I have pretty good integration of different text based applications inside of emacs.
Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
101–110 of 195 posts
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Real world is always complex, ambigous and changing. So any simple model will in time be found inadequate, and complex models unusable. The problem of programming isn't so much the interface. Text has been used for decades and remains a robust communication platform among humans. The real problem is defining the problem to be solved, its scope and adaptability to a complex and changing world. The difficulty is the ga…
What's vague and hard to define about adding up some numbers in a table?
How many jQuery table plugins are there? Sort, filter, pagination, partial display. And yet it is impossible to find components that meets all requirements.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#103> 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…
The answer is to push the "application vendors" back into the browser. None of them are really writing anything that needs to be running natively, it's almost all just a front end to some service on the internet. Real computer applications are almost universally developed by researchers and the open source community and look exactly like this. No "application" just tools you install into your system that are watched…
Are vim and Emacs not real applications? How about gimp? Firefox? Thunderbird?
The gnome people could have used an Emacs or vim window instead of gEdit. But they didn't, because more or less the same incentives that prevent commercial entities from developing components instead of apps exist in the open source community as well.
Hell, even GCC is essentialy an app, even though parts of it would have been extremely useful as share-able components, as clang showed.
And I really don't know what researchers produce apps. The closest I can think of is maybe Coq?
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#104Oh yeah; we have/had this-- it is called HTML and none of us got the idea behind it (I certainly didn't); so, instead we re-created the prisons we were, and are, trying to escape. It also is really hard to profit from ONLY meaningful data thus the death of things like RSS feeds. Can't shovel advertisements, trackers, and spyware down someone's throat just sending a nicely formatted HTML table that the client decides…
> the death of things like RSS feeds This is really sad[1]. RSS feeds are amazing. Thankfully they are not completely gone! [1] Actually, the whole state of the Internet is sad.
RSS feeds are common, but most readers are mediocre. I'm stuck between some proprietary "pay to remove ads and subscribe for premium" crap, an emacs mode that randomly sometimes takes up to an hour to open, and Thunderbird, which recently deleted all of my RSS feeds.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#105This is a great idea that would change computing for the better.
That said, one angle I sense here is blaming. It's easy to dream and blame, it's harder to build and lead by example. It'd be great if this post was a "why XXX" page in the documentation for a new platform which implements the said ideas.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#106A lot of replies are missing the point. It's not "apps integrate better with each other". It is "there are no apps". So what would Adobe sell, if not the "Photoshop app"? It would sell the Photoshop "menu of filters", the "selector toolbox", the "color histogram view" and such. But the workspace where you see the image and apply the selectors or filters would be outside Photoshop itself. It would be a standard part o…
You mean like everything is a file and you could build pipelines of simple commands to modify your data? That’s genius!
Exactly, but imagine real objects instead of text streams, and rich interfaces instead of lo fi terminals from the 70s.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#107A lot of replies are missing the point. It's not "apps integrate better with each other". It is "there are no apps". So what would Adobe sell, if not the "Photoshop app"? It would sell the Photoshop "menu of filters", the "selector toolbox", the "color histogram view" and such. But the workspace where you see the image and apply the selectors or filters would be outside Photoshop itself. It would be a standard part o…
To some degree, Android's Intent system works towards this, in an extensible way.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#108> We must build much higher level shared meaning - Images, Tables, Conversations and beyond, building a common implementation and understanding used by everybody. Thinking you can build something like this is extremely naive. If you have been working in any company over a certain size. You will know that even inside a single company, people often don't use the exact same vocabulary. For example, what constitutes a pr…
But we already do this, with a whole variety of different objects - strings, sockets, integers, floats, URLs for instance.
Strings... which kind? Nul terminated, Pascal Strings, ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16?
It turns out that strings might not even be the best way to handle text, ropes look better. (A different thread here on HN)
We got close with COM and Windows... as much as I knock Bill Gates, at least he managed to push the clipboard into everyone's toolkit. Imagine if that hadn't happened?
What might be possible is to tweak the clipboard a bit to allow the user to set a clipboard boundary in the same manner, but handle the I/O in such a manner as to make it a universally agreed upon object type that can update, and serve as a persistent resource identifier. (Think Ted Nelson's Xanadu)
Someone has to show this as a working concept in an open source project, and then some other open source project has to integrate it.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#109A lot of replies are missing the point. It's not "apps integrate better with each other". It is "there are no apps". So what would Adobe sell, if not the "Photoshop app"? It would sell the Photoshop "menu of filters", the "selector toolbox", the "color histogram view" and such. But the workspace where you see the image and apply the selectors or filters would be outside Photoshop itself. It would be a standard part o…
On the plus side, this could be a way for those who don’t sell apps to compete with the juggernauts.
Yes, people could unite to improve, say, GIMP, by writing extensions for it, too, but if such extensions were usable elsewhere, too, maybe, more people would write extensions.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#110Interesting article, but somewhat of a false dichotomy.
> This absolutely hasn't eventuated - once again, applications are the problem. Photoshop's codebase and Instagram's codebase no doubt have sophisticated Image objects defined, but each only exists within its gated prison.
Photoshop & Instagram's "Image object" are not what make them good. What makes them good is their "Image object" in the context of their eco-system (app/platform/userbase/DESIGN/integrations/etc).
A building is (and has always been) the sum of it's parts.