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

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

#181

Post by Someone »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #164
Someone wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think he killed it “because it wasn’t NeXT software”. I think he killed it because the market didn’t support it (MS Office showed that an ‘everything but the kitchen sink” solution could conquer the market, leaving only breadcrumbs for smaller parties) and to focus the company.

But MS Office is sort of the implementation of what the article describes, with it being thoroughly COM based. You can embed pieces of Office in your software, or pieces of your software in Office (including saving its state in the MS Office's documents).

Technically, sort of, yes, but sociologically: no. Office doesn’t (seem to) use it itself. If you can insert an Excel table into a Word document, why does Word have table functionality on its own? Why does Excel have its own text box for styled text? Can I embed a Word table inside another document without getting the entire Word editor? An Excel table that’s just a table and not a sheet to which one can add charts, etc?

Also (and possibly alongside “we sell Word/Excel separately, too, and want it to be everything but the kitchen sink, to prevent others from providing missing parts”) the answer to that may be “because the UI of OLE-embedded parts isn’t as smooth as it could be”. Outside-in activation (which, reading http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.10/10.08/Op... doesn’t seem to be required with OLE, but I haven’t seen otherwise) means you have to click multiple times to start editing (clock to activate an OLE control, then click to start editing it)

OpenDoc promised much more, but of course, the market didn’t want to deliver it at the time, and we also don’t know whether its promises really can be fulfilled (Cyberdog was cute, though)

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

#182

Post by fleetingmemory »

The first thing that should be considered is security. I 'm writing this from a computer which has been hacked over and over, and could very well be caught right now in a man in the middle scheme. Once you've got a serious security model baked in, you can start to imagine other things.

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

#183

Post by WhyNotHugo »

I do feel like iOS is moving in this direction.

My photos are in the photos app (and they're not "files"). I can tap share, and send them to WhatsApp / Telegram / Email.

This somewhat unifies the "photo selection and sharing" interface of all applications in one place. It's also good for security since I can deny all these apps access to my library.

Also, on any app when saving an image, it also goes into photos. There's no filesystem, it goes into a dedicated "photos" storage, and I can later find it there to use it for whatever (also, copy-pasting images in modern OS's is fabulous).

It's quite clear that he proposal from the article aligns well with slowly shifting away from a "files" mentality. Honestly, I'd love to see a "Photos" app on Linux that handles all my images files, and stop using the cli / file manager to treat them as files (e.g.: drop one level of abstraction).

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

#184

Post by skybrian »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #113
skybrian wrote: post #66

This is a very old-school way of thinking, without any mention of privacy or how to share data safely between different users. As soon as you have multiple users, especially when they don't trust each other, things get much more complicated. Should you really be able to do anything you like with your bank account or DMV record? And do you really want the people you interact with to download all the photos you share?…

There's prior art for all of that, including object and method-level security, in Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM). It can be made to work.

Sure, but if you're doing RPC and it does a security check, this isn't all that different from filling out a form and getting a response. It's not empowerment since you don't get to do anything more with the data than you could otherwise.

That's not much like playing with your own data in a sandbox.

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

#186

Post by srtjstjsj »

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…

They also did Visual Basic for Apps, which inspired the similar Google Apps Script.

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

#187

Post by juancampa »

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.

Yes!! Here's a link of an experiment I did some time ago to do just what you're describing: https://twitter.com/juancampa/status/1033495489637961729?s=1...

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

#188

Post by gumby »

Programs these days, dating back to the arrival of the PC, are roach motel silos. When you use two or three programs to work on a problem, each program often maintains its own state -- on mobile, often data files as well.

In the "old days" you could work on a task with a single directory (or tree) holding source code, documentation, email, etc and your editor, email program etc would work fine. Now my email is in its own tree, slack messages theirs, bug reports their own, and of course source code in a source tree. What a massive regression.

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

#189

Post by vincnetas »

anoncake wrote: post #141
vincnetas wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

If the user wants to provide a "non-real" picture, there is no legitimate reason to stop them.

What if i want a user to provide a legitimate photo as much as possible for instance ID/license verification for car sharing app.

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

#190

Post by wangketuo »

hello！i m from china，english not good，but for this idea i have thought for 5 years，so i want to say something

for this idea，i want mention ：

Data is not the core, but the value is the core. All the programs on the Internet have barriers, not because there are barriers to data, but because there are barriers to value.

I've written a lot about the cost of developing the World Wide Web, and only by lowering the barriers to development and allowing more people to participate in the building of the web's "value program" can the vision of the Web truly be realized.

The closure of the program itself is not the closure of data, but the closure of the value of the scene, is the closure of the construction of the scene power, I have a product prototype design.

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