[wlesieutre]

SuperCard is one clone that picked up where HyperCard left off, with the extremely similar SuperTalk language. It fixed a lot of Hypercard's issues, like built in color support, access to native UI widgets, multiple windows, and the ability to create standalone applications. Updates added both OS X and Intel compatibility.

But it's definitely a niche product, which we've seen isn't something Apple is interested in. Supercard.us is down right now, so I'm not sure whether it's on the market or not. As Apple has discovered, the vast majority of computer users aren't interested in creating software; they're content consumers. SuperCard probably got as much use for making quick mockups before building a "real" application as it did by amateur developers.

One thing that I'll give HyperCard is that it made it easy for me to play around with programming while I was in elementary school. Today's programming tools are largely not that accessible.

[podperson]

Good of you to mention SuperCard which was, in many ways, the obvious successor to HyperCard (and it was revived a few years back and died owing to lack of interest). These days Runtime Revolution fills that niche. SuperCard was kind of flaky (I developed some stuff with it) and, more importantly, took an IDE -> shipping app model (where the dev environment was pretty much split off from the standalone app). This made it more useful for "real programmers" but less accessible for tinkerers.

It's probably worth mentioning that HyperCard was incredibly stable. You could work in it for months on end without crashing or losing any work. That alone was pretty staggering for the time.