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I 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.

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I 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

Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the...

We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.

A 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.

> Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product

They never hacked color into HyperCard 2 since their plans for HyperCard 3 were too grand - it was going to be a part of QuickTime, so that HyperCard stacks would be multimedia applications delivered as QuickTime movies, including embedding on the web. This was when Apple was spiraling though and it got cut.

You said it well. The aesthetic is so much more about building your project within the project itself (like what Jupyter and Marimo did for Python, but more so because you also lay out GUI this way), having built-in components, designing around very simple "multimedia" integrations (push a button and a sound plays! With a single command in the event handler!) etc. than about any of the technical limitations.

To me, a properly modern "Hypercard" would be something like if Marimo and Pygame had a baby, and that baby was IDLE except it didn't suck.

> IDLE except it didn't suck.

Hmm, I put that poorly, and can't edit now. I'm really thinking more about the entire Tkinter stack, and the way that IDLE is used both to demonstrate it and to provide a way to edit the Python code needed to interact with it.

> Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product.

I think the bigger problem was when Apple stopped shipping the Hypercard development environment and instead shipped only Player. Also when they stopped developing or supporting the environment entirely.

They had a really cool thing going, but since it didn't contribute directly to the bottom line corporate had it killed.

Myst was famously built in Hypercard, but they must have worked around the limitations somehow?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

i believe they used a modified version of hypercard for myst. their earlier games, like _cosmic osmo_, used vanilla hypercard.

In a sense, yes. They used third-party extensions (XCMDs) to HyperCard to add features it didn’t support out of the box, such as full-color support.

And in the final releases of HyperCard, Apple even bundled a third-party color XCMD in order to pretend that HyperCard supported color. It was really limited though (insert PICT files from disk! change the color of buttons! use the paint tools in color? what are those?)

i think supercard supported color.

Yeah there were a few clones that added color and other features - two are even still around today!

https://www.mackiev.com/hyperstudio/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

The Apple IIGS version supported color

decker has color!

Smart

HyperCardSimulator.com lets you make and import stacks anonymously and link to them online. Enjoy!