Design

The Invent framework has a certain design outlook, way of paying attention to our users and programming philosophy. This page explains and illustrates these things.

The summary is...

Invent is for beginners

Who are beginners?

You're a beginner if creating typical UI based applications isn't your usual focus.

The Invent framework aims to be easy to learn, so you can get on with the fun of creating interesting things. With a little experience, you'll quickly build all sorts of valuable stuff. Invent does the technical heavy lifting so you can focus on with the important things.

If you're asking questions about technical features of Invent, such as, "why does Invent use the JavaScript Audio class like this rather than like that?", then you're probably not a beginner. However, we invite you to contribute to PyperCard if you spot ways to enhance the experience of beginners.

Tip

If you just want some deeply technical capability that Invent doesn't provide, you should probably try another framework that supports that capability rather than try to force it into Invent.

What Invent is

• Simple - Invent doesn't need a lot to make stuff happen.
• Expressive - you can do lots of different stuff with Invent.
• Empowering - Invent helps assemble stuff so you get what you want.
• Teachable - it's easy to explain and learn stuff with Invent.
• Fun - it feels good to make stuff with Invent.

What Invent is NOT

• Comprehensive - rather, we try to implement most of the features, most beginners want, most of the time.
• Fast - rather, we prefer to use Python because it is an easy-to-learn and widely used programming language.
• Flexible - rather, we expect our core pragmatic programming paradigms to be good enough most of the time.
• Opaque - rather, you don't need to be a programmer with a degree in computer science to get started and building stuff in only minutes.
• Hard - rather, we concede that some stuff is deeply challenging and you should use something else if Invent doesn't work for you.

Personas

To help orientate folks contributing to Invent, we've created a small group of personas to illustrate the diversity of "beginner" coders we hope to help with our project.

Each persona has four sections:

1. an introduction that explains who they are,
2. a description of how they're using the Invent framework,
3. any mitigating circumstances about their use of Invent, and,
4. a list of _Invent_related features/capabilities they need.

The persona images were made via a stable diffusion based tool for generating faces. These people do not actually exist!

Alejando 🇲🇽

Alejandro is 12 years old, lives in Mexico and is learning how to code in his after school computer club. He is also colour blind, so the colour pallette for user interfaces sometimes poses a challenge for him.

His teacher, Miss.Perez, has asked him to create a simple game with Invent in a choose-your-own-adventure style. Alejando is only too pleased with this project since he has lots of story ideas based in the Star Wars / Marvel universes.

Alejandro doesn't speak English, but Miss.Perez has created resources in Spanish, based on the Invent documentation and tutorials. He builds and hosts his projects on PyScript.com.

Alejando needs:

• A Spanish language version of PyScript.com.
• The availability of auto-didactic resources such as:
• Beginner friendly example projects.
• Tutorials.
• A simple development environment that supports learning.
• Support for light, dark, high-contrast and custom themes in the UI layer.

Ash 🇬🇧

Ash, 29, works as a back-end Python engineer at a hedge fund in the City of London. They are part of a team responsible for ensuring the right information and alerts get to the right colleagues as market conditions change throughout the day. Most of their Python work is related to data science and the Python tooling needed to create the bespoke and commercially sensitive information used by their colleagues.

They often need to direct non-technical colleagues to specialist sources of information, and to this end Ash has used Invent to create a simple wizard like app to signpost and track the usage of internal services, depending on user role and need. Ash hopes to follow this up with another Invent app that allows traders to read financial alerts consumed from an internally developed news API.

Ash, as an experienced developer who is already familiar with Python, was drawn to the ease with which UI driven apps could be created by folks with little or no frontend experience. They were up and running within an hour, after reading the cheatsheet and skimming the relevant sections of the tutorials. It took just three days for them to produce the wizard app for internal colleagues, and they presented their work to the wider engineering teams in the company, as part of a lunchtime technical "brown bag" session. They also suggested a couple of documentation changes as PRs to the Invent repository and have been active on the project discord channel. They intend to suggest Invent's use in an upcoming London Python Code Dojo community meetup.

What Ash needs:

• A technical cheat sheet for getting experienced developers up and running.
• A simple and intuitive (yet powerful) means of making network calls via both HTTP and web-socket protocols.

Mandisa 🇿🇦

Mandisa, 35, is a high school teacher in a girl's school in Claremont, Cape Town, South Africa. She is a subject matter specialist for computing and is responsible for developing and delivering the programming curriculum for students aged between 11-16.

She first heard of Invent from a tutorial given at PyCon Africa in Ghana, and has remained in touch with the mentor who ran the tutorial. She understands the basics of Python but is often only a little bit more advanced in her understanding than her most advanced 16 year old students. She enjoys the fact that she can use Invent to create interactive presentations for her students, doesn't need to persuade her school sysadmin to install anything (it all works in the browser), and her students can easily take her example apps as starting points for their own Invent projects.

She hopes to contribute an Invent talk at next year's education summit at PyCon South Africa and all her learning resources, released under Creative Commons or Open Source licenses, can be found online via her school's website and her PyScript.com account.

What Mandisa needs:

• Good mobile performance so her students can run their work on their personal computing devices (MicroPython).
• Teacher friendly learning resources that can be freely adapted / adopted in the classroom.
• A classroom friendly configuration of pyscript.com (where teacher has admin control over student's workspaces / applications).

Parminder 🇮🇳

Parminder, 44, is a research scientist attached to the United Nations. Her focus is the measurement and impact of long term environment change on glaciers. She is also partially sighted, and often uses a screen reader and/or magnification features while working across all her computing platforms (Android mobile, Apple iPad and a Windows "work" Lenovo laptop).

She uses Invent to design data collection apps for both her scientific colleagues and non-specialists in the field. These apps are often used in relatively disconnected areas with only patchy 3G internet coverage, or faster Starlink (satellite) based wifi at base-camps.

What Parminer needs:

• Responsive: same app works on both mobile and laptop.
• Offline storage.
• Robust error handling for network based tasks.

Janet 🇨🇦

Janet, 52, is COO at an established and flourishing aeronautical engineering company. Based in Vancouver, the company has several thousand employees in offices in Canada, the US, UK, France and Italy. Much of her work depends on her ability to learn and then communicate key facts in a timely manner. Janet, as someone with a strong engineering background, has picked up a basic understanding of Python.

She uses Invent to create a set of pages containing live data for the purposes of sharing key insights with her colleagues. She likes to think of her Invent apps as interactive dashboards quickly created for other C-level executives in the company, and her reports who use it to monitor key status indicators relating to all sorts of factors including financial, logistical, manufacturing and sales based data.

She especially appreciates how Invent works with real-time data and behaves like a multi-path presentation tool, depending upon what key insights the user wants to learn. She also appreciates how easy it is to update the Invent app, as business needs change, and the app just updates to the latest version when refreshed ~ making the deployment story very easy, cross platform (including mobile) and requiring little or no technical knowledge.

What Janet needs:

• Visual UI designer with access to code behind.
• A simple and intuitive (yet powerful) means of making network calls via both HTTP and web-socket protocols.
• Examples of pages to display common data patterns.

Hasan 🇹🇷

Hasan, 67, is an amateur tech enthusiast and restaurant owner from Selçuk, Turkey. The historic ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are only a few miles away.

Never shy of embracing technology, he's decided to write a multi-lingual Invent app that acts as the menu for tourists at his restaurant. He aims to support Turkish, English, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Italian and Spanish versions of his menu. He's famous among his friends for experimenting with new technology. For instance, he's been using spreadsheets for managing stock and accounting since Windows 3.1 and recently embraced a take-away food delivery app to increase the reach of his restaurant (the inspiration and template for his own menu app).

He started to learn Python as a personal project during the COVID pandemic (his daughter-in-law is a Python programmer in Istanbul, and suggested he look at Invent). Because of the tourist trade, he has relatively good English and is working his way through the Invent tutorials while sketching out his ideas for the menu app for his restuarant. He likes using Python, appreciates that Invent works on all his customer's devices (thanks to MicroPython), and is pleased his rusty HTML skills can be used for generating the user interface.

What Hasan needs:

• Internationalization support.
• Ability to hand-craft HTML based cards.