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1. What's the equivalent of HTML5 canvas in Hypercard? 2. Suppose there's a little dataflow drawing program somebody else wrote in Hypercard. I want to add a b
by jancsika 7y ago
1. What's the equivalent of HTML5 canvas in Hypercard?
2. Suppose there's a little dataflow drawing program somebody else wrote in Hypercard. I want to add a binding for my own transient card to pop up on keyboard shortcut, gain focus, steal all input events, then go away on another keyboard shortcut (and return input events to their original bindings). How do I do that?
3. Suppose Hypercard flourished into the 90s and early 2000s. How would this alternate-reality Hypercard have dealt with the pop-up ad problem?
I'm sure there are answers to these questions. However, a theoretical Hypercard that solves them-- plus all the other myriad problems that come from existing on a weaponized internet-- would make this tech much closer to the complexity of the modern web than to the original Hypercard.
- _bxg1 7y agoAgreed. I would also argue that spreadsheets serve much of the role that HyperCard was trying to, including many of the problems that a world built on HyperCard would have had. Enormous democratization of computing for the use-cases that can be understood without programming skills, and also enormous amounts of fragility as applications are cobbled together from loose components.
- underwater 7y agoThat power comes at a cost. The author covers this when they say open source versions of Hypercard do too much. There is a place for a low powered/low barrier to entry programming environment. My first forays into computing were Klik n Play and VB6. They let me learn how to solve problems without being overwhelmed with the many things a real Software Engineer needs to deal with.
- wolfgang42 7y agoFor your #2: HyperCard is primarily mouse-oriented; I don't believe there's a way to add keyboard shortcuts (without writing an XCMD in another language like Pascal). Instead you'd add a button into the other stack (probably on the background) to 'go to "UtilityStack"'. This would take you to the first card of the stack you'd created, which naturally takes over since it's the one being shown (no need to explicitly 'steal' events). Once you're done there, either use Go > Back (Cmd+B, I believe) or have a button on the card with the script 'go back'. This takes you to the previous card the same way that the back button in your browser would, and likewise events now go to that card with no explicit rebinding required.
- scarface74 7y agoI think you could add keyboard shortcuts. You could definitely add menu items (http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/menu/menu.html http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/menu/menu.html) and you could intercept keydown events at the stack level.
- wolfgang42 7y agoHuh, interesting. They must have added that in a later version than I was using, my copy of "The Complete HyperCard Handbook" doesn't mention "create menu" or keyDown handlers at all. Thanks for the correction!
- duskwuff 7y ago> 1. What's the equivalent of HTML5 canvas in Hypercard? Scripting the paint tools. A practical example: set userLevel to 3 -- "Painting" choose select tool set cursor to blank drag from 0,0 to 100,100 doMenu "Select" set dragSpeed to 150 drag from 40,50 to 480,125 set lockscreen to true set cursor to blank doMenu "Select All" doMenu "Revert" choose browse tool > 2. Suppose there's a little dataflow drawing program somebody else wrote in Hypercard. I want to add a binding for my own transient card to pop up on keyboard shortcut, gain focus, steal all input events, then go away on another keyboard shortcut (and return input events to their original bindings). How do I do that? A keyDown handler in the Home stack and "push/pop card", probably. There isn't really any way to make a card appear on top of another card, though. > 3. Suppose Hypercard flourished into the 90s and early 2000s. How would this alternate-reality Hypercard have dealt with the pop-up ad problem? Poorly. The merryXmas worm comes to mind.