Perhaps I'm misreading your post, but RAD environments for desktop applications have been around for over a decade. I wasn't exactly an early adopter and I remember dragging and dropping a button onto a form using Delphi 4 under Windows 98. And then you could drag and drop to resize it and formatting it was so easy a 13-year-old could do it. I didn't have a clue about Win32 API or the graphics drivers or bitmap buffers or memory buses and it totally didn't matter.