There’s a new zine accepting sumbissions now. It’s all about, and built with Hypercard. I’ve mentioned my love of hypercard in the past, but I’ve never talked about it at length. So let’s talk about the hyperzine, and hypercard in general.

The zine desctiption:

2018 is the year of HyperCard.

The last version of HyperCard, 2.4.1, was released 20 years ago in 1998. In that time, it’s maintained small communities of hobbyists maintaining their stacks and creating new art on old computers. HyperCard has been used by LGBT and other marginalized people to make interactive art representing their experiences.

On the 20th anniversary of HyperCard’s discontinuation, I want to pay tribute to the programming tool that started it all.

So, what’s a hypercard?

Hypercard was essentially the fastest and easiest way for non-technical users to create applications.

Think Powerpoint plus some of the least bad features of the internet plus a really simple and easy to understand method of responding to user inputs and you’ll land somewhere in the neighborhood. Hypercard is worth the price of admission. I want to keep a compact macintosh in my home specifically for exploring hypercard.

Hypercard is the best. It works as a rapid application prototyping tool, or even as a final destination for your application. It’s a pain to get hypercard stacks running on modern computers, but if you’re already set up for it, and you’re building something for internal use, I can’t think of a better platform in terms of speed or ease of use.

That sounds like a lot of Hype(rcard)

Yep! I’m really enthusiastic about it. Hypercard is among my favorite technologies of the past, and the only one that I can think of that doesn’t have a modern analog or replacement. To be frank, we need hypercard now more than ever, and I think this zine is a great idea.

I wanna hypercard.

Neat! Short of owning an old mac, the best route is emulation. The hypercard zine site sez:

Your best bet is going to be using SheepShaver running Mac OS 9 and HyperCard 2.4. I’ll be posting an in-depth tutorial on getting started soon, but for now there’s a good SheepShaver tutorial at E-Maculation.

And then provides this additional link to some hypercard resources.

If you don’t want to emulate, your best bet might be Vipercard. Vipercard is not (yet) hypercard compatible, but it gets the look and feel right, and it’s a new project that is undergoing some serious growth. I don’t know much about the developer, but I’m watching the project closely, and if I am able to support them financially, I will.

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