Recently, Brett Gaylor wrote about the prospective future of Webmaker in 2013, discussing the topic of “Content Types”. Using a promotional video from the days of black-and-white GUIs, he drew an analogy between HyperCard and Webmaker ideology. The idea isn’t new — in fact, Ben Moskowitz had written previously about his own inspiration stemming from software like HyperCard and ResEdit. But Brett’s video really drove home the point for me.
While developing all-encompassing UI’s for tools is ideal, it’s also very hard. However, giving users the ability to script in the context of a tool alleviates much of the pain in designing the ultimate extensive UI. Moreover, it incrementally teaches the user the memes which stir around the tool and how to use them expressively to become super-users.
Naturally, I started hacking away at a prototype of this type of functionality in Popcorn Maker.
