Here in Portland a new group has started called MOSS (Mini-Open Source
Summit) where open source developers meet once a month to talk about
their projects and share ideas. This last Saturday about 20 of us got
together. I decided to show my SuperShape Ruby/Tk app. One of the Python
guys thought it was kind of cool and he decided to convert it to Python
and using PythonCard he did it in about 1/2 an hour. It probably took me
about 2 hours to get it working with TK and mine doesn’t have the cool
slider bars his did - so his was interactive, he could slide the bar and
see the effects right away. Now I could add slider bars to my Ruby/Tk
version, but it would take a while to figure it out.
So I was rather impressed with how fast that a GUI app could be developed
with PythonCard. The name comes from HyperCard which was a Mac
application that allowed you to easily developa GUI app (with no
programming at all). So PythonCard is a rapid application development
tool. According to the author (who was the guy who actually was at the
MOSS meeting converting SuperShape to Python) it’s more like visual basic
now than Hypercard (the idea being the VB is supposed to allow you to
rapidly develop a GUI app, leaving the language (BASIC) out of it for
now).
PythonCard is based on wxWindows and uses the SciTe editor component (so
he could type code and see the results immediately, kind of like irb, but
with nifty things like completion and API hints). I wonder if something
like this could be a plugin for FreeRide?
Phil