embeds, Proce55ing apps or Javascript content. All scripting was a black box to Google as much as it was to Altavista. You had to place ancillary noscript content on each page to make it accessible to robots. That held true for Javascript apps well into the mid-2010s. My point is that we actually could index Flash sites now if we wanted to, just as we do with Javascript SPAs... however no one was making JS SPAs in the early 2000s, and search penalty was one major reason single page Flash sites fell out of use. The fact that JS SPAs have moved in now to occupy the empty niche left by ES4/AS3 really just proves it was a good and necessary idea for certain types of sites that was kneecapped by Adobe's closed source and the direction the web and search was taking.
SPAs have marketing websites that take care of search engine indexing. They also pay to have ads show up on Row 1 when people search for their product.
Everyone I ever wrote a SPA flash site for (including lots of custom carts / online stores), I also wrote HTML-only versions for that were mostly used by crawlers. I made sure these contained the same content as the SPA, and that the SPA would jump to the appropriate section and "page" or product based on the links, since it was understood that Google might penalize search rank if it were found that your flash content didn't mirror the HTML content that would otherwise appear at a given URL. (I'm not sure whether it was a myth, but I heard they had actual humans verify this drom time to time).
The purpose of the Flash app was to make the site more beautiful, not to obfuscate the content.
It's funny people saying hard to index. A fixed format like hypercard or Pdf is easier to index than angular and react. I assume google must be using some kind of headless chrome to index modern webpages.
Also includes Lil - a programming language quite different from Hyperscript/Applescript, but which is beautiful and interesting in its own right — kind of a “humanized” vector language.
In early MacOS, fonts and desk accessories (small applications which could run concurrently with a main application in the pre-multifinder era) were resources which lived in the "System" file. An uninstalled font or desk accessory would be stored in the resource fork of a "suitcase", and a utility called the Font/DA Mover offered a simple UI for copying these resources between suitcases and the system file.
Decker doesn't use a forked filesystem, but still has "resources" in the form of various disembodied modular pieces that can be copied between decks: fonts, sounds, pattern/color palettes, lil modules, and contraption prototypes. When I designed the UI for managing and importing resources, I modeled it after the Font/DA Mover, and naturally called it the "Font/Deck Accessory Mover". :)
I secretly wish the dominant aesthetic in computing was one where everything was mac-like 1-bit dithered graphics, and we only used color when absolutely necessary - when the black and white graphics just couldn't convey what was needed. Like if instead of throwing it away for color, we had just built on top of it.
Side note, I'm also often struck how 1-bit-ish graphics sometimes were used to great effect on the ZXSpectrum, another minimally graphically capable computer of the era. When the game developers were trying to use color the games often looked worse than if they had just stuck with a simpler scheme. Chase H.Q., Bombjack, Pang!, etc. all look amazing to my eye.
1 - https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/