I think it would be great to experiment with building this sort of thing for an e-ink tablet, adding an enhanced layer of interactivity to by-hand notetaking.
Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
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Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#12I think it would be great to experiment with building this sort of thing for an e-ink tablet, adding an enhanced layer of interactivity to by-hand notetaking.
Ink & Switch has been doing work for a while on applying these same ideas of gradual enrichment to ink and tablets. Recent talk describing that work:
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#13The universality of "software" as a digital "techne" makes the aim of this article too fuzzy.
Using the exact author's descriptions, here are some more "defined" apps that are working toward his goal of "dynamic documents as personal software."
- "Write formulas that compute" + "Interactive widgets" anywhere on the page :
- For the simplest sheet-like computations -> https://reactivepad.com/
- For a wider gamut of DB/Sheet type formulas -> https://coda.io/ (on top of its no-code relational DBs)
-> https://tana.inc/ magically turns every typed line of text into a row of a Semantic Graph DB. Then, no-code queries are editable in multiviews (like notion-style DB views for every block of text anywhere).
Edit : He already mentioned that "Coda’s goal is particularly close to ours." Maybe a "Coda+Tana.inc" hybrid will get us nearer to his aim of "computations run on data interpreted from freeform text" as he expressed it.
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#14I've often pondered the idea of something similar to this. I'd love the idea of a note taking app as relational database. Most of my work tends to follow a few similar formats, which I would like to create as templates that pull in data based on queries for whatever project/product/task I'm currently working on. Editing the document in current view would then modify the database, while editing the templates would all…
I often post about Tiddlywiki on HN, so this is a bit of a repeat, but I think Tiddlywiki comes really close. I wrote a bit about it earlier in the year because it occurred to me that, with filters, it really is a database for your notes. My writeup is not complete, but hopefully gives some idea of how Tiddlywiki could be used in this way. https://rpdillon.net/tiddlywiki-a-database-for-your-notes-20...
Indeed, you can get your template up and running by just writing
{{!!a_field_value}}
{{!!text}}
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#15I've often pondered the idea of something similar to this. I'd love the idea of a note taking app as relational database. Most of my work tends to follow a few similar formats, which I would like to create as templates that pull in data based on queries for whatever project/product/task I'm currently working on. Editing the document in current view would then modify the database, while editing the templates would all…
This sounds a good bit like Tana: https://tana.inc/
Tana mostly works as an outliner now, but they're planning a document mode.
Using "supertags" you can tag a node in the database as being a certain kind of thing (eg an article or, one of my uses, a library for a programming language). You can then specify certain fields that are always (or optionally) part of those things. And you can right queries to display nodes that match a bunch of different criteria and then display those fields in columns in a table or create a board of cards.
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#16demo is available here: https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/demo/
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#17I think it would be great to experiment with building this sort of thing for an e-ink tablet, adding an enhanced layer of interactivity to by-hand notetaking.
My dream is combining a simple self-hosted programming system like smalltalk-78 with the kind of experimental notetaking systems demoed here and in other inkandswitch work (crosscut and untangle) on an e-paper based tablet (like the PineNote).
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#18This is something I've wanted for years. My dream app is a "data canvas" where you can write, draw, plan, automate, compute, graph, collaborate, and package into a user-facing executable. Basically every productivity tool (and I mean every tool) combined into one, with extreme flexibility and interoperability.
It's also something extremely hard if not flat-out impossible to do with an intuitive UI. All of that interoperability means extreme complexity, and it's not even possible to infer advanced computations or constraints for an app without specifying them in detail (in which case you're basically just programming). But I like that people are trying, because even though there's no unified data canvas available yet, we really are getting closer with things like high-level languages, low-code solutions, Apple and Microsoft continuity, and of course this.
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#19This is something I've wanted for years. My dream app is a "data canvas" where you can write, draw, plan, automate, compute, graph, collaborate, and package into a user-facing executable. Basically every productivity tool (and I mean every tool) combined into one, with extreme flexibility and interoperability. It's also something extremely hard if not flat-out impossible to do with an intuitive UI. All of that intero…
AI like Copilot is going to be a very important and fun part of that list, I believe.
Re: Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
#20I've often pondered the idea of something similar to this. I'd love the idea of a note taking app as relational database. Most of my work tends to follow a few similar formats, which I would like to create as templates that pull in data based on queries for whatever project/product/task I'm currently working on. Editing the document in current view would then modify the database, while editing the templates would all…
This sounds a good bit like Tana: https://tana.inc/ Tana mostly works as an outliner now, but they're planning a document mode. Using "supertags" you can tag a node in the database as being a certain kind of thing (eg an article or, one of my uses, a library for a programming language). You can then specify certain fields that are always (or optionally) part of those things. And you can right queries to display nodes…
Tana is extremely interesting! It is like someone built an easy to use GUI for neo4j.