One of the PencilCase devs here, thanks for your question.

We've already been using AppDrop with clients and it's been great for them to distribute apps to their own users.

All price levels get access to AppDrop Community which lets you easily share your creations with a link. The Corporate and Founding Partner levels will also get their very own, configurable custom-branded PencilCase AppDrop store.

Yyyyup.

I'd only give these guys money if "AppDrop" isn't part of the value proposition for you.

(It isn't for me! An app toolkit that works like HC sounds fantastic - I wish they weren't muddying the waters with this app-store business.)

The only license I see on the LiveCode site is at http://livecode.com/LiveCode-EULA/ and that specifically mentions that it's not GPL-compatible.

Don't disagree re the average Joe, but as a semi-technical Joe without the chops to really code this is exciting. I'd like to see more non-game demos to better appreciate the scope, but SalesForce integration screams small and medium business use-cases.

Hi there, I'm one of the PencilCase devs that worked on the JS engine. The easiest way to get started with PencilCase is using events and actions in the GUI, no programming required. If you want more control you can program in JavaScript as well with access to all of the objects on your cards, web requests, etc. You get the best of both worlds.

HyperTalk could be done in JS as an intermediate compilation step. (Which we know because that's exactly what TileStack did before it died: http://www.cnet.com/news/tilestack-hypercard-comes-back-from... )

It's a little confusing what functionality is where. I get the sense it's a OS X development suite (à la Adobe's ability to publish native iOS apps) with some kind of app companion (to include AppDrop?).

I think it remains to be seen exactly how much "programming" you can do natively on iOS

Thanks for the GREAT feedback!

Here is what we cooked up this morning in the hotel, table views for demo today. All classic CocoaTouch controls will be in the first release.

http://vine.co/v/MOx5Xd7vMIJ

As someone who does know what Hypercard is, I'd like to see the same thing, and also, a glimpse at what the code looks like.

Me too! (Well I started first in basic, but HyperCard was where I did my real first programming)

I made so many crazy games in HyperCard. I had no idea what I was doing either; I had countless hidden fields that I used to store data, serialized with my own custom format.

I loved it though. So much fun!

It's a "private app store" (their words)—a catalog of published apps developed in PencilCase. A named feature within the app, insofar as I understand.

I got a little annoyed with the excessive use of "TM" everywhere.

You might also find the free community edition of LiveCode[1] handy. At a glance, looks very much like HyperCard. There is also Microsoft's Project Sienna[2] if you are on Windows 8.

[1] http://livecode.com/download/ [2] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-projec...

I started programming in HyperCard around age 7-8. The first things I did were basically interactive stories - think Myst with stick figures and a really childish plot/simplicity. Drawing pictures, placing buttons over them that took you to different pictures with more buttons. Dialogs with questions and multiple choice answer buttons. Eventually adding variables that would remember things that happened before and use those to change behavior later in the game.

I also had fun composing really bad melodies with the HyperCard sound command (that let you enter notes - it'd scale whatever sound effect in pitch)

edit: the greatest learning tools for me were all the included sample stacks. Tearing apart and editing those and the code that made them tick was an amazing learning experience ("oh! so instead of making 50 buttons, I can make one button, and do this thing with the mouse position and some math [something they make me do in school that I otherwise find pointless] and figure out which section was clicked!")

Having used scratch (very cool) I have been using the beta to teach them things like - this image is an ~object~ and it has properties. Look how we can tell it to change these properties over time etc. Its more conceptual than "this is the syntax of an if statement in objective-c". Pretty cool so far (as cool as scratch, just different)

From what I've heard of HyperCard and learning programming languages, children definitely could create a small game, short animation or interactive story. At nine years old, it would probably be rudimentary, but they could learn the basics. Without meaning to be rude, this question's like asking "What would you expect a nine year old to accomplish regarding writing and drawing?"

If you don't like that analogy, consider how children often learn the basics of woodworking or sewing through small projects that might not be useful or even be completed. Programming could work the same way.

Also, while this tale starts with seventh grade (13 years old?) -- I should think kids these days start out considerably more computer literate:

"Learning About Smalltalk" http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?page=61

"My name is Marian Goldeen. (...) I would like to tell you about how I got started working with computers at Xerox and the class I taught."

I started coding at the age of 10 on a ZX Spectrum back in the early 80's with BASIC.

So I would expect a 9 year old to be able to write simple programs, drawing simple 2D figures or question/answer programs.

    10 print "my name"
    20 goto 10

And move on from there?