sadly lost to a domain squatter a decade ago, Smackerel interactive was a canadian multimedia design duo (dave groff and kevin steele). mac users might remember them as the creators of the Mackerel Stack - a goofy hypercard stack that equal parts interactive toy and business card

after the company closed, dave and kevin went on to write some online retrospectives about art & design during the peak 1990s multimedia era. their mini-essays are succinct, thoughtful, and inspiring. i posted the first essay about hypercard a few months ago here: https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/111896945530811821

this is the second of those essays, recovered from the wbm... Learning From Limitations: When Bevelled Edges Were Cool.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100127132753/http://smackerel.net/bevelledTitle.html

kevin's a super nice guy. wish he had joined mastodon.

Always a treat to hear @thomasareed giving his annual malware talk at @macadminsconf.

Love his HyperCard themed Keynote presentation!

Define the Problem first!

Blogity blog post.
#HyperCard
#consulting
#requirements
#customer

https://ko-fi.com/post/Define-the-Problem-Y8Y51H0TD6?fromEditor=true

Some things never change.

Stack-specific help

Some guidelines to remember about providing help to users are as follows:

From #HyperCard Stack Design Guidelines by Apple Computer, Inc., 1989

Ever since I heard about Bill Atkinson’s passing, I’ve been diving into everything I can find about HyperCard. Today, while the world was glued to WWDC25, I was off exploring alternate timelines—asking ChatGPT what HyperCard and the world might have become if it had never been discontinued. It was a blast.

I’ve witnessed only a tiny number of noteworthy moments in #tech, but as a summer intern in 1987 I attended MacWorld and was in the auditorium when Bill Atkinson introduced #HyperCard. Completely mind-blowing: graphics, simplicity, expressiveness.

I remember HyperTalk’s surprising use of `it` as an accumulator:

```
get the selection
put it into the message box
```

I can’t name a contemporary user-friendly #programming environment that lets you create apps/sites as easily as HyperCard did.

#grateful for Bill Atkinson and #HyperCard

HyperSchool is a HyperCard application for schools to do scheduling, attendance, and grades.

It includes thousands of lines of #HyperTalk code, plus some
C code to interface to a scantron machine and to do simulated annealing
before the user gets old.

I loved reading @csilverman’s thoughtful tribute to Bill Atkinson, who gave us personal computing in so many ways.

#BillAtkinson
#Hypercard
#RIP
#Macintosh https://mastodon.social/@csilverman/114646274324945609

Should the next #MARCHintosh be dedicated to Bill Atkinson? His work—MacPaint, HyperCard, and a visionary approach to software—defined the soul of early Macintosh. Every retro Mac celebrates him in spirit, but perhaps this time we could make it official.

"It was Mr. Atkinson who programmed QuickDraw, a foundational software layer used for both the Lisa and Macintosh computers; composed of a library of small programs, it made it possible to display shapes, text and images on the screen efficiently."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html

good long night bill. your software lives on with us.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-rip

Twin Peaks on #HyperCard, 1991-94; via @internetarchive.

RIP Bill Atkinson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Atkinson

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210606

I’m sure we will hear a lot about Bill Atkinson (RIP) over the next few days, but I want to point out the huge influence of #HyperCard on the Web. @timbl himself mentioned it in his original WWW proposal (https://cybercultural.com/p/1990-programming-the-world-wide-web/), early web browsers like ViolaWWW were modeled on HyperCard (https://cybercultural.com/p/1992-web-vs-gopher/), and even JavaScript owed a debt to it (HyperCard included an object oriented scripting language called HyperTalk; https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/).

My toddler son shows interest in a lot of my books - surprising ones. He calls this #retroprogramming masterpiece on #HyperCard by Danny Goodman “the hand book” because it has, uh, a hand on it.

Cc: @uliwitness

Next project I'm equally afraid and hyped about: re-implementing most of #HyperCard as #HTML form-based app. Requires:
- A working #HyperTalk (or the like) interpreter
- Card editing form that's flexible enough to build e.g. a calculator
- Script editing UI
- Smart evaluation that works well with old-school HTML-first UIs
- Server setup to handle all of these

Some of these are entirely new to me, and some don't have reasonable libs for in #CommonLisp, so I'm quite floored with the amount of work. But if I manage to make this thing, I'll have a reliable note-taking tool and a simple programming system!

(Now that I think about it, I don't really need a note-taking tool, because I use #hpda. And the simple programming system might as well be a headless HyperTalk interpreter...)