Reminds me of Dubl-Click's calculator construction kit for classic MacOS. I spent, I think, $75 on it back when that was a lot of money for an underemployed kid; never got any real value out of it, but was fun to play with.
There were a lot of "construction kits" around that time, Bill Budge's 1982 "Pinball Construction Set" was perhaps the first. but there were things like the Adventure Construction Set, Music Construction Set, etc., that let people make their own versions of a program, typically (but not always) games, using a visual interface (even on 8-bit computers). I wonder where these things have gone. Yes, today we have things like Scratch, but that's more a programming language even if it is visual.
I remember seeing a screenshot of the Music Construction Set. It's fascinating how they were able to achieve such complex interface given the size/resolution of the screen and other technical limitations like memory constraints.
It also reminds me that SimCity started as a kind of city construction set. As a genre of software, it does seem related to end-user programming.
to me the converse is what's amazing: that we can waste SO MANY PIXELS while displaying even less.
I don't care that UI elements take up 4x, 9x, or 16x more pixels, or whatever, I care that user interfaces seem to be designed by people who simply do not care (or do not understand) how to convey information visually.
UIs were pretty good before Human Factors and UX people came around and needed to start justifying themselves. Now, UIs suck while looking so much better.
if UX people studied usability and utility, we would be converging on a ruleset for the perfect user interface, but instead things keep changing by larger amounts more rapidly.
Go look at the Windows User Interface Guidelines document published for application developers developing applications for Windows 95. I would like to see something of this quality today, with all of the ability to convey information that this UI paradigm allowed. A contemporary UI design standard doesn't have to look like Windows 95 at all, but it needs to be as discoverable, as complete, and as useful as this design document describes.
There is a later version of this by Microsoft for UWP applications, which even Microsoft failed to follow alarmingly often. links which should be buttons, buttons which should be links, etc. (buttons take action and links navigate, and let's keep it that way, please.)
> I wonder where these things have gone. Yes, today we have things like Scratch, but that's more a programming language even if it is visual.
RPG Maker may fit the bill - although obviously a lot more complex and capable than the Pinball Construction Set, it does not require programming. Super Mario Maker may be even more similar to the Pinball Construction Set, having a similarly limited scope.
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1894-calculator-construc...