
Tersus - an open source, purely visual IDE for iPhone and web apps - beagle3
http://www.tersus.com/
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viggity
In a gold rush, you're better off selling shovels than digging for gold.

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jlees
It sounds like a cool idea, but when I started actually looking at the
interface, I thought: "god, I'd rather code than use that".

Not sure who the target user is, to be honest. Coders want the power of code;
non-coders, IMO, won't cope well with something like this as you still have to
think in a codey kind of way.

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anigbrowl
I would far rather use this than code. I've mentioned
<http://synthmaker.co.uk/> (which includes code modules) before. For many
applications the procedural emphasis of code may not be the best approach. I
like Yahoo's Pipes tool for the same reason. DSP and (to some extent) circuit
board designers use these kind of schematic, flow based applications a lot -
it's basically the same idea as analog computing.

Remember flowcharts? If you're trying to do something complicated, a good way
to approach it is sketch it visually and then refer back to your information
or decision flow chart while punching in the code. When I first learned
programming I thought how nice it would be to just draw the flowcharts in and
build the program that way, but that would have been far too computationally
intense. This is no longer the case.

Frankly, I'd rather let the computer do the work. I also grew up with log
tables and slide rules (as well as walking up hill to and from school), and a
prime joy of having a computer was to be able to automate much tedious pencil-
and-paper calculation. To me, writing code is the tedious crap one has to do
to implement ideas that are often most easily represented in schematic form.
Ugly and flawed though these tools may seem at present, they seem vastly
preferable to _typing_ everything.

These questions remind me a bit of discussions about Emacs/Vi vs (your
favorite modern IDE). Of course you can do truly amazing things in editors
like Emacs. Just as people who knew Wordtsar* and WordPerfect could churn out
documents at high speed with their advanced knowledge of key combinations.
Just like with TeX or CSound you can produce amazingly specific renderings of
typography or music, and where experts with these tools can wipe the floor
with those namby-pamby WYSIWYG tools...and yet the vast majority of people are
happy with the WYSIWYG tools and get more stuff done, because most people are
not sufficiently masochistic as to want everything as abstracted as possible.

* accidental misspelling that was too good to correct :)

Of course, doing it the easy way means one will never be as hard core as
someone who has mastered the techniques of working with high degrees of
abstraction. On the other hand few programmers seem consumed by a burning urge
to throw away their high level languages and libraries and hand-code
everything in assembler, or hardware designers casting aside spice and
breadboards in favor of writing out bessel equations for everything.

Tools like this can seem clumsy and restrictive at first, but all that's
happening is that you're learning to deal with a visual grammar rather than
one based on keywords and syntax. The underlying concepts of programming are
just as portable and useful, and if you stick with it you might be surprised
at how much a tool like this can do for your productivity. You will certainly
find it a hell of a lot easier to see what is going than reading page of code
for all but the simplest tasks.

tl;dr don't mistake your personal investment of time and effort for the best
way of doing things.

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ShabbyDoo
The company seems to be trying a combination of a few open source business
models:

<http://www.tersus.com/#Id=18>

Nothing wrong with this, but I'm skeptical. It's my understanding that
companies like RedHat (and JBoss specifically) obtain most of their revenue
from support contracts, training and consulting for large IT groups. And, it's
usually a back-door sale -- developers start using JBoss, it's well-liked, and
then management buys support. How will Tersus get its foot in the door? It
doesn't seem that people who would consider using it would be knowledgeable
enough to seek out such a system. Wufoo likely gets back-door sales from non-
IT parts of large organizations, and it markets itself in a "solutions" sort
of way ("You can do surveys!"). It seems that Tersus walks in a no-man's land
where its not sufficiently friendly to attract Wufoo-like users, and its not
sophisticated enough to be chosen by a developer for a project. Who's their
target customer?

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abalashov
It's interesting for UI design, but anyone saying that you can bring web
applications - logic included - "to life" with no coding is selling snake oil.
Some coding is required even for the most banal of CRUD apps, even if you're
using a glorified database front-end like Maypole.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes, you'll probably need to hack out some code to get things done. But it's
not inevitable.

This <http://kineme.net/files/Nord-Modular-30-large.jpg> is the first-
generation programming environment for the Nord Modular a (since discontinued)
DSP-based representation f a modular analog synthesizer. No coding at all here
- you have a bunch of modules, some of which are bitwise or digital, some of
which are not. The configurations are referred to as patch files (after patch
cables) - not to be confused with a code patch.

I don't want to go reinstalling the software, finding the file, and making
screen captures (and I've since sold that keyboard), but I had a patch file
that would let you play _Asteroids_ when you plugged the audio output into an
oscilloscope (or ran a softscope on on a computer). I would play by twisting
two knobs (for heading and thrust) and hitting a piano key to fire, pew pew.

I think we could all agree that _Asteroids_ , even a primitive implementation,
involves logic. And although this might seem like a very perverse way to
implement, there are many tasks oriented around signal or data flow for which
the procedural approach to programming is equally perverse.

Look into <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer> for more.

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korussian
I love the idea of a visual IDE for web apps, but Tersus seems so heavy, with
so many dependencies.

This may be a stupid question, but is there a good OS X-based visual IDE out
there for creating web apps?

I don't care if it's for PHP or Python or anything else - I want to learn to
create web apps, and I have to start somewhere. I'm trying out both Django and
RoR, but it would be awesome if there were a visual way to start putting the
pieces of an app together, and then building up the code from within.

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poppysan
Looks promising. I like the fact that you can demo the iphone apps with no
iphone...

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allenbrunson
You know, if you download Apple's iPhone development environment, which is
free, you can _also_ "demo iPhone apps with no iPhone." It comes with a pretty
decent iPhone simulator.

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darw1n
yea but this is for windows also. Its the only way I know that you can develop
iPhone apps on windows. (Right?)

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TomOfTTB
You all need to read the actual page. This just creates iPhone WEB APPS not
native apps. In the tutorial they skirt around that but you can clearly see in
the instructions (<http://www.tersus.com/#Id=1336>) where it says...

If you don't have an iPhone, you can see a preview of how the application will
look on iPhone. Simply add "/iphone.html" at the end of the application's URL
in your browser (e.g. go to <http://localhost:8080/ShoppingList/iphone.html>
instead of <http://localhost:8080/ShoppingList>):

So it's creating a web app not a native one. Something you can create with any
Windows HTML editor (and you can demo it simply by using Safari for Windows
and resizing it)

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ugiflezet
You can also create a native iPhone app:

Starting with version 1.3.27, Tersus Studio generate native iPhone
applications, in the form of Xcode projects that you can to compile and sign
using Apple's iPhone SDK <http://www.tersus.com/#Id=2820>

