HyperCard Clones

Here are a number of currently available HyperCard clones that I am aware of (and in some cases have personal experience of). These are all currently maintained and/or under active development. There are a number of other HyperCard clones that are no longer maintained - I have not mentioned these. There may well be more that I am not aware of - if you know of any, then please post this information.

Tim Brailsford, Feburary 2006

Supercard

Supercard is the closest that you can get to Hypercard today. It was the first HyperCard clone, and is still an excellent (although Mac-only) multimedia authoring system that retains much of the design philosophy of the original and is compatible with its data files. I have fond memories of using it when it first came out in the mid 1990s, and in those days it was marketed (with some justification) as a "better Hypercard than Hypercard". It is now in version 4.5, and you can download a free time-limited version (if you happen to have a Mac to run it on!).

ToolBook

ToolBook is a Windows-only authoring system that was originally based heavily on Hypercard. In the early 1990s it was marketed as a "Hypercard for Windows", and for a while Microsoft bundled it with Windows. This means that a lot of people got some experience with ToolBook, but despite this it failed to take off in the way that Hypercard did. My memories of it from my multimedia developer days are that it did quite a good job of making Hypercard-style development available to Windows users, but that it wasn't as elegant or as much fun to use as Hypercard. In recent years, it has been sold at least twice, and it is now marketed as an e-learning development environment by SumTotal Systems. This is now a seriously upmarket (i.e. expensive) multimedia development system, that is sold in two versions. ToolBook Assistant is a mildly limited version that is merely expensive. ToolBook Instructor, has rather more features and is much more expensive. If you are interested in ToolBook and want to have a look at it, then you can download a free 30-day trial version.

Runtime Revolution

Revolution is a truly multi-platform Hypercard clone, with versions for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and Solaris. It claims that you can author on any platform and deliver on all four. It is also possible to import HyperCard documents, so this would provide a way of porting old HyperCard applications to Windows (and/or Linux or Solaris). I don't have any experience with this myself, but it looks extremely interesting. It is somewhat cheaper than many multimedia authoring systems, and there is the usual free 30-day trial.

Hyperstudio

I have never used Hyperstudio, and don't know much about it. It is a HyperCard-like product that has both Mac and Windows versions. There is a free crippleware demo version, as well as a relatively low-cost student edition.

PythonCard

PythonCard is an interesting open source project inspired by HpyerCard. It is built using the Python scripting language, and it runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Not only is it built using Python, but it uses Python as the internal scripting language (i.e. instead of HyperTalk.

WildFire

WildFire is an open source project intending to clone HyperCard from the ground up. This is very much a work in progress, but there are some usable tools and I, for one, am watching this with interest!

FreeCard

FreeCard is an open source project to clone HyperCard in Java. Ths is currently a long way off producing anything very usable, but it might do so one day.