SuperCard Programming/Introduction

SuperCard is a Macintosh development environment. It is very similar to the venerable, and now defunct, HyperCard. It is made and sold by Solutions Etcetera. The latest version, 4.6, was released late in 2006 and supports the creation of Universal binaries (i.e. programs that run on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs).

Of all the HyperCard clones that have existed, SuperCard is the only one that currently focuses solely on Mac development. Some people see this as a weakness in today's world where delivering cross platform applications has become more and more common. Others see this as an asset due to SuperCard's ability to provide access to Mac specific features that otherwise wouldn't be desireable in attempting to deliver cross platform applications.

Being that it is a "card based" or "stack based" development environment, it has the following features:

• Windows
  • Windows are the equivalent of stacks in SuperCard
• Cards
  • Windows can contain many cards (or even just a single card)
• Backgrounds
  • each card has one background
  • cards within a window do not need to all have the same background
• A scripting language
  • SuperCard's scripting language is called SuperTalk. It is very similar to HyperTalk, the scripting language of HyperCard and it belongs to a family of languages now known as xTalks (the "x" is usually pronounced "cross")
• A player application
• The ability to create standalone applications