What is a modern successor to HyperCard?
Livecode went closed source and is out of the reach of most folks due to pricing.
Decker is too like to the original in being limited to b/w pixel graphics.
Flash afforded vector graphics and scripting, but is moribund.
Scratch only makes games and game-like things, with no ability to make traditional GUI elements.
Tcl/TK and Python/Tkinter lack integrated graphical development environments where one could just draw, while tools such as Lazarus and QTdesigner are too integrated with traditional textual programming. Processing similarly lacks a graphical representation of code or a drawing environment.
Nodebox and Ryven and so forth separate pretty graphics made of standard components and output.
If a naïve user wanted to express themselves by integrating drawing and numbers and code, what modern environment facilitates this?
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118159
(this discussion seems to have aged out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040642 )
and it's almost exactly what I want (just needs to be a stand-alone desktop app, and have tools for arc and Bézier curve (so that a user could extend arc into a circle, and I assume line into a rectangle) --- if it added Flash-like deforming line-drawing (see Wick Editor for an implementation) that would be icing on the cake.
Thanks!
https://beyondloom.com/decker/color.html#Index
It's also possible to build new widgets with arbitrary appearances and behaviors like date pickers, radio buttons, or tab-bars via "Contraptions"[1]. The community forum has a collection[2] of Contraptions to suit various applications; sharing or re-using them across decks is as simple as copying and pasting a widget.
[0] https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html#font
[1] http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#contraptions
[2] https://itch.io/t/2690007/the-contraption-bazaar
Emulators page with links to versions for MacOS and Windows.
https://mendelson.org/emulators.html
Hypercard 2.4.1 is available at the Macintosh Repository
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2632-hypercard-2-4
I had bought it long ago and used it in my work to make simulations with graphical output (via XCMDS) and to output EPS files for tech pubs. I think that the in-house use of HyperCard was vastly under-reported.
I'll update in a reply if and when I find the best standalone HC clones in my search.
Naturally, the full-blown emulator and HC are not for kids, unless you install it for your kids. I let my daughter have some fun with the original HyperCard, and I keep a MacCube with MacOS9 for sentimental reasons, though it's boxed right now.
Sightly off-topic, Processing offers highly graphical coding.
https://processing.org/
And gcompris offers lots of educational apps that one might have written in HyperCard.
https://www.gcompris.net/index-en.html
Probably I should just use Hypernext Studio:
https://tigabyte.com/
but I don't like that it's closed source/very small company (one person?) and not really cross-platform.
IMHO, there are so many interesting past submissions on this subject that I suggest inspecting the compendium directly:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=hypercard