What is HyperCard 2.4?

HyperCard is a simple but powerful programming environment for the Macintosh. You can literally draw your programs and fill them with life using the easy to understand HyperTalk Language. In HyperCard you can simply combine differend kind of media such as text, image, sound and even movies (QuickTime format).
It is that intuitive both eldar people and kids can actually create software using this unique tool.

Need a reason why you should buy a classic 68K/PPC mac? Start here.

HyperCard 2.4.1 is the final version of HyperCard ever to be released. The next version would have been 3.0 but the program was discontinued before release.

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Like a graying radical from the sixties, HyperCard has been living in the past for quite some time now. More than two years have passed since Apple last upgraded its once-revolutionary but now creaky-in-the-joints multimedia authoring application, and that was a mere shuffle from version 2.3 to version 2.3.5. Most of us die-hard stackers frankly had given up hope for the old gent and expected any day to read that he had quietly passed away.

HyperCard 2.4, available on Apple’s Web site as an updater for versions 2.3 and 2.3.5, actually breathes life into the old fellow. What’s new in HyperCard 2.4 is mainly QuickTime. Previously, you could play movies in HyperCard using QuickTime Tools, but now the native vocabulary of HyperTalk (HyperCard’s scripting language) incorporates a large number of new QuickTime-related commands, properties, and messages. These functions give you unprecedented control over every aspect of QuickTime, including features you probably didn’t know about, and for the first time allow movies to be interactive.

The new Movie XCMD allows you to address the properties of each QuickTime track type and use them to perform tasks with your HyperTalk handlers. You can play with sprites, frame rates, track order, sound volume, and so on. For example, to adjust the volume of a movie to maximum, you use the command “set soundVolume of audio track 1 of movie ‘My Movie’ to 100.” What you generally can’t do is change the content of a movie track. So although you can search for, extract, and jump to the text of a QuickTime text track, you can’t modify the text itself. Do that in MoviePlayer or another QuickTime editor.

HyperCard 2.4 also contains the first complete implementation of a command language for QuickTime VR From with-in HyperTalk, you can specify VR nodes by their unique IDs, change to a custom cursor when the mouse passes over a hot spot, and move among multiple nodes even if the creator of the VR movie didn’t link them.

HyperCard 2,4 is not Web-ready out of the box (you need Web server software and Royal Software’s LiveCard to publish your stacks on the Internet), but you now can use a HyperTalk command to open an URL with your default Web browser. For example, you can set up a button action to link directly to a Web page related to the material on a card.

Apple has made some welcome improvements to the script window but failed to address such problems as the program’s inability to view and change the properties of more than one object at a time, its excessively modal structure, and the tiny field capacity (still only 32K!). Not to mention that HyperCard stili lacks built-in color support, antialiased text, built-in text replacement, forward deleting in text fields, a database-style list view — and there’s not even a Windows player for stacks.

Can you do serious work in HyperCard? Absolutely. I use it every day to manage several large reference book and directory projects. And QuickTime or QuickTime VR creators definitely should add HyperCard 2.4 to their arsenals. Nonetheless, the program is in desperate need of a major upgrade that addresses its long-standing shortcomings.

Anzovin, Steve. (August 1998). HyperCard 2.4. MacAddict. (pg. 58).

Download HyperCard 2.4 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K + PPC (FAT)

At least 2MB of RAM (4MB if running under System 7 and above, 8MB for PPC)

Mac OS 6.0.5 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver