He reads, so you don’t have to.

When I was maybe eight years old, I starting making HyperCard stacks. I very quickly learned how to create moving, talking stories and scenes. They were my own little disjointed narratives to click around in. Mostly they were centered around how awesome Captain Picard, and Star Trek: The Next Generation were. Sorry, still are.

So yes, as Dale Dougherty says, the iPad damn well needs a HyperCard. How else do the nine year olds with iPads create something that harnesses the awesome awesomeness of Apple’s awesome device? Not with Objective-C, most adults barely have the patience to kludge there way through that. Nor with the current web toolchain of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, I hope! Because the web has barely advanced beyond the point of a hyperlinked web-serviced cloud-based HyperCard.

There needs to be something to make the iPad a tool for creation, not just for consumption. Sure, Apple makes buttloads of money off of iTunes… but think of they buttloads of money they could be making delivering your iPad “HyperCard stacks” to the world. They already do this with iPhone apps, but it’s a too-exclusive club (admittedly of 40,000+ people).

David Pogue said in the New York Times, “the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it - books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience - and a deeply satisfying one.”

Now imagine creating things using that same tactile movey-grabby-flingy interface. I would dare say that would be a little more “deeply satisfying” than browsing your music collection in a fun way.

Potentially Quartz Composer, mostly used for making screen savers right now, could be leveraged to create this. It has all the right moves, in that development is very very graphical. You drop in components and string them together with virtual wires, and it handles audio and video with ease. It’s not the answer, but it could be the seed of one.