What is SuperCard 3.x?

SuperCard has followed a winding path, emerging more than ten years ago from Silicon Beach Software, moving to Aldus and then to Allegiant Technologies, and now settling down with IncWell Digital Media Group. Along the way, SuperCard has gone through periods of dormancy and uncertainty, but IncWell’s first update brings the software up to speed with current Macintosh technologies at a price that can’t be beat.

SuperCard is often described as “HyperCard done right.” Like HyperCard, it uses a card-stack metaphor for organizing information. In SuperCard, cards appear in standard Mac OS windows and contain graphics, buttons, and text fields, all of which you can script to provide custom interactivity and functionality. You do your scripting in SuperTalk, an extended variation of HyperTalk, HyperCard’s English-like scripting language.

Although SuperCard clearly derives from Apple’s ever-aging HyperCard, don’t let this lineage put you off. SuperCard has always offered integrated color capabilities, still missing from HyperCard. It supports bitmapped images and vector graphics, which it treats as full-fledged objects just like buttons and fields.

The program’s forte is interactive multimedia. It supports audio, animation, and media playback in ways that are easier to script than in Macromedia Director. SuperCard projects can work like standard Mac programs, offering custom menus, palettes, and tool bars.

To this potent mix SuperCard 3.5.2 adds a handful of new features, plus complete compatibility with Mac OS 8.5 and support for key Macintosh technologies such as drag and drop, the Appearance Manager, and QuickTime’s new image formats. SuperTalk can also manipulate QuickTime VR movies, recognize spoken phrases via PlainTalk Speech Recognition, and manage scripts written in languages, such as AppleScript and Frontier’s UserTalk, that conform to Open Scripting Architecture (OSA).

Duncan, Geoff. (May, 1999). SuperCard 3.5. Macworld. (pg. 44).

Download SuperCard 3.x for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver