6 ms·

Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics

280 points by metadat 3y ago

metadat 3y ago
Credit: @smartmic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40289036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40289036
gnabgib 3y ago
Previously on HN [1] (191 points, 3 months ago, 36 comments) [0] (215 points, 2 years ago, 88 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409
metadat 3y ago
Folks: Don't forget to try it out yourself! https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/tour.html https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/tour.html This triggered amazingly sweet memories for me, am I alone? My only wish would be to have pinch-zooming on mobile.
- josephg 3y ago
  For some reason that uses about 20% of my iphone screen. Its so tiny I can’t read the text, and they’ve disabled pinch zooming so I can’t get in closer.
  - metadat 3y ago
    Buckle up and put on some glasses B-) Or, shudder, bookmark and visit from a desktop. Worth it.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    Going into landscape helps.
  - hoc 2y ago
    You can increase the zoom factor in Safari's address line, hitting that aA button and then the big A... That, combined with landscape mode seems to make it usable, at least on the Max models.
- treve 2y ago
  Could be a firefox issue, or I don't know how it works but 'New Card' just gives me a blank screen and no way to write/draw.
kibwen 3y ago
Beautiful! I realize there's a certain aesthetic you're going for here, and what I'm about to propose is a prime example of a slippery slope, but if you're willing to go juuuuust a little further from 1-bit graphics to 2-bit graphics, you might actually get legible photographs. Here's a website that I love that has a similar aesthetic; every image here has at most six colors (although each image has its own color palette): https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
- RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
  Decker's UI is primarily black-and-white, but it actually uses a customizable 16-color palette. On the community forum[0] there's some discussion about dithering and importing colored photos. Users have taken advantage of color to make some really gorgeous projects[1]. [0]: https://itch.io/t/2668739/16-color-dithered https://itch.io/t/2668739/16-color-dithered [1]: https://crowmorbid.itch.io/desker-deckmonth https://crowmorbid.itch.io/desker-deckmonth
sircastor 3y ago
With respect to this project’s choices, I feel like HyperCards greatest flaw was failing to implement color when the Mac had begun to embrace it. By the time I was in high school, all the Macs in my school were color machines. But HyperCard never got true, native, built-color.
- thaumaturgy 3y ago
  That's largely my recollection too. HyperCard was hugely popular, especially as an introduction to programming for kids, but the Quadra Macs and their kin introduced color and everyone wanted color. HyperCard never got a native update for it and it was the number one feature everyone wanted. There was a related product (SuperCard?) that offered color. I remember trying it but it was clunky. I don't remember why, but in any case, it never took off. There was also the matter of HyperTalk's limited API. There was a market for ... extensions, I think they were called? Some developers really dominated that space for a while. (I wonder whatever happened to J5erson? He was brilliant.) Extensions were commonly written in Pascal and could add a lot of capability to HyperTalk, and were a great stepping-stone for people that wanted to explore programming beyond HyperCard. Decker looks like it has a lot of the good things from HyperCard -- simplicity, portability. Kind of a shame it isn't using something closer to HyperTalk though. It really was a nice language, for what it was.
  - karmelapple 2y ago
    > There was a market for ... extensions, I think they were called? XCMDs and XFCNs - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Extending_HyperTalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Extending_HyperTalk
  - sircastor 2y ago
    One of my early computing regrets is not focusing enough to learn HyperTalk. I was aware of it, but my attention and focus were just a little too wild to allow me to explore it properly. I made lots of stacks that were basic games, but I struggled with sticking with it long enough to finish any. I think if I’d understood what was possible with HyperTalk I could’ve gotten into organizing programming a lot sooner.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
msephton 2y ago
Decker is superficially similar to HyperCard because it's primarily 1-bit, but it's different enough to require a totally new learning curve. It's quite difficult to use, requires learning "Lil" a new and unique language, and is missing many HyperCard/MacPaint affordances you might be looking for if you're expecting HyperCard. The upshot is that HyperCard artists can't switch and continue to use HyperCard in a browser thanks to Infinite Mac. So close, yet so far. Similar, but different.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  If the language is the most important thing for you, https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/ has a very HyperTalk-like language and runs on modern hardware.
  - rapnie 2y ago
    "Sign up for your demo" .. missed opportunity.
    - msephton 2y ago
      They've done that for years, as well as some very dark patterns, and perplexing dishonest marketing. I tend to avoid them.
  - msephton 2y ago
    It's not. There's isn't a single most important thing. HyperCard was an almost perfect blend of many things. That's why it's easy to spot when they're missing, like some omissions or differences in Decker.
- hyperhello 2y ago
  It's not everything it was, but HyperCard in a browser is available at https://hypercardsimulator.com https://hypercardsimulator.com
  - msephton 2y ago
treve 2y ago
There's so much love for HyperCard. I missed out on this, but it seems like it empowered people to make lots of small useful utilities. It somewhat seems similar in versatility to spreadsheets, but with a different utility. For the people that were around for this, I'm curious what kind of modern tools captures this feeling for you? I'm slightly younger, and I feel some nostalgic love for tools like Delphi/VB and Macromedia Flash. Imperfect tools, but they sparked creativity. Our tools got so much better, but we lost something along the way.
- divbzero 2y ago
  Also, given the love, why is it that HyperCard died out and nothing similar took its place?
  - treve 2y ago
    For the first question, I found this: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/23/hypercard-3 https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/23/hypercard-3
  - chrstphrknwtn 2y ago
    I suppose Flash was the new HyperCard. Almost anyone could get an awful lot done without knowing much about anything.
    - surfingdino 2y ago
      And the results were quite awful... Steve Jobs couldn't wait to kill it.
      - pavlov 2y ago
        Apple’s App Store is filled with ugly apps that have poor performance. People will write that kind of software on anything that has enough programmability. So it’s not that Jobs killed Flash to save users from bad taste. It was because Flash was the most widely deployed cross-platform runtime of the desktop web era (at one time on 96% of computers!) and he didn’t want Adobe or anyone else to have that kind of power anymore.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
This would be a great tool for coding interviews, Any idea how to share the HTML in realtime?
- msephton 2y ago
  You'd expect people to code in a language they likely have never seen before in an interview? Would you provide the documentation?
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    People have different opinions, and all can be fine, I don't claim to have the definite answer. IMHO coding is about thinking, not about the knowledge of a programming language. How do you split the problem into smaller problems? And then in even smaller ones to the level you can express solutons in code? Then what can be abstracted for future changes? I would not provide documentation, but explain how the candidate can write some code if they tell me what they want to do, perhaps write the code sketch for them. The language is so simple that any candidate can get the basics in a few minutes. And I'm interested in their thinking, not in their mastery of a programming language. If you're a good Python coder, I'd also hire you for writing Go. (To understand where I came from: This is perhaps from my personal background, I have done hundreds of interviews, I wrote code in 20+ languages and was paid for in 10+ languages over the last four decades. So I value thinking and problem solving more than the correct syntax in an interview - e.g. if you write Java code, I don't care about braces and semicolons)
    - msephton 2y ago
      I agree coding is about thinking. I've worked for Apple, and written a GOTY game, but I don't know how I'd react if asked to write code in such an esoteric system. I could talk through the concepts, and you could write the code. Cheers!
      - KingOfCoders 2y ago
        Then perhaps we don't fit each other, which is fine, and isn't finding that out a good result of an inteview (that you don't want to work with me? - instead of starting and then beeing unhappy - IMHO not enough candidates evaluate the company and their future manager in interviews)
7thaccount 2y ago
I have no idea why apple or Microsoft don't spend more effort making something like this for their OS for casual developers. VB and Python are fine, but sometimes I want something that is really tailor made for building small applications.
- firecall 2y ago
  Well... Apple do have Swift Playgrounds. And SwiftUI is about as easy as it gets! Although using Xcode and setting yourself up in the App Store still requires some understanding of arcane settings and Xcode IDE familiarity :-)
  - msephton 2y ago
    SwiftUI is a long way behind drag and drop user interface layout. But today there are different problems to solve, like dynamic screen sizes, which it make relatively easy.
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    I'm thinking of something a lot easier than writing Swift code.
anonzzzies 2y ago
Note that the author also made a k interpreter [0] which has a graphical env to play around with as well. Lil takes a lot from it. [0] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok
time4tea 2y ago
There was a NASA laserdisc at school with loads of shuttle information. It was hooked up to a Mac running HyperCard, for navigation and displaying info. It was pretty cool, although I think at the time I didn't appreciate it as much.
- firecall 2y ago
  I remember things like that! Dont think I ever saw that one, but I'm sure there were some HyperCard Stacks floating around that were mini databases of cool things with images. Sort of an early Multimedia before the 90s Multimedia bubble :-)
TomMasz 2y ago
I've been playing with this on and off for a couple of years. If you remember early HyperCard, this will push all your nostalgia buttons. But it's good for more than that and it's really worth taking a look at for new work.
rlawson 2y ago
I love Decker - it's a lot of fun. I also enjoy Wyldcard if you are looking for something with hypertalk scripting. https://github.com/defano/wyldcard https://github.com/defano/wyldcard
chaostheory 2y ago
Everything aside, Decker is such a great name. I know that one of the hardest problems in computer science is naming, and I don’t want to call out any projects with hard working maintainers but it is refreshing not to read about another project named “X”.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
AstroJetson 2y ago
I got into Decker when it was mentioned last week in the discussion about HyperCard replacements. I’m really wondering about packaging of decks. I really like Redbean and how its all in one file with Lua, SQLite, etc. and you just open up with a zip tool, put all the HTML and Lua code, rename it and its good to deploy. I’m wondering if Decker is considering that kind of deployment to make it easier.

280 points by metadat 3y ago

Credit: @smartmic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40289036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40289036

Previously on HN [1] (191 points, 3 months ago, 36 comments) [0] (215 points, 2 years ago, 88 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409

metadat 3y ago

Folks: Don't forget to try it out yourself! https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/tour.html https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/tour.html This triggered amazingly sweet memories for me, am I alone? My only wish would be to have pinch-zooming on mobile.

josephg 3y ago
For some reason that uses about 20% of my iphone screen. Its so tiny I can’t read the text, and they’ve disabled pinch zooming so I can’t get in closer.
- metadat 3y ago
  Buckle up and put on some glasses B-) Or, shudder, bookmark and visit from a desktop. Worth it.
- al_borland 3y ago
  Going into landscape helps.
- hoc 2y ago
  You can increase the zoom factor in Safari's address line, hitting that aA button and then the big A... That, combined with landscape mode seems to make it usable, at least on the Max models.
treve 2y ago
Could be a firefox issue, or I don't know how it works but 'New Card' just gives me a blank screen and no way to write/draw.

kibwen 3y ago

Beautiful! I realize there's a certain aesthetic you're going for here, and what I'm about to propose is a prime example of a slippery slope, but if you're willing to go juuuuust a little further from 1-bit graphics to 2-bit graphics, you might actually get legible photographs. Here's a website that I love that has a similar aesthetic; every image here has at most six colors (although each image has its own color palette): https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
Decker's UI is primarily black-and-white, but it actually uses a customizable 16-color palette. On the community forum[0] there's some discussion about dithering and importing colored photos. Users have taken advantage of color to make some really gorgeous projects[1]. [0]: https://itch.io/t/2668739/16-color-dithered https://itch.io/t/2668739/16-color-dithered [1]: https://crowmorbid.itch.io/desker-deckmonth https://crowmorbid.itch.io/desker-deckmonth

sircastor 3y ago

With respect to this project’s choices, I feel like HyperCards greatest flaw was failing to implement color when the Mac had begun to embrace it. By the time I was in high school, all the Macs in my school were color machines. But HyperCard never got true, native, built-color.

thaumaturgy 3y ago
That's largely my recollection too. HyperCard was hugely popular, especially as an introduction to programming for kids, but the Quadra Macs and their kin introduced color and everyone wanted color. HyperCard never got a native update for it and it was the number one feature everyone wanted. There was a related product (SuperCard?) that offered color. I remember trying it but it was clunky. I don't remember why, but in any case, it never took off. There was also the matter of HyperTalk's limited API. There was a market for ... extensions, I think they were called? Some developers really dominated that space for a while. (I wonder whatever happened to J5erson? He was brilliant.) Extensions were commonly written in Pascal and could add a lot of capability to HyperTalk, and were a great stepping-stone for people that wanted to explore programming beyond HyperCard. Decker looks like it has a lot of the good things from HyperCard -- simplicity, portability. Kind of a shame it isn't using something closer to HyperTalk though. It really was a nice language, for what it was.
- karmelapple 2y ago
  > There was a market for ... extensions, I think they were called? XCMDs and XFCNs - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Extending_HyperTalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Extending_HyperTalk
- sircastor 2y ago
  One of my early computing regrets is not focusing enough to learn HyperTalk. I was aware of it, but my attention and focus were just a little too wild to allow me to explore it properly. I made lots of stacks that were basic games, but I struggled with sticking with it long enough to finish any. I think if I’d understood what was possible with HyperTalk I could’ve gotten into organizing programming a lot sooner.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

msephton 2y ago

Decker is superficially similar to HyperCard because it's primarily 1-bit, but it's different enough to require a totally new learning curve. It's quite difficult to use, requires learning "Lil" a new and unique language, and is missing many HyperCard/MacPaint affordances you might be looking for if you're expecting HyperCard. The upshot is that HyperCard artists can't switch and continue to use HyperCard in a browser thanks to Infinite Mac. So close, yet so far. Similar, but different.

gcanyon 2y ago
If the language is the most important thing for you, https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/ has a very HyperTalk-like language and runs on modern hardware.
- rapnie 2y ago
  "Sign up for your demo" .. missed opportunity.
  - msephton 2y ago
    They've done that for years, as well as some very dark patterns, and perplexing dishonest marketing. I tend to avoid them.
- msephton 2y ago
  It's not. There's isn't a single most important thing. HyperCard was an almost perfect blend of many things. That's why it's easy to spot when they're missing, like some omissions or differences in Decker.
hyperhello 2y ago
It's not everything it was, but HyperCard in a browser is available at https://hypercardsimulator.com https://hypercardsimulator.com
- msephton 2y ago

treve 2y ago

There's so much love for HyperCard. I missed out on this, but it seems like it empowered people to make lots of small useful utilities. It somewhat seems similar in versatility to spreadsheets, but with a different utility. For the people that were around for this, I'm curious what kind of modern tools captures this feeling for you? I'm slightly younger, and I feel some nostalgic love for tools like Delphi/VB and Macromedia Flash. Imperfect tools, but they sparked creativity. Our tools got so much better, but we lost something along the way.

divbzero 2y ago
Also, given the love, why is it that HyperCard died out and nothing similar took its place?
- treve 2y ago
  For the first question, I found this: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/23/hypercard-3 https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/23/hypercard-3
- chrstphrknwtn 2y ago
  I suppose Flash was the new HyperCard. Almost anyone could get an awful lot done without knowing much about anything.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    And the results were quite awful... Steve Jobs couldn't wait to kill it.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      Apple’s App Store is filled with ugly apps that have poor performance. People will write that kind of software on anything that has enough programmability. So it’s not that Jobs killed Flash to save users from bad taste. It was because Flash was the most widely deployed cross-platform runtime of the desktop web era (at one time on 96% of computers!) and he didn’t want Adobe or anyone else to have that kind of power anymore.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

This would be a great tool for coding interviews, Any idea how to share the HTML in realtime?

msephton 2y ago
You'd expect people to code in a language they likely have never seen before in an interview? Would you provide the documentation?
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  People have different opinions, and all can be fine, I don't claim to have the definite answer. IMHO coding is about thinking, not about the knowledge of a programming language. How do you split the problem into smaller problems? And then in even smaller ones to the level you can express solutons in code? Then what can be abstracted for future changes? I would not provide documentation, but explain how the candidate can write some code if they tell me what they want to do, perhaps write the code sketch for them. The language is so simple that any candidate can get the basics in a few minutes. And I'm interested in their thinking, not in their mastery of a programming language. If you're a good Python coder, I'd also hire you for writing Go. (To understand where I came from: This is perhaps from my personal background, I have done hundreds of interviews, I wrote code in 20+ languages and was paid for in 10+ languages over the last four decades. So I value thinking and problem solving more than the correct syntax in an interview - e.g. if you write Java code, I don't care about braces and semicolons)
  - msephton 2y ago
    I agree coding is about thinking. I've worked for Apple, and written a GOTY game, but I don't know how I'd react if asked to write code in such an esoteric system. I could talk through the concepts, and you could write the code. Cheers!
    - KingOfCoders 2y ago
      Then perhaps we don't fit each other, which is fine, and isn't finding that out a good result of an inteview (that you don't want to work with me? - instead of starting and then beeing unhappy - IMHO not enough candidates evaluate the company and their future manager in interviews)

7thaccount 2y ago

I have no idea why apple or Microsoft don't spend more effort making something like this for their OS for casual developers. VB and Python are fine, but sometimes I want something that is really tailor made for building small applications.

firecall 2y ago
Well... Apple do have Swift Playgrounds. And SwiftUI is about as easy as it gets! Although using Xcode and setting yourself up in the App Store still requires some understanding of arcane settings and Xcode IDE familiarity :-)
- msephton 2y ago
  SwiftUI is a long way behind drag and drop user interface layout. But today there are different problems to solve, like dynamic screen sizes, which it make relatively easy.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  I'm thinking of something a lot easier than writing Swift code.

anonzzzies 2y ago

Note that the author also made a k interpreter [0] which has a graphical env to play around with as well. Lil takes a lot from it. [0] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok

time4tea 2y ago

There was a NASA laserdisc at school with loads of shuttle information. It was hooked up to a Mac running HyperCard, for navigation and displaying info. It was pretty cool, although I think at the time I didn't appreciate it as much.

firecall 2y ago
I remember things like that! Dont think I ever saw that one, but I'm sure there were some HyperCard Stacks floating around that were mini databases of cool things with images. Sort of an early Multimedia before the 90s Multimedia bubble :-)

TomMasz 2y ago

I've been playing with this on and off for a couple of years. If you remember early HyperCard, this will push all your nostalgia buttons. But it's good for more than that and it's really worth taking a look at for new work.

rlawson 2y ago

I love Decker - it's a lot of fun. I also enjoy Wyldcard if you are looking for something with hypertalk scripting. https://github.com/defano/wyldcard https://github.com/defano/wyldcard

chaostheory 2y ago

Everything aside, Decker is such a great name. I know that one of the hardest problems in computer science is naming, and I don’t want to call out any projects with hard working maintainers but it is refreshing not to read about another project named “X”.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

AstroJetson 2y ago

I got into Decker when it was mentioned last week in the discussion about HyperCard replacements. I’m really wondering about packaging of decks. I really like Redbean and how its all in one file with Lua, SQLite, etc. and you just open up with a zip tool, put all the HTML and Lua code, rename it and its good to deploy. I’m wondering if Decker is considering that kind of deployment to make it easier.