Every so often someone creates something really useful that is so different from anything else around that it is hard to describe in words. Something that has to be used to be understood. That is when you know you’ve found something original.
I remember back in 1987 reading some of the early reviews of Bill Atkinson‘s HyperCard where many of them dwelt on the things that HyperCard did less well than other applications – so, for example, some talked about how it was not a very good database or that it was not a very good drawing programme or that the programming language was not very powerful. What most of these early critics missed was that it was a great software applications kit, which enable non-technical people like myself to build useful things that they couldn’t get any other way.
Or as Atkinson put it in an interview in 1987:
“HyperCard, acting like a software erector set, really opens up Macintosh software architecture to where individual people can make their own customized information environment, and interactive information and applications without having to know any programming language. It takes the creation of software down to the level of MacPaint images that you like, then pasting buttons on top of them to make them do what you want. HyperCard puts this power into the hands of any Macintosh user.”
In so far as HyperCard is remembered at all these days it is largely remembered as the authoring kit used to build some of the early interactive media applications (or hypermedia applications, as we called them in those days), which laid the foundations for the interactive media industry we see today.
Some of those applications, such as some of the things published by Bob Stein‘s Voyager, while they may look a bit crude today, in my view were conceptually more sophisticated than anything that has been produced since. (Here I will avoid mounting one of my hobby horses and just touch on my view that the history of interactive media, or as I still prefer to call it hypermedia, is rich in ideas, which while limited by the technology of the time, could usefully be re-discovered by people working in the field today to produce richer and more satisfying media experiences.)
The other significance of HyperCard was, of course, that it was one of the inspirations that led Tim Berners-Lee to creating the World Wide Web – the reason that you are able to read this today. As he puts it in his original proposal to CERN, his precursor to the World Wide Web, “Enquire”, was similar to HyperCard, but “…although lacking the fancy graphics, ran on a multiuser system, and allowed many people to access the same data.”
Now, while I wouldn’t claim that the project that Ben Copsey and I have been working on for over a year now is as significant as HyperCard, it does share two of the same characteristics. The most obvious one is that it is hard to describe, because it is unlike anything else I have come across. The second, is that like HyperCard, though considerably more limited in scope, it is a kind of “software erector set” enabling people to invent and construct “their own customized information environment”.
This week we launched it in Beta, so if you’d like to take a look and have a play you can download it at:
http://trails-network.net/
It is the first bit of software I’ve ever found that allows me to organise my time and activities in tune with my general philosophy of purposive drift. Ben, who has a slightly different approach to life has also found that he can use it to fit in with the way he lives and works rather than following the demands of a bit of software designed around the way someone else thinks he should proceed.
At present it is Mac only, so if you’re a Mac owner, who needs to have some organisation in your life or work, but don’t like programmes that dictate to you how you should behave, why not visit our site (http://trails-network.net/) and see for yourself. The desktop application Memex Trails is free and yours to use for as long as you like. The full Trails Network will be a subscription based service, but for the beta is again free to use for a couple of months.
We like it, we hope you do too.