There are a bunch of simple GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web, but none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit.
When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.
Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."
The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.
As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.
Although as someone who recently developed a brand new System 7 program (for #MARCHintosh this year), I can't really recommend using ResEdit to create your dialogs. It is missing so many conveniences such as snapping that it's actually easier to lay out your dialogs in Rez files.
Right, but... the resource fork could contain code, as well as window definitions, graphics, icons, dialog boxes, menus, language translations, strings, and more.
Of course, generally you'd write source code as text and hook up your interface. Resource definitions could be written as text or laid out using a GUI tool, of which ResEdit was just one. And everything would be compiled during development. But none of that was strictly necessary.
Interestingly, early Palm OS worked exactly the same way - using resources. They took the concept and implemented their own version based on how the classic Mac system worked.
So, you could fix a bug in an app using only a resource editor without having access to the source code. I've done this on both systems!
What I miss is the ability to throw together a simple stand-alone (denormalized) relational database application in minutes. When Uncle Roy wanted something to track his LPs and search them by artist, musician, whatever, it was literally just an hour from concept to sending him a stack he could use. Same when Mom wanted a recipe database she could search by ingredient.
Could I build them a web app today? Of course! And the database would be properly 3rd normal form and all that. But it would take a many hours, it would not be stand-alone (I’d need to host it somewhere for them), and they couldn’t change it to meet their needs.
There are a lot of “toy” standalone database applications that people would like to have, but the barrier to creating them means they don’t get built. I miss the ability to throw together something with very little effort.
(Of course, modern expectations are higher too. A standalone desktop app user will also want a phone version with database sync. Now we’re talking about a much more substantial technical problem.)
I think something like Unity or Gamemaker or even Scratch fills that niche now. They are a bit more game-focused than Hypercard (which was really more of an early iteration on the web), but, I think, capture a similar feeling of empowerment and creativity among nerdy young people as Hypercard did for nerdy young me.
HyperCard was the right tool at the right time, but times change. HyperCard was super powerful with a medium learning curve, but at a time when personal computers were expensive and still an enthusiast (or school) device, users were willing to go further to do more. As adoption increases and prices decrease, there were fewer who wished to produce with the machine and more who wished to consume. HyperCard's market became unprofitable, and it went away.
People mention Flash, and that's a fair replacement, but I would argue it had a similarly steep curve, and the driver there was money - making Flash animations would make you money. Then Apple decided we were done with Flash, and here we are.
The difference between HyperCard and Flash was that HyperCard was for "computer users" who could take the demo card file stacks or whatever and customize them. Flash was for artists and animators who realized "wait I can link this to this" and suddenly they were game/multimedia developers.
Now everything is just for professionals who have already decided what they want to do.
I think PowerPoint or Keynote are better analogs for HyperCard. They all use a "deck of cards" metaphor at their core. HyperCard came on the scene when making GUI applications was still "new". There was so much low-hanging fruit. HyperCard doesn't exactly exist today because the "winners" in each category now exist as full-featured apps, like PowerPoint or Keynote for presentations.
Every "simple app builder" I saw ended up with the problem that it grew with its audience.
All their feedback came from the top 5% of their users who were always pushing its limits and clamoring for more, which ended up making the product too complicated and blocking it off for new users. See also the evolution from VB6 to VB.NET
(HyperCard's problem was that Apple was a completely dysfunctional organization. At one point it was being rewritten to be embedded into QuickTime, which could have saved it and made it work online, doing what Flash did, but alas)
Partly because its world ceased to exist. HyperCard flourished in a world where ‘all’ Macs had a 512×342 monochrome screen, and always ran full-screen. That makes drawing and laying out an UI fairly easy. You didn’t have to wonder how your colors would look in black and white, or how window size would affect the location of an UI element.
This isn't true, you're looking at Flash as a monolith when really it was a bunch of things.
To it's users it was a place many teenagers learned how to be creative with computers, building games and animations and expressing themselves in online communities which had more in common with a proto-youtube/tiktok than what you think of online web games today.
Worth pointing out Adobe didn't care about that part of Flash in the slightest and almost all their dev work post-Macromedia was building systems that community couldn't really understand or see a need to use.
What Adobe saw it as was a video player and a cross platform application tool, but to be honest it just seemed like the team in charge of the cross platform frameworks were just not talented enough to make something at all performant, air/flex UIs always just felt incredibly janky and slow, the Mac team as well just never bothered optimizing Flash on a Mac until Jobs kicked off then suddenly it ran close to Windows speed 2 months later after running literally 30%-60% Windows speed for years.
Jobs was definitely right to kill the latter of what I'm describing but unfortunately the former was collateral damage.
Apple’s App Store is filled with ugly apps that have poor performance. People will write that kind of software on anything that has enough programmability.
So it’s not that Jobs killed Flash to save users from bad taste. It was because Flash was the most widely deployed cross-platform runtime of the desktop web era (at one time on 96% of computers!) and he didn’t want Adobe or anyone else to have that kind of power anymore.
At that point it wasn't as much about control[0] but as that the runtime really was bad. I used it when they released Flash on Android and it was completely unusable. Extremely laggy, the mouse events did not map to touch events well at all, and it would out of memory crash all the time.
Replacing flash on the web with HTML5 was actually a good thing. It's just unfortunate that nobody has built any good web authoring tools for "mere mortals" to use.
[0]Remember the iPhone was launched with no App Store, and Steve Jobs just thought that everyone should write PWAs in HTML5. It took developers jailbreaking the phone, making native apps, and massive internal pressure from Apple people to make him go ahead with the store. But it was partially about control because at the time Flash was a huge source of security bugs and drive-by virus infections from just loading a flash ad. Apple would have to release emergency OS updates if they had bundled flash and they never wanted to be tied to someone else's schedule.
True, Jobs did not want Adobe to have that kind of power, but I am also glad he killed it, Flash apps were fugly, heavy, and the runtime created security problems.
But the main reason, I think, was the flash runtime was an energy hog, and at the time (up until iPhone 4 or so), that meant using a Flash website on an iPhone would shorten battery life and put the blame on Apple.
At the time, they vetoed many things for that reason.
The results were fantastic, actually. The Flash era was a great time, and lots of important and influential software came out of it.
The problem Steve Jobs had was that Flash was too resource/power hungry to run on the first iPhone, so his decision to disallow it was a defensive one.
Interestingly, you could make iPhone apps with Adobe Air (a descendent of Flash) and such apps still run today! So there have more longevity and compatibility than apps written with the official Apple tools. Pickle's Book is one such app you might like to try out.
Today's iPhones are capable of running Flash much better, and iOS is now a resource (CPU/RAM/battery) hog all by itself. So what was really achieved in the long run?
