Why isn't there another Hypercard-like product?

[David Cake]

At 11:49 PM -0400 15/10/06, Karl Kuehn wrote:
>  At that point HyperCard's development was stalling at Apple because 
>the QuickTime team was trying to make it something else.

	Yep. The QuickTime team had the bright idea of turning 
Hypercard 3 into QuickTime Interactive (aka Wired Sprites). Amazing 
technology for the time. It took well over half a decade for anyone 
to catch up with what QTi tried to do. Yet, QTi just didn't catch on 
at all - despite being a fully interactive, cross platform, web 
embeddable, fully media integrated platform years before Flash could 
do most of this. And yet it completely failed to catch on and pretty 
much sank without a trace.
	There were problems with it, granted. And I think Apple 
enthusiasm for it pretty much disappeared once it became clear it 
really wasn't going to be Hypercard 3 (for whatever reason).
	But actually, you know how people (such as in the Eudora 
thread right now) are always bitching whenever Apple produces a 
product to compete with an ISV product? I think this is a case where 
Apples failure to do this pretty much killed the technology (well, 
confined it permanently to a tiny niche). There was one decent 
product to create QuickTime interactive stuff, the terrific LiveStage 
Pro. This still is a really nice authoring product for this tiny 
niche. But it was expensive, Apple liked to demo it but didn't really 
have any sales push (while Flash etc had a huge marketing push from 
Macromedia), and no one really was aware the product existed in the 
first place.
	If Apple had done what they did with so many other companies 
later - bought them, pushed the price down on the product and sold a 
ton of them - QuickTime Interactive would probably be a major 
competitor to Flash at this point. Sure, in many ways QTi sucks 
compared to Flash, but a lot of that is due to the development effort 
that has been poured into Flash over years of strong success  in the 
market - and there are still things you can do with QTi that you 
can't do with Flash, just due to having a far richer range of media 
integration options.

	Trivia - the QTi/HyperCard 3 project apparently had (at least 
at one stage) the codename "Bucky The Wonder Horse".

	Cheers
		Dave