Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

Yes, you are right. I guess my question had two notions behind it.

One is that I want to be able to write some Q&D stuff for my own use and the second was that it seems to me that I am probably not alone in this desire so if something does not exist then that might make a nice project.

We seem to have lost a host of simple application development tools over the last few years (Hypercard, FoxPro) so that now it is quite hard to do personal programming - which folks used to do a lot. The IT is such a personal tool that it seems to cry out for a simple way to build small applications for it. Programming seems to have (mostly) become something that you either do professionally, or you pay somebody else to do for you.

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

Dang. I fondly remember it as being jolly good fun. Besides that, it's my opinion that forms-based metaphores should work very well on tablet devices.

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

Who needs borland/codegear when you have freepascal?
Last I heard, they abandoned kylix and there's no way to do cross-platform development with their tools, while with freepascal you have Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, Mac OS classic, DOS, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, Netware (libc and classic) and MorphOS under Intel x86, Amd64/x86_64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, Sparc, ARM (but no eabi atm:().
For a rad environment comparable to delphi (but that can generate cross-platform gui code for windows, wince, linux and mac os) take a look at lazarus maybe one day it'll be possible to use it to write hildon apps.

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

I agree. One way to get around this, that I have used a couple of times, is to write web apps and use them locally (there are a few very easy Python web frameworks for novice/casual developpers that can be used for this, like Snakelets, Karrigell, and of course web.py). However you don't get the same sort of user interface as with a native GUI (except if you add AJAX to the mix, which is not so easy).

A few years ago there was a very interesting project named PythonCard that tried to recapture the ease of use and user-friendliness of HyperCard in Python. It is still around but unfortunately its creator lost interest and it doesn't seem to be moving much ; also it was based on wxPython (wxWidgets binding) which is a good GUI framework, but a bit on the heavy side for small platforms like the ITs...

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

ObjectVision wasn't a programming language, but a visual development tool. In fact, just about the only "code" you were supposed to know, were spreadsheet formulae (or at least something earily similar).

It was also not so much for developing applications, as a quick'n easy tool to input, access, visualise and process data. I liked it, because I could do stuff without having to program (for which I appear to have a genetic indisposition).

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

Well, I don't know ObjectVision, I was just replying to the delphi part ;)
I do hope that someday one can use Lazarus to make programs for the tablet (I somewhat like python but not enough to write gui apps, while I absolutely loathe C/C++).

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

Yes, I have been pondering this perspective. I like Karrigell - have you ported this to an IT? Still, it is not going to be a bog- simple toolkit.

I had thought about forking Pythoncard and trying to teach it to generate pyGtk instead of wxPython. The major shortcoming of Pythoncard is no support for sizers, but this would not be a problem for the ITs.

However, I think I will play with Eagle a bit first.

Do you know anything about the 'Easy' package that Nokia INdT are prepping? It will include Eagle, apparently, and I like the title.

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

I haven't actually used Karrigell, but some years ago I made such an app with Snakelets, which is in the same vein.It ran (still runs, in fact) on my Zaurus C760, so there's no reason it couldn't on the 770...
Nowadays i'm playing with web.py. Now THAT'S a bogs-simple toolkit ! And for the kind of personal stuff that's going to run only on 127.0.0.1, its lack of features actually is a feature...

Hadn't even heard of it... must have missed something, where did you see it mentioned ? I must get in touch with Gustavo.

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

Second post down:

http://groups.google.com/group/eagle...427a46723691de

Re: Novice/casual development tools
 

Squeak may interest you.