Kado

HyperCard for the Figma era.

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Inspiration

HyperCard is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used and I always hoped that Apple or someone else would come along and revive it. There have been a few spiritual successors over the years and many of the most popular SaaS apps today employ many of the HIG principles pioneered by Bill and his team.

What it does

Make anything from "Choose your own adventure" games to visual novels, interactive prototypes, static websites and more.

How we built it

I used Kiro in combination with Claude Sonnet 4.5

Challenges we ran into

Sonnet 4.5 did an amazing job setting up the project's basic structure and UI. However, I reached a point where it wasn't able to figure out some really simple fixes on its own and I was having to spend a lot of time debugging with React's Developer Tools and adding screenshots to get it to do what I needed. This all changed as soon as I switched to Opus 4.5 and I ordered it to go back and make revisions where they were needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of the fact that I have a working app that's very close to what I originally envisioned. There's still lots of room for improvement, but overall I'm quite satisfied with the way it turned out.

What we learned

Prior to embarking on this project I had a very vague recollection of HyperCard having last used it nearly 3 decades ago. Instead of making an attempt to clone it pixel by pixel I chose to read and listen to a few interviews by the late Bill Atkinson to try and figure out what he would have done if he was building it today with the tools that we now have at our disposal. I also spent a lot of time analyzing software which has borrowed heavily from HyperCard's legacy and core tenets to see how I could apply some of their innovations into my own little app.

What's next for HyperData

I'd like to create custom SVG icons to replace all the emojis currently there as placeholders. There's a few additional features which I thought about implementing, but simply ran out of time to do so. These features include: static website generation similar to Univer.se and the ability to draw within the app similarly to TLDraw. I intend to use this app as my main brainstorming tool from now on and will continue to make fixes and add additional functionality as needs arise.

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