ongoing � When Secrets Make Sense: "The point about incompatible architecture is right, by the way; by analogy, if the OpenOffice guys could download all of the Microsoft Office source code tomorrow, it would probably slow them down more than help them."
Open source is something strange. I was looking at Zend's contest for PHP5 code: most of it is typical open source programmers: programmers doing programmer stuff: message boards, application environments, all that. One project stood out for me: PHPClick: " phpClick is a web-based web application development tool targeted at nonprogrammers." In other words: create forms and such without programming. Now that's something I haven't seen done well, yet. I tried it out and was expecting a typical programmers' tool, but behold, the interface looks promisingly usable. Here's a screenshot.
At the right you see componens (checkboxes, text, ...). If you click on them, they'll show up in the preview screen. It's like Visual Basic!
The project still isn't really functional - I hope they are working on the code as much as on the interface (an unusual comment for an Open Source project!) And let's be superficial: they have a nice logo too:
Later: I was clicking around, and behold: "phpClick is developed as part of a collaborative Virginia Tech and PennState research effort." So that's why the app felt so un-typical and innovative. There is solid research behind it. :)