Prototyping Apps --- do you?

[AndyP]

Richmond, Mr SubRoutine ..rather like that..I hope you manage to BreakOut occationaly)

Richard, totally agree, low fidelity paper sketches do tend to drive conversation and 'what if?" debates.

Having a design looking too finished has on one occation led to a situation where a potential client backed out because their understanding of the amount of work (and cost) still required was greatly less than was actually needed, because in their view the project was in essence Virtually completed. That was a hard but good lesson to learn...back to paper.

[mwieder]

Yep - have been there.

Check out Balsamiq for getting prototypes in front of clients.
It's designed to have just that pen-and-paper look so it's not intimidating and doesn't look too finished but still has all the bells and whistles for a demo walkthrough.

Unfortunately there's no linux version, just Windows and OSX.

https://balsamiq.com/

[richmond62]

Richmond, Mr SubRoutine ..rather like that..I hope you manage to BreakOut occasionally

Ha, Ha: when I was at University I was sneaking into the Maths department from the Philosophy department
and was an average 3 years older than the other students. So the Maths and Physics students were BreakingOut in
horrifying attacks of acne, while I was just annoying the people teaching PASCAL
and so on in the Maths department who had major stereotyping problems with a red-headed, kilted, OT,
flamboyantly artistic fellow who used to roll in, usually partly drunk, and help the Maths kids sort their branching logic out . . .

Whether I should really have been called "Mister SubRoutine" or "Missed The SubRoutine" is a bit of a moot point.

Not withstanding that; I do think chopping one's code up into reusable, manageable chunks is far, far better than having
endlessly long lists one can get seriously lost in when trying to work out where a bug is.

[richmond62]

I actually feel that prototyping is a fairly nebulous term once one starts working with computer code (as apart from playing
with one's childhood toys on the carpet and/or drawing coloured stuff on paper),as, certainly with Livecode, the
boundary between what is a prototype and what is a developer preview, a release candidate, and a finished product can
get very subjective.

I could never understand an idea that I have seen voiced, that one use Livecode for prototyping and then use
"a real programming language" (whatever the %^&$# "a real programming language" means if it excludes Livecode)
to write the end product.

[mwieder]

I think for me the idea of prototyping means that I can cobble something together as a proof of concept without committing myself to a lot of work.
Then if it doesn't meet my needs or a client's needs I won't feel too bad about tossing it.

I've only been in the situation of having to rework something in a "real" programming language once in the early 90s when I had done a prototype in HyperCard but had to resort to coding in C because HyperCard's graphic routines weren't fast enough to keep up with the graphing we needed to do. Fortunately I was using a RAD environment called Marksman that made coding in C just about as easy as xtalk.

[richmond62]

It would be great to have a web address for that 'Marksman' RAD, as it would be interesting to see how it works.

[mwieder]

Yeah, but is was a MacOS-only app (up through OS9) and never made the jump to OSX or anything else. I'll see if I can dig up some historical data.

[richmond62]

As I have a G3 iMac that is a dedicated Mac OS 9 machine . . . .

[richmond62]

So; back to Prototyping . . .

Livecode would seem to be the best of both worlds:

Re prototyping:

1. Livecode seems to offer Delegation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegatio ... ogramming)

2. One can quickly get an incomplete version of what one is aiming up and running (or, not running . . . ).

3. Incomplete versions can be sent out to testers who can send feedback without having to wait for a supposedly feature-complete piece of software.

From a prototype developed in Livecode one does not need to redo the whole jingbang in another programming language
as one can move directly through a series of increasingly feature-rich prototypes to a finished piece of software.

[richmond62]

http://pv-productions.com/where-technol ... oductions/

https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/show ... hp?t=33062

[thatkeith]

the higher the fidelity of the UI rendering the lower the quality of the brainstorming that happens around it.

THIS! Yes, absolutely. The same goes for graphic design. I insist all my students keep a sketchbook and scribble roughs into that before reaching for page layout or graphic design software. The precision inherent in these tools pushes users into working on the final polish long before the initial ideas have been properly worked out. I always have a sketchbook with me: A5 (roughly half US Letter size) so it's easy to carry, and hardback so it survives being crammed into whatever bag I might use. Flicking through used pages shows written-out notes and thoughts, scribbles for graphic design projects, rough wireframe designs for app projects, odd-ball doodles for harebrained ideas, drawings for home improvement plans...

I do often jump straight into LC or SC to try out little script ideas to see if initial concepts would work, but for actual project planning paper is by far the best place to start.

k

[richmond62]

Oddly enough, from a teaching point of view I have a criticism of Livecode: as a WYSIWYG setup it
is almost too easy, and children who, by manipulating premade objects on-screen, get the impression
they can program computers suddenly get turned off when they see the coded underpinnings for the first time.

I went up to my house in Scotland this Summer and liberated my old BBC Master Compact from the attic, and with the
aid of a 6 pin DIN to SCART cable have connected the thing up to a flat-screen telly in my classroom so I can show
the kids BBC BASIC at its finest: I have also installed BBC emulators on all my machines running Xubuntu 14.04 so
that I can have the children making a few simple programs in BASIC before they get anywhere near Livecode!

http://b-em.bbcmicro.com

[richmond62]

I am really writing this message to revive this thread as I feel that LiveCode [the company] has lost the plot
in terms of pushing its product [err . . . LiveCode] as a rapid prototyping tool.

Several pupils of my EFL school [who currently attend EFL classes] who attended my "Q 'n' Dirty" intro to programming using LiveCode
a few years back, and are now learning such jolly programming languages ("In the first and the second year we are just writing console programs." FFS!) as C# have remarked on how, by running up prototypes in LiveCode they have succeeded in making their programming teachers look pretty foolish [which warms the cockles of my heart] . . . . .

. . . mind you, their teachers have got university degrees in programming; so you'd expect them to have corks rammed right up their conceptualisation organs in Bulgaria, which, oddly enough given its commie past, is the last bastion of didactic educational conservatism.

[stam]

It is an interesting discussion, although reading through the posts above there seems to be some cross talk between prototyping and wireframing, which aren't the same.

Given the immediacy of livecode development I'm not sure there is a real need to 'prototype' since your prototype is essentially a version of your app, but certainly wireframing can prevent subsequent headaches when planning more complex apps. Much like @mwieder in a post above, I'd highly recommend Balsamiq for planning a wireframe blueprint for apps, before diving in and staring to code.

S.

[richmond62]

But there is plenty of space between a wireframe and a fully functional finished product,
and LiveCode can be used to produce models with partial functionality.

ANd when it comes to wireframes I favour a packet of chunky coloured pencils and lots of paper:
or, from a more ecological point of view, a board and sticks of coloured chalk.

At a really cheapo shop here you can buy sticky-back plastic that you can stick on anything to
make an 18 x 18 inch instant chalkboard: rocks!