Just today I read that VPRI fonc mailing list was shutting down because they shifted focus onto other area (communication design or something like that). A YC incubator thing IIRC.
YC HARC - harc.ycr.org
Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
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Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#12I found it interesting that in an HN discussion about how to auto-update comments Alan Kay said, "How about a little model of time in a GUI?"[1] It ties into when he said of smartphone apps, "It's painful to see people using billions of devices that have forgot that undo is a good idea." [2] It made me think about how things like Redux (or even just Google Drive revision history) where you can 'time travel' through s…
It is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.
I find it interesting that Google Docs also doeen't have branching undo. There is no way to revert a commit, you can only go back in time. And there is no blame.
I loved the article by the way. The future of writing should be version controlled Juniper notebooks. Next step for GitLab is to build a cloud IDE to bring that closer.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#13If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#14Pop-up warning.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#15It's clear from the interview that Kay thinks mobile computing isn't where it should be. But I haven't studied the DynaBook. Does anyone know exactly what Kay thinks is needed, in order to realize his dream?
I found a few such things in the article:
- more-discoverable undo
- some sort of AI-based virtual assistant
- a stylus and holder, and presumably input methods and applications that are better suited for that stylus
- something nebulous about having warning labels and being designed for the higher-order cognitive centers of our brains
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#16[deleted]
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.
I find it interesting that Google Docs also doeen't have branching undo. There is no way to revert a commit, you can only go back in time. And there is no blame. I loved the article by the way. The future of writing should be version controlled Juniper notebooks. Next step for GitLab is to build a cloud IDE to bring that closer.
Google Docs has blame by looking at the history of changes in the file, although I will admit that it is not the most obvious.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#18For all the respect and admiration I have for Alan Kay, I think he's often showing a lot of bad faith.
His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is "design principles". But then do some common use cases.
When the abstraction meets reality we get comments like "the iPad should have a pen". Which is really an interesting observation, but doesn't quite rill the crowd like the abstract impressive-sounding stuff does. And you'd hardly call these isolated observation "vision".
Clearly, the user interfaces we have today are sub-optimal, and I can make hundreds of factual remarks on what could be improved. But I don't think this works out to a "vision". In fact, a vision is I think sometimes bound to be too abstract. If we just had products where the shit was fixed relentlessly, I reckon we'd get to "good" without needing them.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#19This isn't the first time Alan Kay express his view on HTML / CSS and Javascitpt.
But what alternative do we have / had?
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#20This isn't the first time Alan Kay express his view on HTML / CSS and Javascitpt. But what alternative do we have / had?
It is terrible though. It is worth stating the obvious fact once in a while.
This organic design of the web stack with layer upon layer upon layer upon layer can't go on for forever. At some point it will just become too painful and an alternative will emerge.