Doing some more digging, apparently AdGuard just created a URL tracking filter a couple of weeks ago that we should be able to enable in either the AdGuard or Ublock Origin (or perhaps other ad-blocking) Firefox mobile addons eventually:
https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-url-tracking-filter.html
Or you can manually add the filter now. After installing the Ublock Origin addon in firefox mobile, I clicked on the 3 dots -> Addons -> Ublock Origin -> Open the dashboard -> Filter lists -> Import... and pasted this URL (from the top of the above link):
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistr...
I tested by sharing a URL with UTM and other parameters, and it did strip them.
Maybe it depends on what's the next platform. C/C++ was sort of a base programming language for desktop apps, javascript for the browser, and Objective C & Java for mobile. Server apps have been a mix of PHP/python/java/ruby/node.js.
I guess my 2 wild guesses for the long-term future might be either or both 1) a visual/block programming tool (which perhaps might perhaps be more usable in virtual reality type environments) or 2) natural language programming (programming in English and/or other natural languages), which might be more usable in both virtual reality and chat environments.
The main challenge is students who can't read yet vs. those who can. In an after-school elementary school coding club I did a while back, I mainly used https://code.org/
The kids also really liked Lightbot. Unfortunately, the web version uses Flash which means it won't run nowadays on most computers. There are apps though, including a LightBotJr version for 4+.
I ran across blockstack recently and was wondering if it fit the bill. It seems like Solid minus the linked data stuff. The user keeps control of their own data just like with Solid. They have some initial apps listed here: https://app.co/blockstack
At the bottom of the comments, a member of the Hypercard team said it was killed in 92, before Jobs returned.
There still is no free development tool out there that matches what Hypercard did in terms of power and ease of use. We're still coding with languages designed for constraints that disappeared decades ago.
I've never used Hypercard and I just can't fathom the love for it.
If nothing matches Hypercard, why don't people use it (or some opensource copy) of it? So many seem enthralled by it but the reality is no one seems to want to bring it back.
It was a different time, the world moved on to web enabled / multi-user applications. Hypercard and MS Access where decidedly built around single users with the latter having multi-user capabilities but not great support for it. They where both designed in a time where a constant network connection was a luxury and not a commodity. They where awesome for their time, but it was also a simpler time, as of yet no one has come up with a stupid simple app builder for present day computing realities as complexity has exploded, its a interesting problem and if a person could make creating simple apps for web/mobile/multi-user as easy as Hypercard was, they would certainly be rolling in fortunes.
One of the attractions of Hypercard was that a "stack" (document) was entirely self-contained; and would always behave exactly the same on any machine where HC could run.
Notably, would run without any need for servers (or, worse, the subscription-and-lock-in "services" ubiquitous today -- arguably the 1980s "computer revolution" was strangled in the cradle, and we've gone most of the way back to 1970s-style time-sharing now: how many phone apps etc. will run usefully without a net connection? The "smartphone" is essentially a small "glass TTY", rather than personal computer in the '80s sense.)
I've run HC stacks written 30+ years ago. How many current-day "web app" documents will be readable as-found 30 years from now? For that matter, I've paid for iOS apps that would no longer execute after half a year (on account of Apple's "API changes", or in some cases -- author's "call home" server fell down and did not get up, etc.) Permanence (in the most basic "I paid for this and it ought to be usable for so long as any compatible iron remains functional" sense) is no longer part of the software commercial culture, and one is likely to be laughed at for merely raising the question.
> The "smartphone" is essentially a small "glass TTY", rather than personal computer in the '80s sense.
We now have a generation or two that completely missed this era, and, worse, might be uninterested in the history. The idea that you would have a ubiquitous, portable, always-on personal computing device and that -- at least from the perspective of people who are knowledgeable of about this history -- you would put a Unix on it is completely crazy.
It is, as you say, an expensive and sleek teletype emulator
Its power was partly in its ubiquity - people who weren't programmers stumbled across it, had a play and suddenly realised 'this is a bit handy'. There was never really a killer app for Hypercard, it had so many bizarre use-case cases. But its flexibility and ability welcome unlikely users in is where it did so well.
Well, the main reason no one uses Hypercard itself is because emulating classic MacOS is a pain and a half.
I haven't explored all the copies, but the ones I have seen tend to be less featureful and/or less user-friendly than the original.
Furthermore, probably the best modern software that's similar to Hypercard in its overall flexibility and power is...the web. Back in the day, Hypercard was it; there wasn't really anything else in that space. Nowadays, there's still nothing that's quite as awesome or matches all its features, but there are things that are much closer and do a lot of the same things that are much more accessible than emulating or reimplementing Hypercard.
The existence of the Web is indeed a big reason. While everybody seems to compare Hypercard to things like Visual Basic, and yes, you could use it that way to make applications, most people used it to create stacks on a topic (a particular band, or Shakespeare's plays, or Japanese swords) that were basically Web sites before the Web.
Emulating Mac OS classic isn't particularly difficult these days. I use sheepshaver with great success. I actually DO use it to run my old hypercard games I wrote in elementary school.
Last time I tried using Basilisk II, I managed to get it to be stable (running System 7 in an emulated...IIsi, I think?), but if I ever tried to change anything beyond adding and removing disks, it just wouldn't run.
I haven't tried SheepShaver much, I admit, because most of the stuff I want to run was written for 68k and runs poorly or not at all on PPC.
I guess DreamWeaver might be the modern equivalent (though definitely not as easy to use as Hypercard). Can DreamWeaver set up client-side storage easily? With Hypercard it was dead simple to save stuff to local storage.
> At the bottom of the comments, a member of the Hypercard team said it was killed in 92, before Jobs returned.
Well, HyperCard had several lives.
An early version of HyperCard 3.0 was demonstrated at WWDC in 1996 which used QuickTime ("QuickTime Interactive", or QTi) as its runtime. That would've allowed stacks to run in browsers, and in every app that leveraged QuickTime to render multimedia content.
The 1992 killing was before my time, but in any case HyperCard was effectively killed forever in 2000 when Jobs reassigned the HyperCard engineering team to not-HyperCard.
you might want to check https://www.livecode.com is is a modern day xtalk, it uses a language and model just like HyperCard but it creates standalones for windows, mac, linux, android and iOS.
i poked around the website and forum a bit and one thing I missed was a way to see community libraries and projects. check out the euphoria site for instance: http://rapideuphoria.com/archive.htm
I totally agree with you that the site needs more work to make these things more discoverable. We don't have a package manager (I built one more than ten years ago, it never got traction and it was very naive) but there are many libraries floating around. Our forums and mailing lists are the most common places to find resources. The IDE also has an online portal inside it that can be used to share code, most people use it to share demos, samples and libraries.
yeah, that's why i feel like euphoria is a good example - they have a small (but, from what i can see, enthusiastic) community, and their website doesn't have a ton of polish, but it's pretty pleasant to navigate and makes things very discoverable.
CSS has one of the strangest designs in all of computing. It's simultaneously Turing-complete yet too weak to easily encode many common types of styling. It has practically no abstraction capabilities, no namespacing, and its syntax at every level (selector syntax, Unicode escaping, etc) is different from the other languages it has to interoperate with, for no apparent reason.
I doubt Hypercard would have ever gotten anything like CSS. It was unlikely enough that CSS ended up anything like CSS!
Also, modern Dev Tools in all the major browsers are getting close to being full blown IDEs in their own right (again). It's got a full REPL one F12 (or Ctrl+Shift+I) press away. (Plus modern syntax highlighting, element inspection, direct CSS and sometimes JS file modification.)
(Pre-Edgmium, Edge's Dev Tools even shared a bunch of code with VS Code and briefly explored hosting a full VS Code experience.)
I would, why wouldn't i? If all you need is to write some formatted text with a bunch of images and perhaps a table or two, composer does the job perfectly fine and the page you get works on any server and client with practically zero overhead and resources.
They wouldn't. You would, that's fine, and I made a site with it in the distant past, or I tried. I checked, but if I did actually publish it, archive.org doesn't have that version.
I say tolerance because much more recently I had problems trying to make a chart and tripping over colspan and rowspan stuff. I really just need to sketch the contents out on paper, first...
I'm not sure i understand, your issue with Composer was making a chart? Why would you try to make a chart in Composer, it is a page editor not an image editor, why not make the chart in a tool made specifically for charts and use it as an image? Also what tables and colspan/rowspan have to do with charts?
Sorry, I meant table and started saying so but I cut that part out at some point. I also tried lowriter; editing tables and rows and cells is better, but not by much.
It is closer to the ideals of smalltalk and LISP (of the '70s) - where there is little or no distinction between the environment in which one writes the software and the environment that the software is run.
This is a fundamentally different way of how the environment works. You could stop a program and access the development environment because that was part of the runtime.
The parent is talking about an integrated environment for development, where that integrated environment is indistinguishable from the language itself.
Examples of this include elisp and emacs, smalltalk and squeak, and to a lesser extent visual studio and C#.
There have been relatively few ecosystems so integrated. Java and Javascript/html/electron apps are notably not like that at all. There is no one "the" environment for coding those, simply several very popular ones.
My own take is that Apple should have made a "Hypercard"-like thing the "top layer" of a new operating system. In other words, the entire desktop/windows/buttons interface to the main OS would be itself scripted in Hypercard.
Smalltalk takes this a step further of course by making the whole operating system a live environment. The very UI vocabulary one uses can also double as "programming"
Hmm. Unity scripting sort of works like this if you if ignore the closed source parts. It's kind of nice to edit the editor.
At the same time, having the power to corrupt your runtime is arguably more trouble than it's worth.
It was really a thing that could, theoretically, have taken the course of Director or Flash. You can imagine a parallel universe where that happened and my guess is the final result would have been the same.
It's better to learn things in or close to the contexts in which you will use them. That's the heart of situated learning / problem-based learning / simulations, etc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning
