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> The result should be a single .exe file with no or minimal dependencies and a size of less than 40MB

Computers come with a modern browser now. Instead of a .exe file, could it be, let's say, a single .html file with inlined image/css/javascript?


So much time spent on creating many different web frameworks to try and replicate the snapiness of native applications when the solution was to make native applications use web-tech so that both are equally slow. Mission accomplished! Genius!.


You just redicovered HTML applications from Internet Explorer 5.

Greetings from 1999.

https://www.developer.com/guides/ie5s-html-applications/


Yeah I thought of this too. Wrapping this with Tauri should not be too hard, and quite space-efficient


> For a large company this is a millions of dollars

The FDA was expecting that companies spend millions to ensure that the products are free of sesame to help people with allergies, but companies realize that it's easier to just add sesame into their products.

I am not sure the government could do now to help people with sesame allergies. Ban sesame outright from certain products? Mandate that certain companies produce sesame-free products?


Adding an allergen in quantities where it has no meaningful effect is attempting to flout a regulation. It's like bringing money into the country by spitting it among fellow travellers. In a functioning system the authorities would have the power to investigate and use discovery to identify cases where allergens are being added deliberately for no other reason than flouting rules. They should then be able to issue substantive fines to encourage actual compliance.

Its not like adding small amounts of an allergen is a victimless. Lots of people with moderate to serious allergies eat things every day which "may contain" their allergen.


It's not flouting a regulation at all. It's the opposite of flouting. It's complying.


“Malicious compliance” can be read as “flouting” in some cases.

Eg: transaction structuring which is illegal in most places.


Here is a question that's been bugging me. What is the modern day tool that achieves the same thing as HyperCard back then? Is it html/javascript?


I would say that HTML/Javascript is not a "tool" in the same sense that HyperCard was.

HyperCard's real strength was that it allowed mere users (not programmers) to create their own apps (or "stacks", in the HyperCard parlance) through pointing and clicking, plus an English-like scripting language (HyperTalk).

We have largely abandoned the idea that users should be able to create their own apps, so there is no popular, modern analogue to HyperCard, though some people keep trying. For instance, LiveCode is a commercial product that is directly inspired by HyperCard. And CardStock is an open source HyperCard clone that swaps out something English-like for Python as the underlying scripting language.

https://livecode.com/

https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock


A lot of people have asked this question. There are a bunch of simple GUI-builder tools, 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.


HyperCard is more limited (which acted as a forcing function for creative solutions) and also had an approachability which far surpasses that of HTML/JS. But maybe it's the closest analog..

Even if you stick to only HTML, it's not nearly as fun to make.


For one: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

It even looks a bit like Hypercard, by default (it's lo-fi, but there are colors under the hood).


Agreed, Decker has that right feel to it to be a good reimplementation of HyperCard. I’m happy it exists, especially as a desktop app.


My take is that there is no such thing. This is not because there aren't tools now that do "similar things" to what HyperCard did, but there is simply no longer a personal computing environment in which such a tool fits so instrumentally and seamlessly.

HyperCard came about in an era where personal computer users were still being inculcated into what using a computer even meant. That was the moment to let end-user programming and malleable systems like HyperCard take over. (A somewhat similar thing might be said of OpenDoc, but that's a bit different)

From a corporate perspective, what even was HyperCard? A way computer users could just make their own basic applications? How do you continuously make money? What about your computer's dev community? Because of these and other commercial concerns, both the way users today engage with personal computing _and_ the tools we have to manipulate our computing environments are strongly determined by a consumption model -- and there exists a strong bifurcation between users and programmers.

We have no true HyperCard equivalent today because personal computing went in a different direction.


Yes. Many people would argue that HyperCard was an offline precursor to the world wide web. Web pages are very similar to HyperCard stacks and the JavaScript 1.0 manual "cites HyperTalk as a major inspiration".


Dare I say, Scratch?

https://scratch.mit.edu/


It might be, if it had traditional GUI objects, and if it were straight-forward to compile to a small, easily distributed stand-alone binary.


Black text on Grey background was nice. I am not sure why we switched to dark grey text on white background or light grey text on black background.


It didn't help that Apple provided the $0.99 price point for iPhone applications when the expectation for programs before was at least $20.


The only thing constant in modern web design seems to be the ever-increasing amount of margins and paddings. Everything else goes in cycles.

When Google fully-rounded the corners of a rectangle, they added even more margins and paddings. When texture comes back in style, I bet we'll see even more margins and paddings.


> War between nuclear powers doesn't happen any more

That might change as more nations acquire nuclear weapons. Or maybe the pathway to world peace is to give every country nukes.


[flagged]


Just because sarcasm doesn’t really work in text let me clarify. This strategy works not at all in the USA.


> leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product.

Best of all, if the competitor becomes a threat, the company with 50€ a month product can just buy them out.


Less so thanks to (recent) strong antitrust enforcement, see Figma.


Doesn't 10.x.x.x only have 255x255x255=16 million addresses? Still a lot through.


Yes. In between thinking about it and writing it down I confused “24 bits” and “16.78 million.”


I have a different take on this.

If the same feature were built on Android or iPhone, the data would be encrypted, and the researchers would have had a hard time accessing the SQLite file itself.

Microsoft's takeaway from this negative news would be that it needs to lock down Windows 12 by adopting designs from Android and iPhone, effectively closing it off.


It would be good for security but horrible for usability.

I recently got an iPhone and had to migrate to it from my Android phone which turned out to be really unpleasant because I could not carry over WhatsApp data.

Turns out that the SQLite database is encrypted and I can’t easily carry it over, nor even get the encryption key in a non-rooted device.

Furthermore, there is also the issue that Android only backs up to Google Drive whereas the iPhone only backs up to iCloud so I could not restore from backup either.

A task that should have taken minutes took me hours and I had to buy some questionable software.

https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/iphone-andr...


I also looked into transferring WhatsApp data from Android to IOS recently and there is an official way to transfer in both directions now.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/686469079565350/?helpref=hc_fnav

I didn't end up going through with it through since there was no way to take a Signal backup created in Android and restore it to IOS.


> Your iPhone must be factory new or reset to factory settings to pair with the Move to iOS app and move data from your Android phone

As I pointed out in the post, this was pretty much the dealbreaker for me. I had initially set up the iPhone without all of my accounts, just for development, but had gradually carried over my accounts and the apps I need to use. And then I find out that I’d basically need to wipe all of the progress and start over, just because the data move can’t be initiated with an already set up phone (which probably made developing the app easier, but at the same time limits its usefulness).


My bad. I didn't realize that the Move to IOS app had been addressed in your blog.


FWIW I did manage to decrypt the sqlite database with the encryption key that you create for google drive backups (and should have noted down somewhere).

It's been a while, but I think I used this github repo [0], that was the first search result, and it also mentions the 64 character long key.

[0] https://github.com/ElDavoo/wa-crypt-tools


Quickly tried it out again, and it still works

If you still have the key and encrypted database, you "only" need to:

1. Have python

2. Install the project like described in the README

3. Execute

  wacreatekey --hex <your_64_characters>
4. Execute

  wadecrypt encrypted_backup.key msgstore.db.crypt15 msgstore.db


the data is encrpyted.the data is encrpyted.the data is encrpyted.the data is encrpyted.the data is encrpyted.the data is encrpyted.


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