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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

#131

Post by Guthur »

djrobstep wrote: post #16
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 ec…

This has resonated with me as I've recently been thinking about service interopt. There is a strong push in my org to go full rpc, which will probably win out for not bad reasons, but I sort of wish we had but in the necessary up front investment to model it restfully.

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

#132

Post by kzrdude »

ehnto wrote: post #71
djrobstep wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ec…

Not that I disagree with your overall assertion, but without economic incentive there is really no incentive in most cases. For someone who does have economic incentive, it's really business risk reduction 101 to not pin your application to a network of invisible and hidden dependencies that you have no control over.

Right, using f-droid and installing open source apps where the only incentive is the user's benefits.. that's a breeze of fresh air. Of course it can never give you access to instragram or any particular commercial platform like that, but you can handle your own data with dignity.

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

#133

Post by kzrdude »

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…

In mac os, for example, there was the services menu. Is it still alive? I haven't been on mac os much since 10.5.

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

#134

Post by simonh »

The nearest I've come to working in an environment like this is a system called Quartz developed at Bank of America. It's a massive set of infrastructure and code based on Python. It consists of a variety of services such as a distributed synchronised hierarchical object store, a set of compute grids, a web server farm, etc. All the code is in a massive code repository and is world readable by any developer in any team, with the configuration for everything in a single config hierarchy based on YAML.

To create a batch process you just commit the code, commit the config for where and when you want it to run and on which host group, and you're done. You can even develop desktop apps running a copy of the runtime locally. Because everything is Python (obviously low level libraries were done in C or C++) and exposed to python APIs, and all the Python code was available it was very easy to develop interoperable applications.

Of course there was huge duplication, but it was an incredibly fun system to work on. I really miss it. The previous iteration of it was actually called Athena and developed at JP Morgan by the same team, who were later hired away by BoA. Even before that they developed the original version at Goldman Sachs, but that wasn't based on Python.

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

#135

Post by DougBTX »

There are hundreds of libraries and packages for dealing with images which can all be mixed and matched together. So maybe Instagram and Photoshop don’t participate in that open ecosystem, but that’s their choice. If you want to use the concept of `Image` it is an import statement away.

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

#136

Post by BlueTemplar »

This is one weird article.

What it wants is standards, but the word is never used.

What it wants is the Unix philosophy-like micro-programs, that "Do One Thing And Do It Well.", but no mention of that either, except in drive-by disparaging text-driven interfaces that most of these currently use…

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

#137

Post by romanoderoma »

greggman3 wrote: post #111
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…

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…

OLE was only part of the strategy, the idea behind it was to create a "document centric" operating system.

In other words the "no apps operating system" is what Microsoft envisioned already with Windows 95

IBM tried something similar with OS/2 warp that was "object centric"

The idea failed, not because of OLE, every other technology was bad back then and inherently less secure, but because the World moved back to app centric view and rebranded it as people centric. the modern app stores are the result of that and the fact that the integration comes in the form of "share this" "tweet this" "post this image on Instagram" is why we still have apps at the center of the old desktop metaphor, because branding has more monetary value than function (we don't beven write anymore, we tweet), even though something functional is better than something with just a brand attached to it.

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

#138

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

This doesn't make any sense.

Apps are what allows you to do any work on the data, starting with being able to display the data on a screen (or print it on paper).

Data without apps is completely useless.

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

#139

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

Platforms are completely antagonistic to this goal, as the definition of a "platform" is pretty much "something that lives in its own world, and so doesn't care about following outside standards".

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

#140

Post by mrmonkeyman »

djrobstep wrote: post #106
lixtra wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, how brilliant. Now, imagine if I could represent these "real objects" with something as interoperable as, say, plain text. How innovative, imagine this! Now all parts of the system speak an universal language. Break down all barrieres!
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