13th July 2010, 2:42 AM
http://gizmodo.com/5584640/create-your-o...e=true&s=i
Some time ago I was thinking about how to make a powerful "map editor" type software much more user friendly (I was thinking this since Warcraft 3, and again when Smash Bros. Brawl's map editor managed to disappoint me). I thought that if a company like Nintendo is ever going to give it's users a lot more power over their maps, they'd need something Nintendo-friendly, so I imagined pre-built blocks of code that appeared to the user as literal building blocks that they snapped together. They'd be color coded depending on which objects one "snapped" into the input and output of them. One could literally pick up a block and "drag" it over various objects on a map to "link" them. If they wanted a timer map trigger, they'd literally just drag in a stop watch item and drop it onto the block over "trigger", that sort of thing. It'd be soft cuddly and powerful.
Google beat me to it... They're awesome.
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
Just check this out. It's frightening just how closely this matches what I had in mind. Of course it won't be as powerful as a typical programming language, but if users can, after learning a few things, design their own "code blocks" it has potential to BECOME that powerful.
Some time ago I was thinking about how to make a powerful "map editor" type software much more user friendly (I was thinking this since Warcraft 3, and again when Smash Bros. Brawl's map editor managed to disappoint me). I thought that if a company like Nintendo is ever going to give it's users a lot more power over their maps, they'd need something Nintendo-friendly, so I imagined pre-built blocks of code that appeared to the user as literal building blocks that they snapped together. They'd be color coded depending on which objects one "snapped" into the input and output of them. One could literally pick up a block and "drag" it over various objects on a map to "link" them. If they wanted a timer map trigger, they'd literally just drag in a stop watch item and drop it onto the block over "trigger", that sort of thing. It'd be soft cuddly and powerful.
Google beat me to it... They're awesome.
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
Just check this out. It's frightening just how closely this matches what I had in mind. Of course it won't be as powerful as a typical programming language, but if users can, after learning a few things, design their own "code blocks" it has potential to BECOME that powerful.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)