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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

> One of the things modern tools left behind is how the code and UI were bound together

That seems wrong to me, unless I've misunderstood your comment. It's more like there's a saturated market full of such tools.

Microsot Power Apps, Quickbase, Mendix, Salesforce Platform all provide "no-code solutions" that let you drag and drop and customise with code. Then there are Bootstrap generators that you let you control layout. I've seen plugins that integrate React components into a WYSIWYG editor. Even PowerPoint has easy to attach custom actions for desktop presentations.

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None of these apps are really priced in a way that allows me to build an app and share it with people as a personal project though.

Let's assume that I want to build a simple app for my local theater troupe, which will have 20 users:

* Quickbase starts at $600 a month

* PowerApps costs me £7 for every user I want to give access to the app

* Salesforce again costs me £20 per user per month

* Mendix costs me £10 per user

All these are priced at enterprises that have deeper pockets than a personal project or small community org can stomach.

If you just want to make a cool app and share it with some people online, none of these products have commercial models which are compatible when you compare it against the 'old fashioned' ways to build apps like WinForms, Flash etc.

I would love to find an alternative to these products with a commercial structure that means if I build something cool I can share it on HN without it bankrupting me.

I think that's a different point to the OP, which was more about Hypercard (which would not support your app idea as it's not multi-user).

That said, there are also alternatives in that space:

* Drupal

* WordPress - particularly with Forms and Elementor

* SquareSpace, Wix, Netlify all have free tiers (depending on what your troupe users can do)

I don't personally think any of those start to scratch the capabilities of WinForms or an old-school Access DB - These are just the ability to create a static site, or at most submit some data through a form, not build an actual application.

I know Hypercard wasn't multi-user, but you could make something and then send it to someone without incurring fees.

Regardless of the technology and requirements though, which will be specific to each project, I just wanna be able to make stuff and show it to people :) (and not just a static site with a form).

And if I need to make certain apps quickly, why is Access still a compelling choice? (PLEASE someone tell me an alternative if there is one for the sort of app you would build in an Access DB, I genuinely want to know!)

So why not use WinForms?

It’s old and legacy, and it would be great if there was something that was as quick and easy but built on new technologies with better capabilities.

IMO, the problem is that many of those tools are really not that reliable in the sense that they may go away soon.

It all takes a company to be acquired by M$, GOOG etc and then taken offline. For example, I lived through Google Appmaker (absolutely fantastic!) which was retired with 6 months notice.

It's really risky to build larger app on no-code platforms that you don't fully control via self-hosting. And I don't know great open-source/open-core low/no-code stacks that are easy to use and expressive enough. It would be great to get pointers.

I guess a the height of hypercard, that really wasn't really on people's radar.

Sounds like you're worried about what happens if you embed and tightly couple a lot of your business logic to something you don't have full control over? That's a totally valid concern, and probably one of the reasons we've tended to move away from these tools and towards doing everything in stable programming languages.

It's a classic set of trade-offs - quality, features, stability, security, price. There are lots of solutions on the market offering one configuration of those trade-offs.

If it existed today, some people would push for HyperCard to support mobile apps, multi-user access, web-based and native apps, all of which would make the solution 'worse" for others.

There’s nothing inherent about low-code that requires it to be tied to hosting provided by a specific entity which can unilaterally terminate it.

I agree in theory, although it makes me wonder why - according to this discussion at least - it hasn’t happened in practise.

It’s a great undertaking to do it well.

Hard to do without getting paid, and if it’s for profit you want SAAS since that means recurring revenue.

>I guess a the height of hypercard, that really wasn't really on people's radar.

It didn't matter yet. People were shipping the software they made in HyperCard to customers on floppies or CDs. IIRC these were self-contained executables, so you didn't need to have HyperCard installed for it to run. One of the most famous examples of this was Myst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst.

Myst is an interesting example… while it’s definitely a HyperCard stack, it relies heavily on XCMDs and XFCNs… which let you call into native code. So while it’s certainly the most famous example of a program written in HyperCard, it’s not a typical or representative example of how people made HyperCard programs.

Here’s a recent thread about it: https://twitter.com/uliwitness/status/1408841306013581313

These are all targeted at enterprises. I used HyperCard as a kid, and I don't think anyone would be having a kid using any of these.

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