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Looking for Hypercard-like development environment

1 points by chuckmcknight ↗ HN
A friend of mine is looking for a development environment similar to Hypercard (pref. open source) that will enable his to create standalone apps (obv. with the runtime included). He's not looking to make any money from these, hence the interest in open source, but does need to be able to provide most of the functionality associated with Hypercard (incl. video playback) as well as data grids. I've looked at a number of for-pay options and things like PythonCard (not rich enough in controls) and Shoes, but they don't seem to fit his requirements. LIkewise, he's not a "heavyweight programmer" (his description, not mine) so something at the level of Hypercard seems to be the best fit. Anyone working on or know of anything like that?

Thanks!

3 comments

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makecheck
I'm curious, is there a reason the apps need to be standalone (e.g. performance)? A modern web site could do a good job of displaying the kinds of data you mentioned.
chuckmcknight
Yes, he said that he wants people to be able to use the app without having to be on the internet. I mentioned Mozilla Prism and Google Gears as well as small web servers like Abyss, but he's not too keen on that approach. I'm sure that there may be performance issues that he hasn't mentioned as well, but his primary motive seems to be that internet connectivity should not be a requirement.

Shoes was interesting because it took the approach of being completely standalone, but _whytheluckystiff has vanished so in some regards the driver behind that project is gone.

I've pointed out Supercard and Runtime Revolution as descendants of Hypercard, but I think he's trying to avoid having any out of pocket costs.

Most likely something like Chrome might be possible, but not everyone has (or wants) to install Chrome just to run an app. However, I'm still open to any ideas that I can pass along.