I’m involved in the early planning stage of a couple of projects which might both describe their aims as “to create the next Hypercard”.

This has been an ambition of mine for the last ten years at least, but unfortunately it’s an ambition shared by an awful lot of other people, and so it has become a bit of a hackneyed phrase. Of course, what we definitely don’t want to do is create a Hypercard rip off. There are already some around, they are probably great, and I wish them all well.

What we want to do is to distill the essence of Hypercard - what it was about it which was so fantastic at the time - and apply those same principles to the environment we find ourselves in today.

One thing I’m surprised about is that I couldn’t find a concise description anywhere on the web of what exactly it was that made Hypercard great. As a result, here’s my first attempt: [What Made Hypercard Great?]. I’d be very interested to hear people’s comments.

Whatever I do, my Technorati Profile link seems to be producing errors. Not quite sure why.

I blame Kevin Marks (completely arbitrarily you understand). Hopefully he’ll read this post and fix it for me ;)

Update: I’ve deleted all the claims and started again… the JavaScript error was down to Drupal helpfully inserting a <br> tag in the middle of the Technorati script tag.

On the topic of Hypercard, there seem to be a few other interesting authoring tool projects around. I’ve listed a few below: anyone got any more I should look at?

Squeak has some pretty big names behind it.

PythonCard seems a way away from prime time, but sounds like an interesting project, with a good motto: “Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.”

The Skate project aims to recreate SK8, which was sort of like Hypercard on steroids, written in MCL.

Phase 2 of the great Elegant Chaos relocation is about to get underway.

As a result, the web site may be down for the next week or so. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…

… by Sam, aged 35 (and a bit).

I’ve written a Drupal filter module called [autolink], which works in a similar way to the glossary module except that it creates links to external sites.

The idea is that every time I enter a particular word or group of words (like Tom Smith for example), the filter module will automatically create a link for me.

This is obviously a bit of a blunt instrument (what if I want to refer to a different Tom Smith?), but it is a handy way of avoiding having to enter common links again and again.

I am thinking about ways of making it a slightly sharper instrument, but for now the basic thing works and will be published here soon!