OSNews

It brings back a funny mixture of memories. Hypercard was great. And in the eighties, OS Classic was way ahead of DOS and then Windows in usability. The hardware rapidly started to show its age, but there were enough compensations. And Apple's mania for lockin and control were not yet oppressive or particularly obvious. So I used Macs from close to the original right up to the pastel iMacs.

But gradually, Windows caught up, parity with 98, way ahead of Classic with XP, the PC hardware overtook Mac hardware by miles, Linux arrived, the lockins became more and more strident. As the products recovered from their slump in the nineties, the company became less and less attractive, and the Mac Fanatics became more and more fanatical.

Apple would in the end neither support Hypercard nor open source it, and finally dumped it, leaving everyone in the lurch. This was a kind of turning point - lifestyle marketing had triumphed over the original vision.

The vision had anyway all along been a very strange and unsustainable mixture of empowerment coupled with obsessive control.

And this has continued. The iTunes lockins were bad enough, but the lockins with the app store for the phone are really bad. In the end, for me, Apple is a company you should not do business with, regardless of how good its products may or may not be, because its ethics and business practices are repugnant.

You can get an up to date descendant of Hypercard in the form of Revolution. There is now a free version - look for the alpha version of Media on the runrev site. Its cross platform, though the Linux version has one or two gaps in it. It will seem quite familiar to the Hypercard aficionado, if there are any left. Sadly, you mention HC to the average Mac Head of the new generation today, even the most die hard, and most of them have never heard of it...

Edited 2009-09-23 09:02 UTC