We’ve been working on a coding tool/interface that I think might be of interest to many of you:
Kaleido is a tool that is designed to help visual-thinkers program. You can use Kaleido to create personally meaningful visuals for your code. Kaleido allows individuals to plan, organize, and navigate code in the idiosyncratic way we each think.
Watch the demo video; try it out! We’re pretty excited about the possibilities Kaleido presents, but most of all we want to know what people like you think. Let us know via the survey, our forums, these forums, or email, vimeo, etc. whatever works.
That’s a really neat concept and demo! Great work!
It could be really cool to take it to the next level and have the GUI automatically generate code (even if it’s just boiler-plates or snippets) for you…
I’m thinking along the lines of these type of GUI actions that would add visual elements to your diagram, as well as auto-generate some code:
“Create a new object” - creates a blank class file
name an object - adds an empty class definition (or renames the current one) and renames the class file
assign properties to an object - adds the property definitions, as well as basic get/set methods and a perhaps a “setDefaultProperties” method that would also be added to the constructor/reset method
add a “draw” function to an object - adds an empty draw method
add an “update” function to an object - adds an empty update method
It could be insanely cool to allow a plug-in system for these GUI actions that could provide brand new element types (empty classes, or more advanced boiler-plate classes), as well as new actions that could be applied to specific element types.
Basically I’m thinking along the lines of doing the whole “visual programming” thing (ala Visual Basic *shutter*) in parallel with actual hand-coding. The plugin system would just make it all the more powerful by allowing new libraries and templates to be added.
