Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

I'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing.

As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.

People used the same building primitives to make real blown games or stuff like accounting applications.

And the best part - at that team it didn't looked cheap.

This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.

Previously:

Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments)

Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments)

Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)

This reminds me of LiveCode[1] (aka Revolution and MetaCard) which I’ve used quite a bit about a decade ago. Was also inspired by HyperCard. Just checked their site again and it seems they’ve discontinued the open source version and have pivoted to an AI-assisted drag and drop UI builder.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few years ago. These were user developed applications, done by people who may have been a bit technical, but who didn’t to know a full programming language.

If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?

I miss HyperCard and I love projects like this at a nostalgia level - but if you're going to have aspirations that this is useful today (2026) with a real project then its a complete waste of time.

I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.

It seems application state is mainly maintained in the widgets. Reminds me of Delphi. Is there a similar concept for representing state in a well-suited data structures, that can be created and composed visually like the UI widgets?

If you want the "agentic future" version of this (sorry), tldraw just relased "tldraw offline"[1] which in some ways has a lot of overlap with HyperCard as well.

[1] https://offline.tldraw.com/

The HyperCard legacy lives on! The self-contained single-file HTML export alone makes this a fantastic medium for web zines and indie games, and the dithered aesthetic gives it immediate charm. Looking forward to diving into Lil.

Decker is neat. I was in the process of using it the other day, but discovered it did not have much by way of font size adjustment in text fields. You could make a heading, but I didn't see a way to make it bigger or larger than simply being a heading.

awesome, already love the detailed feature set. one thing I'd love is the option to change themes. for eg. i'd like a more modern theme if i want to create a presentation and send it across. retro is a bit of a cognitive overload on users who are now habitual of navigating a different type of UI.

Looks awesome! Very oddly super small window for it in iOS safari though.

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