Decker Is Hypercard for Now

June 9, 2024 5:27 AM

Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior. Remember HyperCard? Ever wish you could still make simple, scriptable, interactive presentations and applications with almost no effort? Well, with Decker, you can. It's free on itch.io
posted by bowbeacon (13 comments total)

That’s cute. Shame about the retro skin. It’s not like you could ever use it in a commercial or professional context with the one bit vibe. Looks useful for fun tho.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:22 AM on June 9 [1 favorite]

Those fill-textures just made me 7 again. Captain Magneto is buzzing in my ear. I feel the need to cheers Anne and Jay.
posted by es_de_bah at 7:42 AM on June 9

Hmmm. On the one hand this gives me the warm fuzzies. On the other, as the Responses page notes, this is not really anything like Hypercard under the hood.

The message passing hierarchy is nowhere to be found.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:09 AM on June 9 [3 favorites]

I’m enjoying the creator’s blog, as an aside, and I’m not a programmer.
posted by moonmoth at 10:34 AM on June 9 [1 favorite]

I'd like to have Hypercard again, but what I really want is for it to be 35 years ago and for me to be 35 years younger--and, given that 1989 really kind of sucked for me, that's saying something.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:38 AM on June 9 [7 favorites]

Hypercard was the second most fun I had with a computer in highschool (number 1 was Doom but it's not hypercard's fault it came out).
posted by Reyturner at 11:49 AM on June 9 [3 favorites]

HyperCard lover checking in. I never get tired of seeing projects like this. Decker is interesting to compare to CardStock, which uses Python as its scripting language and doesn't have the retro look 'n' feel, but can similarly produce standalone apps and deploy to the web.
posted by /\/\/\/ at 2:03 PM on June 9 [8 favorites]

Ooh re: Cardstock. I hadn’t seen that before.
posted by bowbeacon at 2:47 PM on June 9

It's not a HyperCard clone until it has "Barney Sucks" stacks.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:02 PM on June 9 [3 favorites]

I used HyperCard to make a point-and-click adventure game, which I then submitted for a (mandatory) grade 9 science fair. Since the project didn’t involve actual scientific experimentation, according to their rules the best grade I could receive was a B. I couldn’t possibly have cared less.

(Typing it out, I’m realizing this sort of thing has been a real trend for me.)

Anyway, SPELUNX (from the COSMIC OSMO folks IIRC) was the one that stuck with me. I love the aesthetic of the vertical two-pixel halftones that came with HyperCard. At least one person here has to know what I’m talking about.
posted by TangoCharlie at 10:23 AM on June 10 [3 favorites]

(On the topic of Decker, in line with Halloween Jack’s comment above, you can build a new HyperCard but you can’t make me into a youth with way too much time on his hand.)
posted by TangoCharlie at 10:25 AM on June 10 [1 favorite]

>> "At least one person here has to know what I'm talking about".

Yup. Atkinson Dithering
posted by spudsilo at 1:52 PM on June 10

Atkinson dithering is good, though I was actually thinking of the halftones/dithering patterns here (from Spelunx), which I haven’t seen outside of HyperCard contexts. If you painted within HyperCard, they were at your disposal from one of the painting palettes. It was a good look.
posted by TangoCharlie at 6:56 PM on June 10