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Show HN: Breadboard – A modern HyperCard for building web apps on the canvas
Hey HN! I’m Simone. We re-built Breadboard, a visual app builder that mixes Figma-style UI design with Shortcuts-style logic so you can build, preview, and publish interactive web apps directly from the canvas.

What it does

    Design UIs visually with a flexible canvas –like Figma–.
    Define app logic with a visual, instruction-stacked editor inspired by Shortcuts.
    Live preview apps directly on the canvas –no separate preview window–.
    Publish working web apps with one click.
Why we made it

    Modernize the HyperCard idea: combine layout, behavior, and instant sharing in one place.
    Reduce friction between design and a working app.
    Make simple web apps approachable for non-developers while keeping power features for developers.
    Build a foundation for LLM integration so users can design and develop with AI while still understanding what’s happening, even without coding experience –in progress!–.
Try it –no signup required–

Weather forecast app: https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/weather

Swiss Public Transit: https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/public_transit

info: https://breadboards.io

I would appreciate any feedback :)

Nice - I like the interface, and its easy to navigate. I don't see a way to test the demo apps, but maybe I missed that?

One thing that stands out is where does the app reside? It seems like it perpetually lives within your ecosystem/servers.

For customers that have contracts with me, I'd then need to disclose Breadboard as a subprocessor given the level of integration in the supply chain, IF the apps aren't downloadable and independently auditable.

You've also probably seen SaaS stocks taking a hit lately...

Thanks, really appreciate the feedback!

In the playground the apps can only be previewed in the canvas. Exported/live apps are available here:

Weather App: https://late-cat-2043.breadboards.app

Swiss Public Transit: https://long-wind-1522.breadboards.app

Live apps are hosted on Cloudflare, when an app is published it’s stored and served from R2. Exports are not yet downloadable, but we’ll add downloadable exports soon.

I thought the whole point of HyperCard is that the editor is the live app, that live apps can flip into editor mode at any time, and you THE USER can edit them live, mash them up with other apps, create your own unique apps, that there is no difference between app developer and app user, between the editor and the live app, because they are one and the same. Anything less totally misses the entire point of HyperCard. Otherwise it's just another version of Flash.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44212267

DonHopkins 8 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Bill Atkinson has died

Flash completely missed the most important point of HyperCard, which was that end users could put it into edit mode, explore the source code, learn from it, extend it, copy parts of it out, and build their own user interfaces with it. It's not just "View Source", but "Edit Source" with a built-in, easy to use, scriptable, graphical, interactive WYSIWYG editor that anyone can use.

HyperCard did all that and more long before the web existed, was fully scriptable years before JavaScript existed, was extensible with plug-in XCMDs long before COM/OLE/ActiveX or even OpenDoc/CyberDog or Java/HotJava/Applets, and was widely available and embraced by millions of end-users, was used for games, storytelling, art, business, personal productivity, app development, education, publishing, porn, and so much more, way before merely static web page WYSIWYG editors (let alone live interactive scriptable extensible web application editors) ever existed.

LiveCard (HyperCard as a live HTTP web app server back-end via WebStar/MacHTTP) was probably the first tool that made it possible to create live web pages with graphics and forms with an interactive WYSIWYG editor that even kids could use to publish live HyperCard apps, databases, and clickable graphics on the web.

HyperCard deeply inspired HyperLook for NeWS, which was scripted, drawn, and modeled with PostScript, that I used to port SimCity to Unix:

Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...

>"Apple’s Hypercard was a terrific and highly successful end-user authoring system whose media was scripted, WYSIWYG, and “symmetric” (in the sense that the “reader” could turn around and “author” in the same high-level terms and forms). It should be the start of — and the guide for — the “User Experience” of encountering and dealing with web content.

>"The underlying system for a browser should not be that of an “app” but of an Operating System whose job would be to protectively and safely run encapsulated systems (i.e. “real objects”) gotten from the web. It should be the way that web content could be open-ended, and not tied to functional subsets in the browser." -Alan Kay

>[...] This work is so good — for any time — and especially for its time — that I don’t want to sully it with any criticisms in the same reply that contains this praise.

>I will confess to not knowing about most of this work until your comments here — and this lack of knowledge was a minus in a number of ways wrt some of the work that we did at Viewpoints since ca 2000.

>(Separate reply) My only real regret about this terrific work is that your group missed the significance for personal computing of the design of Hypertalk in Hypercard.

>It’s not even that Hypertalk is the very best possible way to solve the problems and goals it took on — hard to say one way or another — but I think it is the best example ever actually done and given to millions of end users. And by quite a distance.

>Dan Winkler and Bill Atkinson violated a lot of important principles of “good programming language design”, but they achieved the first overall system in which end-users “could see their own faces”, and could do many projects, and learn as they went.

>For many reasons, a second pass at the end-user programming problem — that takes advantage of what was learned from Hypercard and Hypertalk — has never been done (AFAIK). The Etoys system in Squeak Smalltalk in the early 2000s was very successful, but the design was purposely limited to 8–11 year olds (in part because of constraints from working at Disney).

>It’s interesting to contemplate that the follow on system might not have a close resemblance to Hypertalk — perhaps only a vague one [...]

Looks like a less feature-full version of livecode [0], which I'd argue is more of a HyperCard successor", since they were formerly revolution & MetaCard, and can import HyperCard stacks.

[0] https://livecode.com/

There is also Decker (https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker) that is open source and feels much more "Hypercardy", although the retro dithering asthetic may put some people off.
Don’t forget https://HypercardSimulator.com which includes all the content from the eighties and nineties too.
Many years ago, back when I was in high school and they started getting into things like 3D printing and electronics and stuff, the person in charge of all that was discussing the plans with me. I think because I was one of the only students who had electronics experience, at least that people knew about. Anyway, he said they were "going to use breadboard to prototype". The singular of the term was as if it was a product like this. He was so used to every product being a singular of an existing word that would otherwise be plural that when it wasn't a brand/company, he did it anyway. So while I wish you guys much success, feel free to find a name that isn't already a thing.
Breadboard is an excellent name for this project: it tells me that I can snap preexisting components (analogous to ICs) onto a grid and make connections (analogous to wires) between them.

Context, as always, is everything. I don't think that anyone is mistaking Peter Thiel for one of the elves of Valinor.

I bought breadboard.ai like 11ish years ago and ended up giving up on in the venture (AI voice assistant hardware built into a house via standard US 120V outlets and light switches, basically Jarvis). Anyway, the logo is begging to be a lowercase b, like this:

•

•

••

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But the dots are small rectangles, like on a breadboard.

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