Apple's apparent decision not to upgrade HyperCard to support MacOS 9 has many HyperCard fans agitated and worried, but there are alternatives for users with time and effort invested in HyperCard stacks, such as SuperCard, MetaCard, and a newcomer -- Serf.

Serf is a new, $59 shareware, hyper-rapid application development tool for HyperTalk, SuperTalk, and MetaTalk developers at any level. Similar to HyperCard and RealBasic, with an easy to use, drag and drop, object-oriented design environment, and a powerful-but-quick- to-learn scripting language, while Serf won''t be an entirely satisfactory substitute for HyerCard for "consumer" level HyperCard users -- for people who value HyperCard primarily for its user-friendly programming language, Serf is well worth checking out, especially considering that it will cost you nothing to try out the demo, which is a modest 650k download.

Serf's developer Dan Gelder, notes that “Apple has never made anything but the lamest efforts to make HyperCard anyone's tool of choice in the nineties. If you started programming in the last ten years, odds are you've either never seen HyperCard or forgot about it completely.”

Serf is designed to do what Apple didn’t -- to give xTalk developers all the power, expandability, and coolness of development tools today, without leaving behind the elegant design of HyperTalk.

Serf supports integrated color, multithreading, object-oriented classes, high-speed color graphics, big and small pieces of text -- and everything is focused on being EASY -- not just for seasoned developers -- but for anyone who owns a Mac. With Serf, you don't need to give up your investment in your scripting language, and you don't need to learn new techniques and behaviors unless you want to. Serf will give you the capability to expand your HyperTalk scripting efforts. And the documentation is built right into the application.

Serf runs on a programing language called SerfTalk -- a "scripting language" based on the concepts of xTalk, which was invented a guy named Bill Atkinson in the 1980which looks remarkably like English. Serf-users will be able to use their existing HyperTalk, SuperTalk, and MetaTalk scripts with almost no modifications.

Serf supports the organizational tool of a Stack, but doesn’t force it on you. Dan has expanded Buttons and Fields to support many new abilities. To control all this, a compact, carefully laid out "Part Information" palette is available, which Dan says is far superior to the chain of dialog boxes HyperCard gives you.

Dan says that he couldn't imagine using a programming language that wasn't like HyperTalk -- he just didn't want to be stuck with HyperCard's constant quirkiness. He wanted stacks -- he just didn't want them to be mandatory. And he wanted color, speed, and a higher degree of 'coolness'. Serf is what he came up with. It's similar in many ways to HyperCard, beneath the surface, but Dan Gelder gladly broke with tradition when it meant tearing down the barriers that have kept HyperCard from rising.

You can Download the Serf 1.0 Beta Here:

http://www.best.com/~serf/

While the Serf is just beginning to rise, but it has already inspired an independent Website: "Sarah's Unofficial Serf site." You can visit Sarah Reichelt’s stie here:

http://www.onthenet.com.au/~sarahtim/Serf.html

Charles W. Moore

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November 21, 2008