I post the whole text here to read: “The modern operating system only implemented 2 metaphors for builders to extend: the file and the application.

What if they also implemented “event”, “place”, “person”, “feed” abstractly: letting tools that the user invites into their life collaboratively extend those core connected metaphors as well?

My operating system should understand that “Messenger” is a medium by which I “send” “messages” to “people” and that would allow it to join messages to a person across all mediums.

Instead every “application” reinvents the same metaphors over and over in incompatible ways. The user doesn’t want applications, they want extensions.

An “application” invents metaphors to manipulate, whereas an “extension” extends them. 9/10 apps I use should be extensions to metaphors the operating system provides.

Maybe builders and tools should be able to present extendable metaphors to the operating system. This is an interesting idea Web3 is doing. NFTs are not in the ethereum spec, they were implemented later by people but then shared — the ERC721 token standard is a “metaphor”.

But honestly, I’m not as interested in this yet. Common, open, shared metaphors for “person”, “place”, “event”, “message”, and “relationship” would move us so far forward before even considering the long tail of remaining metaphors.

I’d love to see @Apple and @Microsoft build these metaphors into their products. Consider iOS 15’s focus modes, it’s great I can own & control my digital experience by writing rules about who can reach me when I’m in “work mode”, but those rules don’t work.

They don’t work because the iPhone, the smartest device in the world, doesn’t comprehend that a phone number and a SnapChat account could possibly represent the same person. Contacts isn’t an application, it’s a metaphor that other tools and services need to extend.

The water is muddy with Apple because they will always want their first party experiences to perform better than third party ones because that’s how they sell devices. That’s sad.

Your operating system should be incentivized to be the layer of metaphors, and then apps and extensions arrive to make those metaphors useful and bring them to life.

I mentioned Web3 earlier, that’s not the solution here. Web3 implements some fascinating metaphors around identity, governance, and currency; but, the solutions here need to be faster, more private, and be more customizable.

Or maybe Web3 is a movement that encompasses building common metaphors regardless of implementation — and blockchain is just the first platform of many that will be used to that end. That’s a fascinating prospect.

In the end, though, the point I want to convey is that applications should collaboratively extend common metaphors to enrich my life, not incompatibly recreate the wheel over and over and over. “ https://twitter.com/adamtowerz/status/1443505907208392707

Is anyone here familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software ? I'm interested in the idea of "next-gen spreadsheets" and this came up a number of times in my research. I like the idea of periodicity of data.

This looks like a cool job https://twitter.com/GitHubNext/status/1446161405787316233

I somehow missed https://www.hedycode.com until now, an environment that tries to teach programming over multiple levels the way we teach reading or math over multiple levels. Have others seen it or played with it?

Polytope is a code editor (work in progress!) that enables you to embed domain-specific editors into a traditional text-based code editor. Actually that's only half of the story — Polytope doesn't draw a distinction between text-based code editors and domain-specific editors, they are all just editors.

Nice shout out to our community (and many other great references) at the bottom of the page, too.

https://elliot.website/editor/

[I've had this on my backlog for a while. Don't think it's been posted here yet.]

The DeepUI guy is back with a new prototype: Automated Vector Drawing

The tool seems to have a 3-pane workspace. On the right is a live-updating preview of the artwork you create. On the top left is a workspace for drawing vector graphics, with lots of extra widgets and annotations and such for manipulating the graphics you draw. On the bottom left is a node-and-wire editor, where (as far as I can tell) each vector graphic element you create the top left pane gets a corresponding node, exposing some programmatic attributes for that element. There's also a left sidebar with various drawing tools and a list of common functions (measurements, data type conversions, etc). An interesting idea seems to be that the vector graphic you construct in the top left is actually a "function", and you can effectively call other functions inside the definition of a new function by nesting them. This gives you some "step and repeat"-like behaviour as a natural consequence.

Putting on my "visual programming critic" hat for a sec, this looks superficially like Toby Schachman's Cuttle, but with a GUI that seems heavily inspired by 3D / compositing apps like Blender, Houdini, or something from Autodesk. The video has no link to a website, no way to follow the progress of the project. I tracked this guy down on LinkedIn a few years back, and at the time he said he had no plans to keep working on DeepUI stuff, thinking instead that something like Enso was a more promising direction for visual programming. In any event, I'm really glad he's back and made this video, even if nothing else ever comes of it. I went frame-by-frame through parts of this video. There's some interesting thinking on display here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SOv9zntnMY