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Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS
Also, interview with creator: https://www.arraycast.com/2025/01/04/Decker.html https://www.arraycast.com/2025/01/04/Decker.html
- thataccount 3mo agoDecker is neat. I was in the process of using it the other day, but discovered it did not have much by way of font size adjustment in text fields. You could make a heading, but I didn't see a way to make it bigger or larger than simply being a heading.
- RodgerTheGreat 3mo agoDecker fonts are composed of fixed-size bitmaps. The included example "fonts.deck" has a variety of additional fonts to choose from in various sizes, and an editor: https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html We also recently gained a library for working with vector-based text: https://beyondloom.com/decker/hershey.html https://beyondloom.com/decker/hershey.html
- thataccount 3mo agoAh. That would have been good to know! I was looking mostly in the interface for a font size tweaker of some kind.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- brightstar18 3mo agoawesome, already love the detailed feature set. one thing I'd love is the option to change themes. for eg. i'd like a more modern theme if i want to create a presentation and send it across. retro is a bit of a cognitive overload on users who are now habitual of navigating a different type of UI.
- philips 3mo agoLooks awesome! Very oddly super small window for it in iOS safari though.
- RodgerTheGreat 3mo agoDecker prefers integral upscaling. On most browsers, "Decker -> Fullscreen" in the menu (or "app.fullscreen:1" from a script) will enable "stretching", but this feature is not supported by Safari on iPhones last time I tested.
- fastball 3mo agoIf you want the "agentic future" version of this (sorry), tldraw just relased "tldraw offline"[1] which in some ways has a lot of overlap with HyperCard as well. [1] https://offline.tldraw.com/ https://offline.tldraw.com/
- WillAdams 3mo agoIs there a scripting language for this? That was what really differentiated HyperCard and made it a replacement for the never-released MacBasic: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
- landver 3mo ago[dead]
- mwcremer 3mo agoAppears so: https://beyondloom.com/decker/lil.html https://beyondloom.com/decker/lil.html
- WillAdams 3mo agoI was asking if tldraw had a scripting option. Which answer after searching is yes and no: https://tldraw.dev/docs/driver https://tldraw.dev/docs/driver
- fastball 3mo agoIt is actually definitely yes! You can script with JS. Steve Ruiz demonstrates having an LLM do that for you in his intro video to this "offline" version of tldraw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyENfxgyYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyENfxgyYA
- tomhow 3mo agoPreviously: Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments) Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments) Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)
- WalterGR 3mo agoMost recently, 27 days ago with 9 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48693273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48693273
- bjconlan 3mo agoThanks, I want to add https://www.arraycast.com/2025/01/04/Decker.html https://www.arraycast.com/2025/01/04/Decker.html which introduced me to it. I wish more people had exposure to q/k/apl and think this is a great way to do it. I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice
- tomhow 3mo agoThanks for that audio link. We've added it to the header of this thread, though you'd be welcome to submit it as its own post, perhaps in a few months (to allow time for it to feel fresh again once this thread has vacated the community's memory cache).
- donohoe 3mo agoI miss HyperCard and I love projects like this at a nostalgia level - but if you're going to have aspirations that this is useful today (2026) with a real project then its a complete waste of time. I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.
- hyperhello 3mo agoHyperCardSimulator.com lets you make and import stacks anonymously and link to them online. Enjoy!
- RodgerTheGreat 3mo agoI use personal applications written in Decker on a daily basis. There are over 300 games, zines, visual novels, and toys built with Decker on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker https://itch.io/games/tag-decker Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the_Peacock_House/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the... We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.
- InsideOutSanta 3mo agoA lot of these modern HyperCard reinterpretations get stuck on the black-and-white aesthetics of the original. That's cool, but it limits how broadly appealing they become. Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product. A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech. Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.
- andrelaszlo 3mo agoMyst was famously built in Hypercard, but they must have worked around the limitations somehow? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst
- wetpaws 3mo ago[dead]
- zeroq 3mo agoI'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing. As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook. People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications. And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap. This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
- giantfrog 3mo agoThe Fallout analogy is perfect. Limitation stimulates imagination. I think that’s part of why essentially limitless AI models produce things that are so devoid of it.
- temp0826 3mo agoConstraints really breed creativity. The demoscene is probably my favorite example of it.
- TimTheTinker 3mo agoThis is why the perpetual obsession with creating new genres in university art departments is so dumb. One told a prospective student (my wife's friend) "we don't do beautiful here" as if that signals erudition. Real beauty comes from expressing something coherent within constraints such that the constraints become the means of expression.
- Tade0 3mo agoI was happy to see gen Z art students dropping this sort of snobism when I visited a student art exhibition made for an edition of the Long Night of Museums in my city. Instead of the usual hideous red, black, grey and white that seemed ubiquitous since at least the 80s along with the most terrible textures one could find, there was blue, yellow, different shades of green. And one painting featuring an exchange of text messages.
- huseyinl 3mo agoThe HyperCard legacy lives on! The self-contained single-file HTML export alone makes this a fantastic medium for web zines and indie games, and the dithered aesthetic gives it immediate charm. Looking forward to diving into Lil.
- janci 3mo agoIt seems application state is mainly maintained in the widgets. Reminds me of Delphi. Is there a similar concept for representing state in a well-suited data structures, that can be created and composed visually like the UI widgets?
- RodgerTheGreat 3mo agoDecker heavily emphasizes the concept of "reified data", representing information as tangible entities within a deck. You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications: http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets For example, "WigglyKit" offers several contraptions which operate on a shared convention for representing animated images: http://beyondloom.com/decker/wigglykit.html http://beyondloom.com/decker/wigglykit.html You can also represent composite data as a series of cards in a deck, or use cards as encapsulated "objects" that you communicate with via events: http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html#cardsarerecords http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html#cardsarerecords In a pinch, you can also easily encode arbitrary data in fields as a JSON superset with their ".data" attribute.
- BoingBoomTschak 3mo agoFeels more like jerry-rigged SmallTalk to me. Maybe more like Rebol?
- mbreese 3mo agoIs there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few years ago. These were user developed applications, done by people who may have been a bit technical, but who didn’t to know a full programming language. If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?
- chrisweekly 3mo agoSQLite seems to me like it fits the bill.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoSQLite doesn’t have a built-in user interface. The value of something like FileMaker isn’t the underlying storage mechanism, it’s the WYSIWYG user interface building that lets you quickly build custom apps around it
- chrisweekly 3mo ago(sigh) I was replying to: >"If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use?" not the rest of the comment. mea culpa for not quoting that specific Q. Edit: as for the rest of it, I love using Obsidian for ~everything. It's not a database, but it does support queries and rendering of tabular data, which meets all my admittedly modest needs. (if a true db is required, some ppl like logseq which has some feature overlap w obsidian but is db-driven)
- swiftcoder 3mo agoHistorically the kind of shop that wants a FileMaker/Access replacement does not really want to develop software from scratch. I guess vibe coding may change that equation these days
- josters 3mo agoThis reminds me of LiveCode[1] (aka Revolution and MetaCard) which I’ve used quite a bit about a decade ago. Was also inspired by HyperCard. Just checked their site again and it seems they’ve discontinued the open source version and have pivoted to an AI-assisted drag and drop UI builder. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
- D-Coder 3mo agoI'm using LiveCode for a dozen personal applications (and for just the fun of coding; I'm a retired s/w engineer). It's no longer free, but I started with HyperCard and LiveCode is an excellent replacement, at least for me.
- gnodar 3mo agoThe OpenXTalk community is keeping the open source version alive. https://www.openxtalk.org/ https://www.openxtalk.org/
- josters 3mo agoThanks for letting me know, maybe I need to get back into it. I always enjoyed the speed with which I could prototype new ideas and even get them installed on a phone or tablet.
- proxysna 3mo agoNever used HyperCard, but from descriptions and screenshots in the article reminds me a lot of Delphi/Pascal/Lazarus IDE’s. Appeal is understandable, because it is so cool to be snore to from a few lines of code to a clickable intractable executable, that is the sort of Feedback loop that I miss in python and go GUI builders that I’ve used previously, and why I keep c inning back to Lazarus.
- neet_dev 3mo ago[dead]
- mempko 3mo agoWait, you are telling me people vibe created apps before LLMs? /s This is beautiful. I loved Hypercard when I was a kid. If they added networking to it, it would have been superior to web browsers! Please people, have some joy and stop taking people down a peg for vibe coding apps. Let people have fun again for once.
- 2b3a51 3mo agoVibe away. Vibe code like a teenager with leather trousers and a top with zips (punk days). Just don't put it in production or in a work flow where there could be consequences if (randomly) nondeterministic.
- mempko 3mo agocorporate mindset.
- jandrese 3mo agoBeing able to load stack pages in from a remote site would be both amazing and a total security nightmare. Hypercard's security model was NOT suitable for that kinda of activity. Hypercard viruses were already a problem back in the 90s, but luckily they were hard to spread so the impact was limited.
- cure_42 3mo agoDecker seems like it would have a lot of potential for e-ink devices like the boox note series and such.
- carimura 3mo agoIf I could point to two major influences that directed me towards computer engineering it was Hypercard and BBS's.
- felixding 3mo agoNitpicking: “classic Mac OS” not “classic macOS”
- hallole 3mo agoWoah, this is something I've wanted for forever! Only, without the "quirky" aspects of its design. I can appreciate the charm, but it does obstruct utility, and this sort of tool -- a super-general digital whiteboard -- would be oh so useful. I never knew of its predecessor, "HyperCard," either, which looks to be essentially what I wish for, only modernized.
- bytesage 3mo ago[flagged]
- madhu_ghalame 3mo ago[dead]
- NoSalt 3mo agoWill it run Myst???
- JKCalhoun 3mo agoEngineers of a certain age, sitting around, kicking around ideas for a modern Hypercard… what a great pass-time. Scripting language? Javascript? Python? SDL3 for cross-platform rendering, audio… Should the "cards" just be a subset of HTML? Etc…
- jandrese 3mo agoIt's kind of a shame this uses its own, probably more powerful, language instead of HyperTalk. HyperTalk is one of the most accessible languages for beginners I've ever seen. Sure it was primitive and had somewhat weak data organization capabilities, but if you're like 6 it's pretty incredible for your experience to be: 1. Open a blank script 2. Drag a field on the screen and name it "myname" 3. Drag a button on the screen, open up it's script and see: on mouseUp end mouseUp 4. You then enter the following two lines between those two lines: ask "What is your name?" put it into card field myname 5. Then you go back and click the button and a dialog box appears asking your name and when you type it in an hit enter the name appears in the field you created. That sort of directness is lost in modern development environments. The concept that the button's script lives inside of the button, and in fact everything on the page could have its own script. The page itself also has script, even the stack itself. Your code can of course call code in other objects if need be (typically at the page or stack level), and there is a whole message passing thing happening in the background. It's by far the most intuitive programming environment I've ever seen. It has the kind of immediate impact that helps to save off boredom or feeling like there's too much homework before the fun starts. In the day people complained about the syntactic sugar in HyperTalk, but I think it was just right for the target audience. They did have more of a point about the difficulty in managing structured data, often having to store things in hidden fields referenced by line and word number or hacks like that. The most incredible part is this was all in an application that came with the OS. It was the perfect opportunity for a bored kid to randomly come across it and discover a lifelong passion. There was nothing to install, no product to buy first--it was just there, asking to be discovered. And even if your parents weren't about to buy a reference book you could open up other stacks and start reading the code to learn the language. Because most scripts were small and self contained (remember that they were stored at the widget level) this was a legitimate way to understand the basic syntax and keywords.
- RodgerTheGreat 3mo agoIn Decker, most of this example would be similar. The button's default script template would be: on click do end And filling it in with an equivalent script would be something like: on click do myname.text:alert["What is your name?" "string"] end There is slightly more "programming-language-like" punctuation to Lil than HyperTalk, but simple examples are still simple, and in my opinion having first-class collections (lists, dictionaries, tables) and a richer set of APL-like operators makes Lil scale up much better to more complex programs. As a child I recall struggling tremendously with HyperTalk's "almost-english" structure; it made scripts easy enough to read and understand, but provided very little help when it came to writing new scripts. Decker has a similar Widget -> Card -> Deck event bubbling hierarchy to HyperCard, and in my opinion retains much of the same directness and simplicity for simple applications. The differences in approach won't please everyone, but they are all carefully considered, and have been refined over time based on feedback from the user community. Decker is a living, growing platform!
- tangentstorm 3mo agoDecker is amazing. I've started a set of tutorials (decks + videos) as a byproduct of trying to teach my 8-year old daughter to program with it. https://itch.io/t/6632495/decker-programming-tutorials-videos-with-decks https://itch.io/t/6632495/decker-programming-tutorials-video...
- k310 3mo agoI wrote one-off scientific applications in HyperCard for a rocket science company. Graphics via creating HyperBasic XFCN's IIRC. One was a simulator for trading off various optical sensors that our Director enjoyed using. Again, IIRC, graphics output was also in EPS, that the tech pubs group could import directly into reports. Another was a form, using built-in fields, that my boss stole (YAY) for creating documentation for a progranning project we were working on. Output was in Postscript, basically in Unix manpage format. When your boss steals the documentation job, it's a big win. Fantastic rapid prototyping environment with no-brainer UI elements and persistent database.
- jgalego 3mo agotalk about serendipity: https://github.com/JGalego/HyperLab https://github.com/JGalego/HyperLab