HyperCard - Applications

Applications

HyperCard has been used for all sorts of hypertext and artistic purposes. Before the advent of PowerPoint, HyperCard was often used as a general-purpose presentation program. Examples of HyperCard applications include simple databases, "choose your own adventure"—type games, and educational teaching aids.

Due to its rapid application design facilities, HyperCard was also sometimes used for prototyping of applications and sometimes even for version 1.0 implementations. Inside Apple, the QuickTime team was one of HyperCard's biggest customers.

A number of commercial software products were created in HyperCard, most notably the original version of the interactive game narrative Myst, the Voyager Company's Expanded Books, and multimedia CD-ROMs of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony CD-ROM, the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, and the Voyager MacBeth.

The prototype and demo of the popular game You Don't Know Jack was written in HyperCard. Renault, the French auto manufacturer, used it to control their inventory system.

In Quebec, Canada, Hypercard was used to control a robot arm used to insert and retrieve video disks at the National Film Board CinéRobothèque.

HyperCard was also used to prototype a fully functional prototype of SIDOCI (one of the very first experiments in the world to develop an integrated electronic patient record system) and was heavily used by Montréal Consulting firm DMR to demonstrate how "a typical day in the life of a patient about to get surgery" would look like in a paperless age.

Activision, which was until that time primarily a game company, saw HyperCard as an entry point into the business market. Changing their name to Mediagenic, they published several major HyperCard based applications, most notably Danny Goodman's Focal Point, a personal information manager, and Reports For HyperCard, a program by Nine To Five Software that allowed users to treat HyperCard as a full-fledged database system with robust information viewing and printing features.

The HyperCard-inspired SuperCard for a while included the "Roadster" plug-in that allowed stacks to be placed inside Web pages and viewed by browsers with an appropriate browser plug-in. There was even a Windows version of this plug-in allowing computers other than Macintoshes to use the plug-in.