Curious if there will ever be a version of Decker, or more features in Decker that are "color friendly" instead of it being sort of a hack/workaround to have color. I know this isn't totally in the spirit of Decker and HyperCard, but I really feel like it would probably encourage more users to gravitate towards Decker. Listen, I am 100% on board with the 1-bit Macintosh aesthetic, and I understand that it keeps the size of bitmaps small... But I feel like it would be nice to have the 16 colors not be so hidden. Let those colors be accessible from the toolbar. Have some sort of palette file, for swapping palettes between cards.
Or... perhaps, if I could be even more bold, some sort of 8-bit color "extension" that allows 256 color palettes, but does not come stock with Decker? Perhaps also some sort of "extension" that allows for QuickTime style videos. I'm just sort of thinking about how it would be nice to author experiences with Decker that are on-par with other experiences of the Macintosh era, like Myst and Director-based games. Of course, this would balloon the size of decks... but this is why perhaps it could be some sort of "extended" feature. I just feel like Decker and Lil are powerful enough that they deserve to be at least this much more flexible as tools. I don't feel like this is feature creep/bloat to ask for. I think as long as Decker doesn't extend itself beyond "System 7" level Macintosh features, it will still be in the Macintosh spirit.
I understand if this is not the ultimate goal of Decker. I just wanted to throw it out there. I still love Decker as it is and will continue to love it. I just would love to make experiences that are a little more 1995 than just 1985.
Honestly, this is making me want some sort of hyper OS on top of Decker. Some sort of Desktop/supervisor (I hesitate to say hypervisor) etc, where the programs are decks. Like, a Finder/desktop environment with folders where files can be stored etc. Decks can execute other decks. Mount deck images etc. Lil as a shell. Lil scripts as icons that can also be run with a double-click. I dunno, just spitballing ideas. Probably getting too sophisticated for a web app/authoring tool.
I also would eventually like to see a "home stack" feature like the original HyperCard where we could take several stacks (like zine articles) and put them all together with a parent home stack.
the jam was from before I discovered Decker. i'd love the opportunity to contribute to a new Decker game jam sometime. I even know a lot of people i can probably convince to contribute to it.
I think as time has gone on, I think it's ok that Decker doesn't dither color images built-in. It makes sense to have the Bill Atkinson algorithm for the black and white images. But I've been having fun using ImageMagick to tweak dithering to my liking. And there's many algorithms and methods. So I guess I'm saying there wouldn't necessarily be a best one-size-fits-all algorithm anyway, except maybe FloydSteinberg mapped to the 16 Macintosh colors. But even then, it's nice to have the tweakability of ImageMagick.
Ok, so I figured out that I can go into the listener and type: read["image"].encoded to load a color image and spit out the 16-color opaque string of that image. But it's just doing a basic quantize of the 16 colors. Could you possibly add a hint to dither the image?
Like: read["image" "dithered"].encoded
Also, it would be nice if images could be resources, just like sounds. Maybe this is already possible and I don't know. It would be nice if any of those opaque strings could be imported as a resource.
Also I seem to have a weird bug with the desktop version of Decker and Lilt. When I read in an image I just get back "?PNG\n?\n"
But if I do it in the browser version I get the image.
Yeah, I know raw audio data like that would balloon really quickly. But on all those old CD-ROMs like The Manhole, raw audio was the norm. Back then the bitdepth/sample rate was your compression, I guess. So I don't really care about compressing the audio. For a standalone desktop deck it wouldn't be so bad, but I wonder if a 500 mb deck (hypothetical rough "CD-ROM" size) would struggle to play in a browser. I really don't know.
It would also be interesting to have small postage-stamp sized QuickTime videos (dunno if QuickTime itself is usable, probably proprietary) you could paste in as an opaque string.
It doesn't fully reflect my feelings on the topic anymore, but the general gist is still how I feel. Decker is the closest thing I've found yet to this ideal.
I also want to say that I really like Lil. I was going to get into the nitty gritty of Flex/Bison to make a parser for a similar HyperTalk inspired language, but I think in the future I might just borrow Lil and use your parser. If I do, I'll let you know.
I think it is worth looking into aspects of Macromedia Director because it is very inspired by HyperCard. Its programming language, LINGO is almost like a dialect of HyperTalk.
I know that if the scope of this project gets too big then it loses its appeal and charm. But for my part, I think for it to become a real "multimedia sketchpad" it would have to embrace the Macromedia Director phase of the Macintosh as well (at least up until like 1995. Director 4.0). Maybe have videos. I'm not saying it should have every feature of Director. Because Director had stuff like timelines (individual frames could have their own scripts, just like cards/widgets) and that starts to scare away newcomers/non-programmers. I just think the aesthetics of Director would be nice (i.e. 8-bit color, video, 22.01khz audio).
But, all that said, I am thrilled to find Decker and am excited to use it as-is. Also, I'm spreading the word to anyone who will listen.
Would it be possible for the Decker executable to look for a default .deck file on startup? So that way all you would have to do is throw the Decker .exe and the .dll files and a "main.deck" file into a folder, rename the executable and voila, it's basically the same as a native export. And if there's no "main.deck" in the same directory, it will just boot as normal.
One other issue along these lines I'd like to mention: If you open a protected deck and then try to close the application, it warns you about unsaved changes. I think for a protected deck it shouldn't warn you about that.
This project is so awesome. It's almost exactly what I always wanted to find/make. One thing I'd like to request is for color image import that spits out a 16-color dithered image and palette. Maybe images as resources. I'd like to import Myst-type images. AFAIK it's a myth that a HyperCard based version of Myst actually shipped, but it was definitely originally built in it. And they did do a Mac resedit type resource hack to add color. So, I get that Myst wasn't standard fare for HyperCard, but it would be awesome to see color content be a little easier to add.
If I was being really annoying with feature requests, I'd love to see this also start to dip into Macromedia Director territory. With 256-color image support, 22050hz audio. I guess I could always fork the code myself and look into making modifications.
Either way, in its current state, this rocks. I've been looking for something like this for a long long time.
