Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by throwaway936482 » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 10:51 AM UTC

swiley wrote: post #77

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…

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…

I see comments like this occasionally and I ask myself, what do people who make them actually do? Genuinely? My three main hats are developer, accountant and 3d designer and while most of my accounting work these days is done via web based services none of my dev work or 3d design work. Sure I consume a lot of stuff on the internet but the vast majority of actual creation is done via native software. Some of it is open source especially dev tools, but the most content creation tools are closed source and with the exception of Blender there are no or at least very few open source content creation tools that are widely used professionally in any field that I'm aware of. (Before the OSS fanatics start what abouting about gimp, Krita, openscad etc. please note the caveats of professional and widely used)

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

#122

Post by imtringued » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 10:56 AM UTC

djrobstep wrote: post #31

_y5hn wrote: post #29

Earlier 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?

You're starting from a solution. What exactly is the problem in this case? Generate a balance statement? You will have to divide it into smaller problems until each problem is small enough that it has an obvious solution. The fact that you only need an addition of some numbers in a table is the result of lots of thinking that you just glossed over.

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

#123

Post by amelius » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 10:57 AM UTC

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…

Isn't that what app-stores are for, i.e. to police the apps?

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

#124

Post by vincnetas » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

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…

There is a reason why some apps dont use external camera app but take pictures themselves. Security. You want to be sure (as much as possible) that taken picture was real and not provided to intent by "use any picture as cammera output"

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

#125

Post by imhoguy » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #117

djrobstep wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - for example, resizing photos. Imagine a resizer object, that could be used: - to implement resizing in various interfaces for image objects - in a script (think unix pipes but operating over real image objects, not streams of bytes) - wired up to various events and data sources for automation (when my aunt emails me a picture, resize it and put it in this folder) The resizer wouldn't be hidden behind some a…

One of the big problems I've seen with multi-vendor systems that co-operate is if something didn't work. It was never clear where the problem was because the system incorporated multiple products from multiple vendors. So if your resizer object didn't work for some images after upgrading Photoshop, but it used to in the old version, how do you get that fixed? In a single-vendor program, it's clearly a bug in the prog…

This. It is not just vendors, but also teams within any company. E.g. operating systems: Windows, Android, iOS/OSX - all are composed of modules which are running as isolated processes and communicating over agreed interfaces. Before system upgrade reaches the market there are countless meetings between teams to sort out bugs and design inconsistencies.

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

#126

Post by orbifold » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

shalabhc wrote: post #84

A 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…

Adobe has an API for all of their software, in principle you can hook into it with your own code. The main problem is that the document model are really complex, so I doubt lots of people would do that in their free time.

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

#127

Post by Guthur » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #123

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…

Isn't that what app-stores are for, i.e. to police the apps?

I think app stores are likely more about the 30% cut. The policing just makes that easier to sell.

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

#128

Post by WJW » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

djrobstep wrote: post #118

greggman3 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft already tried this in in mid 90s. It was called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). You could embed a photoshop document live in your word document and if you clicked the embedded document the photoshop UI for editing would appear. It turned out to be absolutely horrible. Maybe it was before it's time with computers having only a few meg of memory and being slower than today but it seemed more of an issue b…

Sounds terrible, but what you're describing seems to still fall in the category of "integrating apps" rather than "no apps". I think the best real world reference point for "no apps" is the terminal. Piping commands together is very powerful and intuitive (in this way they behave more like composable objects than applications). It works well, except for being unfriendly and reliant on low level text streams, which ar…

The terminal is absolutely full of apps though. It's literally an environment designed around invoking other programs.

Pipelines are indeed very powerful, but mostly for a specific class of tasks. As soon as you need interactivity, the pipeline model losess a lot of benefits. None of the popular databases, web servers, games or office suites are implemented as terminal pipelines. The other problem with pipelines is that while they scale reasonably well with data size, they don't scale quite as nicely with task complexity. A five-program pipeline with complex command line arguments can already be complex to understand. A 500-program pipeline would be a total nightmare, especially when it starts including components for error reporting and retry behavior.

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

#129

Post by chrismorgan » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

I think that we actually do already have a lot of the relevant primitives in one place: accessibility APIs. It would be interesting to see experimentation in using this data for more than just screen readers and the likes, so that you could do things like slurp a table of numbers and add them up regardless of which program it came from (—though PDFs are unlikely to pan out, because the tabular structure is typically just not encoded in the file).

On macOS, there’s AppleScript which can, I believe, achieve some of these sorts of things using accessibility APIs and similar. I’m not familiar with the extent of its capabilities as I don’t use a Mac.

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

#130

Post by imhoguy » Sun, Nov 08, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

Computing "prisons", or better call them boundaries, are result of evolution, limited trust and need of control. Agreed, computing systems simulate human social structures.

BTW this article reminds me Windows OLE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding