Overview

MoStacks is a program for data management. As it was inspired by Apple's famous HyperCard product, it has many features in common with traditional database applications, but goes beyond them in several respects.

Instead of databases and records MoStacks works with stacks of cards: Data is stored in a MoStack, a file with a format based on a four-level hierarchy of stack, backgrounds, cards and fields.

The Mo in MoStacks stands for mobile: The application has the ambition to be the first that brings HyperCard-like data management to mobile phones, starting with Symbian/UIQ2 smartphones, namely the SonyEricsson P800, P900 and P910i models.

Those phones with their relatively large touchscreens are well suited for viewing data, but for setting up a database and entering large amounts of data a PC is a much better tool. That's why MoStacks consists of two programs, a Windows program for stack development on the PC, and a Symbian/UIQ program for viewing and small-scale data entry tasks on the phone. There is support for easy and fast transfers of stacks between PC and phone.

A special card design philosophy allows stacks to adapt to different screen sizes, which will become important on future phone models with larger screens.

MoStacks offers a script language, again inspired by HyperCard's HyperTalk language. While only implementing a small subset of HyperTalk so far, it already allows to add considerable "intelligence" to stacks.

MoStacks is neither a web server nor a true wiki engine, but it nevertheless offers WikiText features like links, paragraphs and text formatting in special wiki fields.

Multimedia support so far is limited to pictures, but the basic architecture is well prepared to deal with sound and movies as well in the future.