Pronto: Toward a Live Designer’s Notebook (ECMAScript)

A SkillsCast for this session is not available.

We will briefly demonstrate Lively Web (informally “Lively”), an archetypical live-object development system. We will discuss how its strengths (live-in-browser open-ended and self-supporting development, plus the ability to save any creation as a web page in seconds) led to an accidental misclassification of the entire system as a “web development environment”. This in turn led to a narrow view of the typical users, and a self-fulfilling agenda to serve relatively serious web programmers and programmers in general.

The original goals of the project were much broader and closer to Alan Kay’s ideal of a DynaBook, and we have begun a project named “Pronto” to re-imagine the user experience for Lively to better suit non-programmers and newbies, while also supporting the more lively touch and pen interfaces of new phones and tablets. The second part of the presentation will cover various desiderata of a dynabook appliance through discussion and demonstration.

The entire Pronto project is open-source work, as is the Lively system on which it is built, and attendees will have full access to the system for play or work, or further exploration and evolution of the tool itself.

KEYWORDS

IDE, Web Development, Live Object System, JavaScript, Serialization, WebDAV, Live Coding, Live Server Coding, Morphic, HTML, Canvas, End-User Access

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

• Jepsen 13 (SkillsCast recorded in December 2020)
• Launching an Internal Developer Community (SkillsCast recorded in December 2020)