IntelligentPad (1989): a component-based drag-and-drop software creator | Hacker News Reader

IntelligentPad (1989): a component-based drag-and-drop software creator

blog.gingerbeardman.com

66 pointsmsephton8 comments

I found IntelligentPad on an old Macintosh magazine cover CD, was intrigued enough to run it, do some digging, do a screen recording and put it all in this blog post.

I'd never heard of it before but you can easily see the things it has in common with Interface Builder (which was new at the time), Hypercard (ditto) and even things that followed it like Fujitsu's TownsGEAR, Microsoft's Visual Basic, Borland's Delphi and Apple Research Lab's Squeak.

The linked page reminds me, I love the style of Japanese websites. :)

https://ipad.live7.jp/

A real assault on the senses!

Just crazy how most things considered innovative are built upon years of other people's work. Technology is beautiful.

I know what you mean. A lot of this stuff stays in research labs. If it's lucky it might break out. I'm thinking of WIMP/GUI (Xerox PARC), Interface Builder (Inria). IntelligentPad seems to have not managed to have broken out quite so successfully, or at least not had the staying power.

I also find it somewhat frightening how quickly good ideas are jettisoned in the name of "progress" when the new thing is provably worse than the thing it replaces. Apple have done this so many times recently with things in macOS and perhaps even with Swift.

never heard of it but this vaguely reminds me of labview (still widely used in factory infrastructure and R&D)

another similar environment that 20 years ago I thought would become the new desktop/programming metaphor is vvvv[0]

[0] https://vvvv.org/

Increasing that LabVIEW was created around the same time. I can see some similarities in the visual programming. The 80s were such a fertile time!

vvvv looks cool, it's just a shame they promote the output (views of exhibitions etc) rather than the tool itself. I tried to find information and screenshots of it, but failed and gave up.

yes, [in vvvv] they've changed the site many times (it's an early 2000s project) and in the current iteration it's more commercial than technical...

however there used to be screenshots[0]! always praise be to the wayback machine

ah and there is also a javascript version[1]!

apparently they've also changed the colours of the environment, it used to be in light shades of grey now it looks all dark mode (which I personally detest and find illegible)

[0]http://web.archive.org/web/20170111184727/https://vvvv.org/s...

[1]http://www.vvvvjs.com/start

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