I’ve been thinking about prototyping. And web applications. And applications that aren’t IDEs. And open web.

That’s a lot of things to think about - but there is also a lot lacking in the solutions we are currently given. For instance, let’s say I am a person who needs to build concepts quickly to test out product ideas but I may only know a little bit of code, a little bit about Photoshop and a little bit about wireframing. What are my options?

I could learn about programming from outputting ‘hello world’ in some arbitrary scripting language to building an entire CRUD system and then take some unknown amount of time to learn someone’s proprietary IDE that hopefully increases my productivity in building apps. Does something like this make sense for me?

The interface is just too confusing and complicated to get anything done right away. Sure, I could read all the documentation, search around online for various tutorials and sources - but then I would just be cornering myself as a potential specialist in this proprietary software. Let’s try something else.

I just want to drag and drop things - and have it generally look as expected immediately. I don’t want to read all this text about how to use it. I just want to use it. How about something like this?

Ahh, this interface is so much nicer to work with. There is one unfortunate thing - there is no actual working code in the back. This is literally a mockup - a ghost of a Photoshop file with all the common web-elements we know and love but lacking the design. This is done on purpose to keep the user from treating it as the real thing, but is this good enough? What if we could have the best of both worlds - prototype-like user execution that actually works with real code without having to write all that code or read mountains of documentation on how the system works?

Let’s look at OSX’s Automator for some clues on how we can bridge the gap:

Here we have something that you can drag and drop, is easy to understand AND actually generates some functionality.

What if we could combine elements of all of these examples and make it web-based, open source and easy to use? What would it mean in terms of optimizing workflow from product to development to production?

These are the questions I want to investigate so that we can make a tool that helps people build functioning prototypes and remove the ambiguity that occurs during planning, sketching and iteration.