RE: [Pythoncard-users] What Do We Call These Things?

> From: Danny Goodman
>
> This thread gets me off my duff because I think the card-ness of
> PythonCard's name and any metaphor used to describe its
> components shackles
> it with too much baggage (both good and bad). Those who know
> HyperCard well
> will have certain expectations that PythonCard is not intended to meet;
> those who may have only heard of HyperCard will feel like they
> have to know
> something else before getting to know PythonCard.

This seems to be the case so far.

> Hemispherical-floating-arm computers notwithstanding, anything

For those that missed it, Danny is referring to the non-event known as the
new iMac.
  http://www.apple.com/imac/
It is cool looking, but hardly earth shaking; many people were expecting the
second coming based on Apple's teasers last week.

> that conjures
> up "Apple" in non-Apple users'/programmers' minds is not a plus for the
> promotion of a new OS-platform-independent technology, IMHO. If
> it's a good
> authoring environment, it will attract old 'Card farts, like me
> (...and hi,
> Dan!) even if you name it something that would get bleeped on
> "South Park."

Agreed!

> And Kevin will be able to spend more time explaining what it is,
> rather than
> defending what it isn't.

Probably :)

I did reserve a project on SourceForge called Monty or wxMontyPython because
I think that this is the kind of project that is going to make Python
complete; remember that Python is from Monty Python not the snake. Pretty
cheeky, probably a bad choice.
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/montywxpython/
but nothing is there. It became pretty clear after a week of messages on
wxPython-users that I would basically just be doing what I thought of as
PythonCard, so until everyone agreed upon a name change I might as well
continue using the same cvs, mailing list, etc.

I like the PythonCard name and how some marketing has already been done for
us, but I guess a lot of anti-marketing has been done as well. If we call it
something like "Biffles" or "Maynard" then we have to start the marketing
from scratch. Just because this is open source doesn't mean that we can
"succeed" without marketing, word of mouth and proactive promotion are both
needed.

I'm still in the camp of not needing a real name until the Prototype is
removed from the package name, but we are very close to that point, so
decision time is coming.

ka