Agreed, I'd love to see that too!
One criticism I have of HyperCard is that it wasn't "HyperCard All The Way Down", in that not all the rest of its dialogs and user interfaces and menus were made out of HyperCard stacks. It wasn't "metacircular", defined in terms of itself.
That's totally forgivable given that HyperCard was the first original iteration, and "merely" getting it finished in time to ship on every Mac desktop was a spectacular achievement. But it doesn't excuse anything that came after it, and it doesn't excuse Apple for dropping it instead of evolving it.
Cyberdog for OpenDoc was another interesting approach to a web browser, built out of components you could embed in documents, but Apple dropped that along with OpenDoc too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiUncy5qW0
Looking back 30 years, that demo is unintentionally hilarious, and it makes me wonder what HyperCard would have been like if Apple had continued to develop it as much as it deserved.
>You always want to end a report with some pizzazz, and these days, nothing is more pizzazz than Java. So over here I have a Java applet, and I want to put it into Claris Works. [...]
>It's actually a little bit different than that. Rather than just being FreeHand it's actually Shockwave for FreeHand, and what we're running here is the Shockwave for FreeHand Netscape Plugin running inside of an OpenDoc Part that can run any Netscape Plugin. So because it's -- [applause] -- it's a little complicated...
Bottlenecking every event and pixel through the Stone Age nascent NPAPI to see Duke waving at three frames a second was not the flex they thought it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
I know because I was writing NPAPI plug-ins at Kaleida Labs at the time, and wrote up the problems I found with the NetScape 2.0b3 Plug-in SDK:
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/netscape/Netscape-Plugin...
>The event handler never gets mouse motion or mouse up events, so I had to track the mouse motion and button release manually by checking the button status in the idle callback.
More about NPAPI's history:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661955
At least Sun's HotJava modular extensible web browser picked a lane, and didn't put that many layers between you and your Calvins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava
Steve Jobs explained both eloquently and dramatically why he murdered OpenDoc:
“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97
As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
HyperLook, which was written in PostScript for the NeWS Window System, was deeply inspired by HyperCard, and addressed the "All The Way Down" problem, as well as Atkinson's admitted limitation of being chained to a hard drive instead of networked.
All of HyperLook's property sheets, dialogs, popups, help windows, menus, etc, were defined in terms of itself, editable and replaceable.
The PostScript graphics editor was a component you could use in your own stacks to edit graphics, like a clock's face and hands, and you could copy ("capture") any user interface as editable structured graphics, which made it easy to illustrate the documentation:
https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/HyperLookManual.pdf
https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLookSimCityManual.pdf
Even the user interface editor itself was a replaceable component, so you could plug in different kinds of user interface editors, or remove it completely to deliver a non-editable runtime system (like SimCity).
The other thing that HyperLook added was another layer in the event delegation system: Button => Card => Background => Stack => Client. The client being what we would call a "web server" or "distributed application" now, implementing what we call the "AJAX" architecture now.
HyperLook (nee HyperNews (nee GoodNews)):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...
I developed SimCity and HyperLook together, each one a forcing function for the other, and I'm taking the same approach now with reincarnating HyperTIES, Ben Shneiderman's pioneering hypertext system from the University of Maryland:
https://github.com/SimHacker/Hyperties/blob/main/docs/README...
I recently wrote this about cloning Photoshop, quoting Alan Kay about old ideas that hang on, and Bill Buxton about unworthy design objectives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052665
Cloning Photoshop is such an underwhelmingly unoriginal and unambitious design goal, like photocopying a Roy Lichtenstein painting, or cloning MS-DOS.
Treating Photoshop's interface as the destination squanders the opportunity to rethink how people create images.
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
From a personal email about MVC and Morphic, published here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
"It is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art." -Bill Buxton
The "Natural" Language of Interaction: A Perspective on Non-Verbal Dialogues, INFOR: Canadian Journal of Operations Research and Information Processing, 26(4), 1988, pp. 428–438.
https://www.billbuxton.com/natural.html
>THE MACINTOSH AS VICTIM
>Before going too much further, it is probably worth making a few comments about my approach and my examples. As will become pretty evident, the Apple Macintosh takes a bit of a beating in what follows. Some readers may view this as evidence of contempt for its design. From my perspective, it is evidence of respect. Let me explain.
>User interface design today is plagued by an unhealthy degree of complacency. We live in a world of copy-cat unimaginative interface products, where major manufacturers put out double-paged colour spreads in Business Week announcing "... our system's user interface is as easy to use as the most easy to use microcomputer [i.e., the Mac]" (or words to that effect). In what other industry can you get away with stating that you're as good as the competition, rather than better? Especially when the competition's product is over 4 years old!
>The best ideas are the most dangerous, since they take hold and are the hardest to change. Hence, the Macintosh is dangerous to the progress of user interfaces precisely because it was so well done! Designers seem to be viewing it as a measure of success rather than as a point of departure. Consequently, it runs the risk of becoming the Cobol of the 90's.
>I criticize the Macintosh precisely because it is held in such high regard. It is one of the few worthy targets. If I can make the point that there are other design options, and that these options appear to have a lot of potential, then I may help wake people up to the fact that it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state-of-the-art.
>Enough of the sermon. Let's leave the pulpit for some concrete examples.