61–70 of 149 posts
The zoom-to-switch-context reminds me of Figma (a design tool) -- personally I like the metaphor of managing hierarchy with scale while mapping spatial relationships to functional ones.
The idea of mixing "data" and "code" is intriguing. I might have to play with an install locally!
Too bad the link in the article is offline: http://bluebottle.ethz.ch/ and http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads takes forever to load somehow.
"Bluebottle" is now called A2 and it's on Github now: https://github.com/btreut/a2 I've done quite a bit of editing on the Wikipedia article, including bringing stuff across from Russian Wikipedia (via Google Translate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_(operating_system) The most active user and development community for A2 seems to be in Russia. There's a Telegram group too but I don't speak the language so I can't…
Not only have I heard of Oberon, I've written code for it! The Oberon programming language is a nicer-than-average descendant of Pascal and Modula-2. The compiler was reasonably fast even in the 90s. The UI was strange enough to feel really interesting. As the article mentions, you could type a command anywhere and click it. And the older version I used had tiling windows, although this seems to have changed. But one…
Also the whole OS was a 1.44' bootable floppy disk which booted in 10 seconds on a 486
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My 0.02CHF: I studied at ETHZ from 2008 to 2015, and I've heard about Oberon once or twice back then, and read about it at least twice that much on HN. Never used it, never knew anyone who used it, never knew anyone who worked on it (though I believe the chair had slots for theses available at the time).
I graduated 2007 at the ETHZ. When I started studying, some student pcs were even running Oberon (no login was required). Only some IT students used them as it was too complicated for students from other departments. They were then later replaced with linux/windows machines. If my memory serves me right, when you bought a laptop through the university neptun program, you had oberon preinstalled too (or at least a dvd…
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It seems (and this surprises me not at all) that this was addressed in 1998 in Linz, Austria: https://www.dinf.ne.jp/doc/english/Us_Eu/conf/csun_99/sessio...
Very cool, and forgive me for not doing more research myself. Also, I should have thought of using a Braille display instead of a speech synthesizer, since for that, all they would have had to do is send commands to a device connected to a serial port. Of course, that would be more complicated now with USB, never mind Bluetooth.
I think tilling WM workflows are more practical than the UI design the article is describing: >Everything is a Command Line Tilling WMs naturally favors TUI apps and opening up a quick terminal in which you input text to do your task. >To launch applications or execute commands, you first type them somewhere and then middle-click them keybinding meta+d: dmenu-run >Everything is Zoomable Tilling WMs with workspaces (o…
> Tilling WMs naturally favors TUI apps I don't see how that is the case at all
OTOH, you can make a TUI that (rightfully) thinks the terminal window is always 80x25 (because God made the VT-100 that way for a reason) and it'll be very hostile to any tiling WM.
Never heard of? Come on! It's the most interesting thing yet to happen in desktop computing.
https://GitHub.com/samsquire/additive-guis
The idea is you define how the GUI should appear by describing it. The GUI changes in real time based on what you describe.
And I also designed a GUI primitive I called GUI thunking, inspired by Haskell. The idea is you can chain together behaviour on a GUI by interacting with the future directly.