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Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

djrobstep.com

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Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#11

Post by ptx »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4
vortex_ape wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate a bit on what COM was? (or link a resource) I couldn't find its mention on the Windows 3.1 Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model which is an elaboration of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s, for instance, ask Excel what is in cell B7, or dynamically load a GUI component out of a DLL and script it into a Visual Basic application. This blends the boundaries between applications in that you might have a Word docu…

This use didn't go away after the 1990s - Office still uses Visual Basic which still uses COM.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#12

Post by samsquire »

I call this idea If you can see it you can use it and right click use.

So if you see a filename on the CLI, you can right click on the file name and interact with the file with a GUI.

Or you could hover over a 

 tag in the browser of some dot syntax or table and right click and click Use. It would run various heuristics over the data to work out what the data is and then import it to the right program.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#13

Post by ptx »

> We need computing environments ... without the concept of applications appearing at all.

Platforms keep trying to enable this, but application vendors want to control the UX and branding, so they're not going to provide these generic reusable building blocks.

Android, for example, lets apps make use of views from other apps and securely delegate a task (e.g. take a photo, pick a file, etc.) to the user's preferred app without needing to request permission for direct access. But nobody does this - apps just requests all permissions and do everything themselves.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#14

Post by juancampa »

This is a problem I have personally spent several years thinking about and working on. The trick IMO will be to build it incrementally from what we already have. For anyone interested, here's my take on it: https://membrane.io

The TL;DR is that I've been building a orthogonally persistent, message-based, user centric, programmable (js/ts) graph

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#16

Post by djrobstep »

ptx wrote: post #13

> We need computing environments ... without the concept of applications appearing at all. Platforms keep trying to enable this, but application vendors want to control the UX and branding, so they're not going to provide these generic reusable building blocks. Android, for example, lets apps make use of views from other apps and securely delegate a task (e.g. take a photo, pick a file, etc.) to the user's preferred…

Author here, yes this is a big problem (the biggest?), as the incentives are all wrong. As I noted in the post: "Often ... apps will have features to integrate with other apps and the wider operating system - but not so much that they become invisible. Instagram still wants you to see its logo, consume its specific content and stay within its ecosystem. Once again, the implementation and architecture are driven by economic imperatives."

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#17

Post by [deleted] »

ptx wrote: post #13

> We need computing environments ... without the concept of applications appearing at all. Platforms keep trying to enable this, but application vendors want to control the UX and branding, so they're not going to provide these generic reusable building blocks. Android, for example, lets apps make use of views from other apps and securely delegate a task (e.g. take a photo, pick a file, etc.) to the user's preferred…

[deleted]

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#18

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

vortex_ape wrote: post #6
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model which is an elaboration of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s, for instance, ask Excel what is in cell B7, or dynamically load a GUI component out of a DLL and script it into a Visual Basic application. This blends the boundaries between applications in that you might have a Word docu…

Thank you for the links! > A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s ... This sounds nifty!

Nowadays you still interface with COM through PowerShell scripting, and it is pretty nifty.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#19

Post by djrobstep »

samsquire wrote: post #12

I call this idea If you can see it you can use it and right click use. So if you see a filename on the CLI, you can right click on the file name and interact with the file with a GUI. Or you could hover over a tag in the browser of some dot syntax or table and right click and click Use. It would run various heuristics over the data to work out what the data is and then import it to the right program.

I like your thinking!
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