You don’t remember the dust-up a little while back over Apple’s announcement of a new OS X feature called Dashboard, and its similarity to the third-party product Konfabulator. I know you don’t remember this, because if you don’t read tech blogs obsessively, you never heard about it to begin with, and if you do, well, who remembers back a whole two months ago?
Two things are/were notable about this little skirmish. The first is that the highest-profile argument that Apple wasn’t ripping Konfabulator off was about how Dashboard was totally different – because it used HTML instead of Illustrator files. See? Totally different. Same look, extremely similar default widgets, similar functionality for the user, but because the interiors worked differently, charges of “ripoff” were supposedly off base. What it does is less important than how it does it: a classic example of the engineer’s mindset.
To be fair, though, that article also discusses some common ancestors of exhibits D and K alike. As far as the techie stuff, while I think the look and standard functionality of Dashboard will mean enough to the average user that Apple should acknowledge some kind of debt to Konfab, the technical differences do contribute to a potential tipping-point effect that matters.
Which leads me to the second point: Apple’s power to A) tie Konfab-like functionality deeply into the OS, and B) give it away free with the OS, gives Macs something they haven’t had for a long, long time: a way for moderately sophisticated users to create apps that look as slick as the real deal, and share them.
In other words, it gives them HyperCard.
It turns out that others with more juice than myself have pointed this out recently – and there was a small of interest a few years ago – but HyperCard has been on my mind a lot lately. I was going to write an article about it, but the boiled-down essence of that is below.
Why not write an article? Because most of the weight I felt this all had was the weight of my personal memories. Of being twelve years old and hearing about this new thing from my dad that MacUser said would let anyone create real Mac-looking programs. Of reading Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think” for the first time because it was reprinted in HyperAge magazine. Of reading Danny Goodman’s Complete HyperCard Handbook from cover to cover, starting an ambitious suite of stacks to manage Dungeons and Dragons games with my brother while we were both out of school sick for two weeks, and building a sound-looping stack that I distributed on local BBSes. Of building interfaces that looked like interfaces for the first time, and things that worked.
HyperCard was when I caught the bug. Not only did it make programming easy enough for me to actually do, but it made it a creative act, just the same as using MacPaint. Or building with Legos. HyperCard was what first made me really, really want to put some kind of stamp on the world of software, besides all the other creative arenas I already had dreams of affecting. I think that was because it gave me a direct taste of perfection: I might not have been able to make a xerox of a PageMaker doc look like a magazine, or an overdubbed cassette-deck recording of a Casio sound like a rock album, but in HC, a button looked like a button and a menu looked like a menu.
Then HC 2.0 went pay, the furor died down and I forgot all about it. I was too busy toying with Director 1.0, typesetting high school newspapers, and making fonts. With all of that I think I was looking for that same taste of untouched-by-human-hands visual perfection. After HyperCard hit the wall I don’t think I did any programming again until JavaScript… but when I did, I of course found writing function calls into buttons and fields totally natural.
Roughly concurrent with the Dashboard foofaraw, I found a couple of interesting bits in the press. One dates back to last October: John Sculley, who led Apple through the late ’80s, claimed in a Cnet interview that the biggest missed opportunity on his watch was HyperCard. Given how many other opportunities Apple missed in that timeframe, that’s huge. Then HyperCard’s creator Bill Atkinson echoed the sentiment in a somewhat silly panel discussion at Macworld Boston.
All this talk about what HyperCard could have been, I thought, and we don’t even have what it was. I looked around for it – there’s still a version of SuperCard floating around out there, and there’s Runtime Revolution, and I guess those are worthwhile if you can spend $300. But if you were a curious user and had that money, wouldn’t you spend it on something you could put on your resume, like Flash? Or Visual Basic? As Paul Graham says, “Companies will pay for software, but individual hackers won’t, and it’s the hackers you need to attract.”
Being free matters. The main cause of HyperCard’s death was the leap in its price tag when it became a commercial Claris product as of version 2.0. The outcry was, well, a lot like the Movable Type licensing scandal, also of a couple months ago. (Which you also have no memory of if you have anything resembling a life.) Some folks were working on Apple to open-source HyperCard for a while, and got a final “no” recently (perhaps because someone at Apple knows the implications of Dashboard). There’s PythonCard, and other, lower-profile shots at reengineering the whole thing as free software… but they’re about as polished as you’d imagine (hint: not very).
Why do I want a new HyperCard when I have my years of JavaScript and the domain knowledge that comes with them? I don’t know. I think part of me still wants that perfection, that instant visual hit of authenticity, even though they’re saying that native GUIs are enjoying their last days. I know too much about web pages, even great ones, to believe that they’re touched by the gods. I just know they’re a shitload of work – work that I don’t even really want in my life. So why is the ghost of HyperCard still haunting me, 17 years later? What do I really have to do to get free?
I remember that when HyperCard first came out, there was some talk about end-user programming, about how people who used to just take what they could get on their computers and use it (not quite passively, but with hard limits on their power that the original hackers never dreamt of) might gain a new kind of literacy. Not much had been heard about that before – not about GUI computing, at least. Not that much has been heard about it since, either. These days, it seems that we’ve given up on trying to get that kind of power to people, in favor of figuring out whether they should have it, or need it, or even what it is. I can’t claim to have answers, but maybe if we could embody that ghost again, we might learn a thing or two.