Game infoSK8 (pronounced "skate") was a multimedia authoring environment developed in Apple's Advanced Technology Group from 1988 until 1997. The project's goal was to allow creative designers to visually create a complex, working application. This was to be done by elegantly separating the concerns of visual design from programming. The main components of SK8 included the object system, the programming language, the graphics and components libraries, and the Project Builder, an integrated development environment. It was described as "HyperCard on steroids".
SK8 was a research project that resulted in a variety of spinoffs (e.g., AppleScript, IPC for the Mac) and was used by Apple for system-level QA and for prototyping QuickTime and Newton, and by universities and corporations for creating and prototyping various tools and applications. Although around 1993 a team was assigned by the Apple Product Division to release a SK8 runtime, the limitation of the Mac's capabilities (mainly, low RAM and processing power) as well as the shift to the PowerPC chip made such a large project intractable. With the bulk of the original vision completed and no easy path to release as part of MacOS, active development ended in 1996-1997, and the Macintosh Common Lisp source code for the entire project was released to the public in 1997.
