“OK. I am going to admit it. I loved HyperCard. I’m not ashamed to say so. We even had an intimate sexual affair at one time. I guess it’s OK now to say that after all these years…”
from “A HyperCard Orange”
“Pile o Cards” (rapidly becoming “Savant Carde”) must have crept out of HyperCard somehow, because people keep asking me to compare them, or making comparisons. With this I am flattered.
Savante Carde shares the “card” metaphor, it uses the idea of how we interact with cards—stacking them, sorting them, writing things on them. What I always thought was cool about HyperCard was how you could attach scripts to anything on a card and it could interact with other parts of the stack, or even outside applications.
My initial concept was to take this to the extreme. Keep the simplicity of the “card”—but extend the idea of what the card could hold (the “information”) and how it could interact with everything else.
Hyper in this context means “non-sequential”—something we have all grown used to by using the web. Or perhaps what has happened is we have been fooled into thinking we are acting non-sequentially. You see, everything that happens is sequential, that’s just the way that we experience time. And for some reason it always flows in this one direction.
What we really mean is that we can make a choice to jump in and out of a particular sequence of thought. Rather than non-sequential, it is more like stream of consciousness. We move along, and take detours, and side trips, and wander. That is really what the web experience is about, and it is what we tend to think of as “hyper” (interesting double meaning…)
Now, what does this have to do with Savant Carde? I want to hold onto the natural comparison with HyperCard, I think it is valid and helpful. But I also want to push past this web-based notion of what is “non-sequential” and see if we can actually discover some new ways of understanding that. After all, the smallest pieces of matter in our universe may be jumping in and out of time even as we speak—actually existing non-sequentially. Theoretically, everything could actually be made of one single bit of material, which just happens to be able to exist everywhere because it is outside of time.
Not necessarily good material for explaning a software concept, but damn fine sitting-around-on-a-saturday-night-and-expanding-your-brain kind of stuff.
Robert
