I don't say it lightly. It's tempting to say it whenever someone has created something vaguely inspired by Bill Atkinson's original card stack-based application that saw me through the creation of so many little games and projects in grade school.

But John Earnest appears to have done it. It's chiefly an imitation of the original (including its limitations, such as the one-bit graphics and resolution of the Macintosh) and after playing with it through an evening, it appears most or all of what you could do in HyperCard, you can do in Decker.

But Decker is also downloadable for Mac, Windows and Linux, and works right on the web! You can also import (and edit!) sounds, write and execute scripts, save and load stacks, and export finished projects as self-contained HTML. John accepts donations when downloading, but doesn't require them. Just fantastic.

The only wish of mine it didn't grant is that it couldn't import my long-guarded and still unemulable HyperCard stacks from those years. But something tells me that didn't slip his mind.

• Beyond Loom (John Earnest's home)
• Decker