I have been looking around for development tools to do simple GUI apps on the tablets and have not found anything suitable.

What I have in mind would be something vaguely like Hypercard/Pythoncard/VB using a scripting language - preferably Python. Above all it should be usable by just about any tablet owner without having to set up a complex development environment or acquire detailed knowledge of tablet internals, Hildonization, Gtk+, build systems, install systems etc...

Is there anything like this available? I have searched but found nothing. I thought that the OLPC folks would have something like this for Sugar, but I don't see anything there either.

Nice dream.
Me Too, Me Too...

I haven't found anything suitble either.
My idea was to try wxGlade and python but I am really new to all the UI stuff and I haven't found anybody who described the path for me - so my own research is veeery slow.
The bad news is that - as far as I understood it - libglade is not supported on chinook anymore.

The simplest tool I know of is Gustavo Barbieri's Eagle framework :
http://blog.gustavobarbieri.com.br/

It uses Python, of course, and offers a simpler way to build Gtk/Hildon GUIs.

For novice/casual use, these portable languages and tools are really nice because you don't need to set up a complicated cross-platform development environment to be able to code on a (Windows, Linux) desktop and run the result on the tablet. It just happens.

Is Borland still around? Can we get the sources for ObjectVision?

Eagle sounds nice.
Thanks, will have a look at it.

Yes, it does sound good. fpp, thanks for the pointer.

I also came across Pluthon: http://pluthon.garage.maemo.org/
and it looks like it would be possible to develop Eagle/Python apps in Eclipse (on any platform) and deploy and test directly on a tablet. No Scratchbox required.

Plus PLuthon uses Pydev which is very nice - I don't suppose it can use the Pydev debugger(?), but you can log to the Eclipse console from an app. running on the tablet.

Has anyone done this? I plan to try it out soon so any caveats would be welcome.

I believe eclipse is overkill for Python/Eagle development. A good Python editor (such as SciTe, also available for Maemo) is quite enough. On a Windows desktop you just need to install Python, the Gtk runtime, and pyGtk. Then you code and test your app from within Scite. When you copy your code over to the tablet with the maemo version of Eagle, Hildonization is taken care of automatically.

I like Eclipse/Pydev as an editor and debugger, but I don't want to get into emacs/vim/eclipse/<name your editor> debates. It is just a matter of my preference and comfort.

I do take your suggestions about installing GtK and pyGtk on a Windows box so that you can test locally. Thanks again.

Oh, if you're already used to Eclipse/Pydev that's different, of course. I was misled by the "Novice/casual" in the title, and responded with someone starting from scratch in mind...

Only just. Borland spun off their developer products to Codegear:
http://www.codegear.com/

Delphi now costs about $2,000!!!

I don't see any mention of ObjectVision - according to Wikipedia they stopped development in 1992 ...