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Honestly, while growing up.. There's something really amazing about the intuitiveness of tools like Macromedia Flash, Visual Basic, Audacity/even FL Studio that

Honestly, while growing up.. There's something really amazing about the intuitiveness of tools like Macromedia Flash, Visual Basic, Audacity/even FL Studio that we've had so many people being able to pick up these tools without having to resort to so much documentation/tutorials. I don't think I could've done that with any of the HTML5 / Web tools that were touted as an alternative at that time... Or probably even today. I mean sure there's MIT scratch that does half as many things as visual basic. But i feel like we need a little more "mature" tools that fill these gaps. I could be wrong and there's much better replacements these days..

WillAdams 1y ago
For me it was HyperCard/Runtime Revolution/Livecode. Unfortunately, that latter, after stumping for funds to go opensource has gone closed source and is now charging enough that I can't justify it for hobbyist use, and the openxtalk folks don't seem to have an easy Windows download yet (I'd love to be wrong). I'd really like for there to be an opensource successor to VisualBasic which was cross-platform and worked well enough to be popular enough to achieve a critical mass of usage/support.
- occasionalcoder 1y ago
  https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    Thanks! That seems to be the consensus --- hopefully it will become more popular, and I'll give it a try, and hopefully will add to that.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Check out https://avaloniaui.net https://avaloniaui.net as well. It's basically a cross-platform reimplementation of WPF. It's not quite as simple as C#+WinForms or Lazarus+LCL because you don't get drag-and-drop UI designer, and you need to write markup by hand (albeit with live preview). But unlike HTML, it's actually designed for desktop UI apps from the get go, so it's much easier to write for anything non-trivial. And you can still write "quick and dirty" GUI code by directly connecting event handlers to buttons and updating values etc in it, ignoring data bindings and other more advanced facilities.

WillAdams 1y ago

For me it was HyperCard/Runtime Revolution/Livecode. Unfortunately, that latter, after stumping for funds to go opensource has gone closed source and is now charging enough that I can't justify it for hobbyist use, and the openxtalk folks don't seem to have an easy Windows download yet (I'd love to be wrong). I'd really like for there to be an opensource successor to VisualBasic which was cross-platform and worked well enough to be popular enough to achieve a critical mass of usage/support.

occasionalcoder 1y ago
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Thanks! That seems to be the consensus --- hopefully it will become more popular, and I'll give it a try, and hopefully will add to that.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Check out https://avaloniaui.net https://avaloniaui.net as well. It's basically a cross-platform reimplementation of WPF. It's not quite as simple as C#+WinForms or Lazarus+LCL because you don't get drag-and-drop UI designer, and you need to write markup by hand (albeit with live preview). But unlike HTML, it's actually designed for desktop UI apps from the get go, so it's much easier to write for anything non-trivial. And you can still write "quick and dirty" GUI code by directly connecting event handlers to buttons and updating values etc in it, ignoring data bindings and other more advanced facilities.