A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
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A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
1–10 of 80 posts
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#2Agree with this. For me, being able to tweak Quake (when it came out) was massive. You could poke around in QuakeC, make a funny model / map etc. The fact that customisability extended to it's two sequels was even better.
To a lesser extent, even being able to modify pretty much any game mechanic via the pull-down Console was amazing too. A great entryway to programming for the young enthusiast!
Always was a wonderful advantage to owning a PC over a console. That, and the accompanying utilities you could combine with the game, to create new graphics, sounds etc.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#3let's start over. You might like civboot.org
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#4I cut my teeth tweaking unit settings and then adding new units and buildings to Command & Conquer games with easy .ini tweaks.
I've long applauded the efforts of the JA2 1.13 devs and their drive to externalize basically every game parameter into xmls that can be edited rather than hardcoded inside the game's executable.
Tweakable software is the best!
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#5As a young child with only the scarcest grasp of programming, I spent endless hours using ResEdit to crack open and customize every application on my mac. Every game and utility was filled with its own surprises; graphics I could edit, tables of strings to pore over, dialogs to rearrange, menus to customize, and so much more. I never had a manual, but everything was so straightforward and clear I learned everything I needed by experimenting. The entire experience was intensely empowering and gave me a wonderful sense of ownership and instrumentality over my computer.
The project that currently occupies most of my time, Decker[0], is a rapid development platform that can produce standalone single-file HTML "applications". The detail I'm most proud of is that every such app still contains the entire suite of editing tools: anything made with Decker is ready to be customized and extended by end-users.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#6Playing with browser developer tools and always seeing obfuscated JavaScript makes me sad. I'm not a web developer, but I suspect the security gained is low enough to fall within the author's "unnecessary constraints."
On the other hand, there are projects like https://github.com/rxi/lite Its scope and layout makes it extremely tinkerable.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#7Playing with browser developer tools and always seeing obfuscated JavaScript makes me sad. I'm not a web developer, but I suspect the security gained is low enough to fall within the author's "unnecessary constraints." On the other hand, there are projects like https://github.com/rxi/lite Its scope and layout makes it extremely tinkerable.
I think a lot of obfuscation seen these days isn’t about security, but is a side effect of minifying code (which usually is worthwhile).
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#8Letting people into software as a soft thing, something shape-able, invites in the best human spirit! It's not just another appliance, not another gadget, it's something deeper & that you can geek with, imprint yourself & your behaviors or style on! I love it.
There is a notable e-collective dedicated to soft/changeable systems, the Malleable Systems collective, https://malleable.systems
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#9Playing with browser developer tools and always seeing obfuscated JavaScript makes me sad. I'm not a web developer, but I suspect the security gained is low enough to fall within the author's "unnecessary constraints." On the other hand, there are projects like https://github.com/rxi/lite Its scope and layout makes it extremely tinkerable.
I think a lot of obfuscation seen these days isn’t about security, but is a side effect of minifying code (which usually is worthwhile).
While there is a slight difference that can add up (if text assets bandwith factor well into your traffic), I prefer to push out brotli compressed unminified js/css nowadays. Makes it easier to understand JS issues on prod as well.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#10let's start over. You might like civboot.org
In case anyone's curious: I didn't recognize the .org domain but I felt lucky, punk, and followed it. civboot.org redirected me to https://github.com/civboot/civboot which I totally would feel comfortable visiting :)