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/UIQ3 smartphones, i.e. the SonyEricsson P1i, P990i and similar UIQ3 models. (Read more about the history of the project here, and about plans for the future here.)

Those phones with their relatively large touchscreens are well suited for viewing data, but for setting up a database, entering large amounts of data and importing them a PC is a much better tool. (More about this stack development "philosophy".) That's why MoStacks consists of two programs, the MoStacks Development System running on Windows and the MoStacks Manager running on UIQ3. 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 subset of HyperTalk so far, it already allows to add considerable "intelligence" to stacks.

MoStacks supports a number of import and export formats. Most notably there is a powerful CSV importer and the ability to directly import most HanDBase files.

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. MoStacks also offers basic Unicode support and can deal with data in scripts like Cyrillic, Chinese or Japanese.