uliwitness
Active member
Hi,
since someone in another thread mentioned it'd be interesting, just thought I'd mention that I'm working on a HyperCard clone names Stacksmith that runs on modern OSes. Some goal posts:
1. Fix some of the mistakes SuperCard and LiveCode made in extending HyperCard's design
2. Make it feel like a modern program
3. Import existing HyperCard stacks (I have a 'stackimport' command line tool that converts a HyperCard stack into XML + image files, which Stacksmith can read, as can any human with an image editor and text editor, but it's not been a priority to keep it working)
4. It will not run XCMDs or XFCNs (that would require MacOS 9 emulation and even then wouldn't be very useful for most XCMDs), though I will eventually add some sort of extension mechanism, and I will likely add some built-in commands for compatibility with common XCMDs like "palette", "addcolor" etc.
5. Expand upon HC with color support, internet support, arrays, multithreading, modern MacOS UI elements, closures, animation, but done "the HyperCard way" using metaphors non-programmers know, not by just adding Pascal or C syntax to HyperTalk.
A lot of this already sort of works (multithreading and closures aren't there yet, animation doesn't exceed what HyperCard did yet), but it's all still very much a work in progress and not really usable in practice.
I've also started rewriting the programming language a while ago, to fix a mistake I made in the core design that greatly slowed down development of new language features, so who knows when that new rewritten language will ship.
But anyway, some of the results of this can be seen in the file format description on HyperCard.org, which describes all I know about HyperCard's file format, as well as the AddColor resources that store color information.
So if any of you are curious, feel free to ask questions in this thread.
since someone in another thread mentioned it'd be interesting, just thought I'd mention that I'm working on a HyperCard clone names Stacksmith that runs on modern OSes. Some goal posts:
1. Fix some of the mistakes SuperCard and LiveCode made in extending HyperCard's design
2. Make it feel like a modern program
3. Import existing HyperCard stacks (I have a 'stackimport' command line tool that converts a HyperCard stack into XML + image files, which Stacksmith can read, as can any human with an image editor and text editor, but it's not been a priority to keep it working)
4. It will not run XCMDs or XFCNs (that would require MacOS 9 emulation and even then wouldn't be very useful for most XCMDs), though I will eventually add some sort of extension mechanism, and I will likely add some built-in commands for compatibility with common XCMDs like "palette", "addcolor" etc.
5. Expand upon HC with color support, internet support, arrays, multithreading, modern MacOS UI elements, closures, animation, but done "the HyperCard way" using metaphors non-programmers know, not by just adding Pascal or C syntax to HyperTalk.
A lot of this already sort of works (multithreading and closures aren't there yet, animation doesn't exceed what HyperCard did yet), but it's all still very much a work in progress and not really usable in practice.
I've also started rewriting the programming language a while ago, to fix a mistake I made in the core design that greatly slowed down development of new language features, so who knows when that new rewritten language will ship.
But anyway, some of the results of this can be seen in the file format description on HyperCard.org, which describes all I know about HyperCard's file format, as well as the AddColor resources that store color information.
So if any of you are curious, feel free to ask questions in this thread.