Tuesday, June 10, 2008

TileStack - Your Creative Playground

TileStack - Your Creative Playground: "Remember that great application that used to come with all Macs called HyperCard? Ever wished it would return, only better? Say hello to TileStack!"

I liked Hypercard. I knew people from all walks of life who used it. It was free, included with all Macs, and the scripting language was easy to learn. Users could build some fairly complex applications in a short period of time. There are a lot of tools out there that do what Hypercard can also do and the tools are used for what most people used to use Hypercard for (contacts, recipes, etc.) but the presence of a powerful but simple scripting language means that users have to ability to take it far beyond the vision of the creators. Most often, Hypercard stacks were pretty basic, but in the hands of the right user, it could really fly. For instance, in the final days of Hypercard, someone built a complete bulletin board system from nothing but Hypercard. A bulletin board was a pre-WWW system that users would dial into to leave messages, host games, and communicate with one another. BBSs were often stacks of modems in people's garages. Applications like Hypercard democratize technology.

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