Swiping between cards - metaphor end-of-the-road?

[Richard Gaskin]

I stumbled across this thread and it got me thinking:
http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=29184

LC has cards, which are great for many things but somewhat limited.

For example, as the OP asks about there: how does one swipe between them?

That seems a perfectly reasonable expectation, given what cards are and 
the central role they play in LC's object model and language.

And yet we don't really have any way of doing that.

Doing it right on mobile would mean some drag-triggered transition which 
responds to the drag movement itself, and could be canceled if the user 
releases their finger before a certain mid-screen threshold is reached.

Of course we can do that with groups, but consider what that means:

We'd have to construct all of our layouts on a single card, and have 
some means of moving the groups on and off screen as needed, both during 
development and at runtime.

All doable, and not too much of a brain-bender.

But it's work.  And non-obvious to newcomers.  And even for experienced 
devs it's tedious.

And at that point, the beautiful simplicity of the card metaphor breaks 
down.  Indeed, it's no longer even relevant because we're not using 
cards at all, but groups on a single card.

At that point, some of the advantage of choosing LiveCode is lost, 
because one of the most central elements of its object model is no 
longer a best fit for today's designs.

Modern UIs (most mobile and increasingly on desktop as well) benefit 
from providing a sense of unifying flow with, among other things, 
interactive drag actions as transitions between screen layouts.

I was considering putting in a feature request for a new drag 
transition, but before I do I think we need some design work to figure 
out exactly what it should do and how we work with it.

It's not even a transition per se, since those are discrete visual 
operations performed after a user action has been completed (e.g., a 
mouses click or a menu selection).

This seems perhaps a good candidate for a property, maybe something like 
"the dragTransitions" of a stack.  When true, any drag actions not 
handled by any script would be handled by the engine by dragging a 
transition from card to card according to the direction of the drag.

That may be too simplistic, though. Do we really want free travel 
between all cards in a stack?  If not, how do we specify what happens in 
response to a drag when we want a card-to-card transition?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com