What is HyperCard 2.3 + Color Stack Repair + Addmotion II?

HyperCard 2.3 is an enhanced Version of HyperCard 2.

AddMotion II is a great addition to HyperCard allowing to "animate" (move) objects in front of a background without any coding. AddMotion was first introduced at Macworld 1990 for the newly released HyperCard 2.0.

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Ever since it was bundled with every Mac in the late 1980’s, HyperCard has been difficult to categorize. Today this combination free-form database, programming language, and interface builder has all kinds of interesting and unusual applications, but it’s probably most widely used as a multimedia authoring tool. Unfortunately, HyperCard has fallen behind in the software genre it helped define. The latest release, 2.3, addresses many of the needs of today’s users without sacrificing HyperCard’s look, feel, and spirit.

According to Apple, the big news is that HyperCard has been rewritten in native mode for the Power Mac. In practice, this doesn’t translate into the performance increases you might expect. Some tasks are noticeably faster, but overall HyperCard still suffers from slowness, especially when you use it with color tools and large font collections.

Version 2.3 includes a set of color paint tools identical to those found in AddMotion II, the animation program by Motion Works that was bundled with HyperCard 2.2 (it also comes with 2.3). Although handy for authors who don’t want to switch out of HyperCard to create or edit color images, it doesn’t hide the fact that HyperCard is still a monochrome program. It adds color images to black-and-white stacks after you’re done creating them. You can’t print color images or view them in the Go Recent dialog box; you can’t even see color images on screen unless HyperCard’s memory partition is set to at least 5MB.

The most important change in version 2.3 is the addition of Button Tasks. Button Tasks automate a variety of tasks without scripting, making it easier to use for beginners who want to produce impressive multimedia results quickly.

It’s always been easy to program HyperCard. For example, to design an on-screen button that takes a user to another card, you could just click on the Link To button in the Button Info dialog box. In version 2.3 (using System 7.1 or later), a button named Tasks replaces the Link To button. Tasks lets you tell a button what to do when someone clicks on it. There are new options, ranging from the simple “Go to the next card” to complex sound and video presentations. There’s even a Speak Text Tasks option that reads aloud using Apple’s PlainTalk voices (included).

The built-in tasks, which you can program simply by filling in dialog boxes, are especially valuable for beginners and occasional HyperCard users who don’t want to master HyperTalk, HyperCard’s built-in programming language.

HyperCard includes another Motion Works package: Multimedia Tools, a diverse collection of utilities for working with audio and video... Multimedia Tools is functional and useful, but it has a few bugs.

We were unable to complete an animation using AddMotion II. The Mac repeatedly froze before it could finish; users have reported the same problem in online forums. (Motion Works never returned our call for help.)

HyperCard 2.3 is reliable and stable for most applications, but it is not without problems. Shortly before press time Apple released a patch (2.3.1) to repair an obscure bug that caused crashes when colorized stacks were saved on one Power Macintosh and run on another.

The Last Word

The new features, streamlined interfile, bundled programs, and lower price make HyperCard a good value for anyone interested in developing multimedia applications. If you can live with an authoring environment that treats color as an afterthought, and you’re not producing multimedia presentations that work on both Mac and Windows machines, HyperCard is hard to beat.

Beekman, George; Dinsmore, Mark. (November 1995). HyperCard 2.3. Macworld. (pgs. 67-68).

Download HyperCard 2.3 + Color Stack Repair + Addmotion II for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II