Björnke, I think you are right on the money. I had never used Hypercard, but stumbled across Rev 1.1.1 and was staggered to think that this entire programming paradigm had passed me by (I wrote my first BASIC program in 1980). I'm glad that RunRev/Metacard had gone with a cross-platform implementation. I'm only just stepping my toe into mobile development, and I'm pretty sure that if it wasn't for Runrev facilitating that, I would not do it (I've a huge number of other programming/systems issues to deal with). If Apple had not ceased Hypercard development, then Runrev may never have taken off.
Jobs focused with incredible vision, and Hypercard was a casualty. In fact, so was WebObjects, which was a product which was much closer to Jobs heart (being the product that sustained NeXT in its last few years before acquisition). There were key trajectories of WebObjects that were only ever started but never finished (e.g. DirectToJavaClient, where an application was developed by specifying rules). WebObjects is not dead but not really living much. The technology is still available to download, but it requires the use of the open-source Eclipse IDE for development, and requires many third-party open source libraries to function decently. The difference between the death of Hypercard and the stasis of WebObjects is about 5 to 10 years. WO was used (and probably is still used) as a fundamental infrastructure within apple.com. Nevertheless, the last retail copy of it was 5.2 (released in 2002). Apple still needed WO to persist, and made great use internally of 3rd party open-source libraries, so Apple continued to make minor updates to WO whilst no longer selling it. If Apple did not use WO themselves, I'm sure it would have simply died 5 years ago. So, Hypercard was not the only Apple innovation to be killed-off. Back in the day, NeXT used to charge $20,000 per server for WO, and I believe it was $5,000 for a developer license. 2011/12/2 Björnke von Gierke <[email protected]> > People who wrote in this thread about why HC was killed are all self > centric conspiracy lunatics. ... But of course Jobs did what he does best: > Concentrate on a single project (the iMac & what became Mac OS X), getting > ridiculed for it > _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
