[Pythoncard-users] What Do We Call These Things?

[Dan S. <da...@gu...>]

Kevin and I were having an off-list dialog about the direction of the 
PythonCard application building technology. I'm most interested in an 
audience I call "Inventive Users." These are people who want to use 
their computers to solve problems that neither software developers 
nor IT shops tend to want to spend time on (or don't have the cycles 
for, or don't see a big enough market to bother with), who are 
willing to learn scripting but not programming, and who need things 
that rapidly prototype and turn into usable application-like things 
with minimal hassle.

Kevin suggested that he was thinking of moving away from HyperCard's 
stack-background-card metaphor for a number of reasons. But he 
remains appropriately adamant about keeping the simple-is-good 
philosophy behind PythonCard. He ran up the flagpole the idea of 
using Application, Form, and Panel. What follows is my thinking on 
the subject, FWIW.

Whether it's good, bad or indifferent for PythonCard to "lose" its 
"HyperCard-ness" is, I think, less important in the long run than the 
simple-is-good philosophy. But I think there's something 
fundamentally sound and intuitive about the stack-background-card 
metaphor that shouldn't get lost, at least for the Inventive User 
audience. These non-programmers don't want to think in terms of 
applications, forms and panels. Those are "geeky" things.

I'm not certain that stack, card, background is the requisite 
terminology set, but I do feel that something _like_ that set of 
terms is necessary.

For some time I've been noodling about this. I like substituting 
layout for background and page for card. I haven't come up with a 
better word for stack and without one, we almost have to revert to 
cards and backgrounds again. What is it people want to build? 
Solutions. Can we really say, though, that a solution is a book 
(which is what sort of flows naturally out of layouts and pages)? I 
don't think so.

Back when Kaleida was trying to figure this stuff out, they had some 
interesting metaphors but the lore seems lost at this point.

This is fertile ground for conversation, but more importantly I think 
it spells the degree to which a product like PythonCard can succeed 
among Inventive Users and that is my central vision for it.
-- 
Dan Shafer, Author-Consultant
http://www.danshafer.com
http://www.shafermedia.com