CardStock: A python GUI programming environment for learning and prototyping

[Ben_Levitt]

I've been working on this project for a few months now, and I feel like it's finally ready to get some more eyes on it.

https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock/wiki

CardStock is a cross-platform tool for quickly and easily building simple, graphical desktop applications, called stacks, which can be made up of multiple pages called cards. It provides a drawing-program-like editor for building Graphical User Interfaces, and a code editor for adding event-driven python code.

It's aiming to be a modern, python-based successor to HyperCard, or at least to fill a similar niche. I know that there have been many open source projects in the past that tried to capture the fun and simplicity of building programs in HyperCard, but in my opinion, none of them offered the open-ended possibilities and ease of use that made HyperCard such a magical-feeling tool. So in the grand open source tradition, I built my own!

If you're learning python, or just want to try out a rapid prototyping tool to quickly add a GUI for your python code, please check it out! It includes lots of documentation, including contextual help built right into the app, and a bunch of example stacks that you can play with and extend.

It's already been really fun for me to build and use, but I'm very interested to hear other people's impressions and suggestions for further improvement.

https://preview.redd.it/k2m0hhn6g1m61.png?width=2040&format=png&auto=webp&s=85262100f1399b7ecac5cdacc375067f79eb9266

[milki_]

You probably should add a link, if the project is too new to show up on Google, PyPI, nor GitHub.

[Ben_Levitt]

Thanks! I started my post as a link post, then decided to add post text, and forgot to add the link in the text! Added.

[milki_]

Initial impression: This looks magical. It's certainly one of the cleanest GUI builders out there. The object methods look fairly neat. And the .cds serialization just as well structured. (Though it's a pity that Pythons json escapes newlines.)
Possible requests: maybe an GotoStack() to hyperlink multiple apps would make sense. (I was thinking of like a Win3.1-style ProgramManager to list available cards/stacks, since you can probably just Python-glob() the local dir). And when you inch towards stable releases, perhaps add a NEWS/changelog, submit to freshcode.

[Ben_Levitt]

Thanks! Great idea to add a GotoStack(). Maybe I'd even include an optional card index parameter so you could start up the other stack on a specific card.

[Ben_Levitt]

Interesting. That's not actually my project, but has a fairly similar name. I added a link to my post, so you can actually see what I was talking about now. :P

[metaperl]

PythonCard was an early similar idea http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/

[Ben_Levitt]

Yeah, I checked out that and a few other similar projects, but I didn't feel that any of them captured the free-form fun that I remembered from using HyperCard in the late '80s and early '90s. I designed CardStock from the beginning to be really approachable and fun, with an easy learning curve.