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Apps SDK

developers.openai.com

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Re: Apps SDK

#151

Post by anal_reactor »

munk-a wrote: post #125
derekcheng08 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there are many, many things for which chat is a great interface. And by positioning ChatGPT as the distributor for all these things, they get to be the new Google. But you're also right that many domains for which a purpose-built interface is the right approach, and if the domain is valuable enough, it'll have someone coming after it to build that.

I have yet to see a chat agent deployed that is more popular than tailored browsing methods. The most charitable way to explain this is that the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing and that the chat agent is providing most of the value that a tailored browsing method would but without any of the investment required to bring a traditional UX to fruit…

> the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing

Have you ever worked in a corporation? Do you really think that Windows 8 UI was the fruit of years of careful design? What about Workday?

> but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots

Not really. If the chatbot is smart enough then chatbot is the more natural interface. I've seen people who prefer to say "hey siri set alarm clock for 10 AM" rather than use the UI. Which makes sense, because language is the way people literally have evolved specialized organs for. If anything, language is the "battle tested UX", and the other stuff is temporary fad.

Of course the problem is that most chatbots aren't smart. But this is a purely technical problem that can be solved within foreseeable future.

Re: Apps SDK

#152

Post by rushingcreek »

irrationalfab wrote: post #140
rushingcreek wrote: post #6

I think this is very interesting, but it is reminiscent of what we built with Phind 2 where the answer could include dynamic, pre-built widgets. The problem with this approach is precisely that these apps/widgets have hard-coded input and output schema. They can work quite well when the user asks something within the widget's capabilities, but the brittleness of this approach starts showing quickly in real-world use.…

> If those features aren't supported by the widget's hard-coded schema, you're out of luck as a user. Chat paired to the pre-built and on-demand widgets address this limitation. For example, in the keynote demo, they showed how the chat interface lets you perform advanced filtering that pulls together information from multiple sources, like filtering only Zillow housers near a dog park.

Yes, because it seems that Zillow exposes those specific filters as a part of the input schema. As long as it's a part of the schema, then ChatGPT can generate a useful input to the widget. But my point is that is very brittle.

Re: Apps SDK

#153

Post by whinvik »

Ads. They created ads. Now (or eventually) they can charge app developers to be featured first for a specific use case.

Re: Apps SDK

#154

Post by somuchdata »

bonoboTP wrote: post #142

This is part of the fight regarding whether we will have utility apps inside the chat app or chatboxes inside the utility apps. Obviously OpenAI would prefer that they are in the driver seat and delegate to passive apps, while regular apps like Booking would prefer to be the app the user uses and to run an AI chatbox nested inside their own app UI, so they can swap it out etc. Convenience-wise probably this model is…

They also released ChatKit today for building in-app chat UI experiences, so it seems like OpenAI is trying to make sure they get a larger slice of the pie no matter which interaction model wins.

Re: Apps SDK

#155

Post by moralestapia »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #117
moralestapia wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, though. It is now evident why Flash was murdered.

> We now know why Flash was murdered This is a stupid conspiracy given Apple decided not to support Flash on iPhone since before Jobs came around on third-party apps. (The iPhone was launched with a vision of Apple-only native apps and HTML5 web apps. The latter's performance forced Cupertino's hand into launching the App Store. Then they saw the golden goose.)

You ignore the state of things back then.

HTML5 was new and not widely supported, the web was WAY more fragmented back then, to put things in perspective, Internet Explorer still had the largest market share, by far. The only thing that could provide the user with a rich interactive experience was Flash, it was also ubiquitous.

Flash was the biggest threat to Apple's App Store; this wasn't a conspiracy, it was evident back then but I can see why it is not evident to you in 2025. Jobs open letter was just a formal declaration of war.

Re: Apps SDK

#156

Post by tracker1 »

moralestapia wrote: post #150
tracker1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drank the kool-aid?!? I worked in the eLearning space, I was a prominent user and developer for Flash/Flex content... there was some interesting tooling for sure, I also completely disabled it on my home computers as a result of working with it. I had a lot of hopes after the Adobe buyout that Flash would morph into something based around ActionScript (ES4) and SVG. That didn't happen. MS's Silverlight/XAML was close…

>I was a prominent user and developer for Flash/Flex content I was as well. It wasn't as bad as people describe it. It was an amazing platform, HTML5 just recently caught up. In retrospective, Adobe should have open sourced it. >MS's Silverlight/XAML was close Hahahahahha, yeah sure! That tells me everything I need to know.

I agree it should have been open-sourced (at least the player portion)...

As for Silverlight, I mean the technology itself was closer to where I wanted to see Flash go. I'm not sure why you're laughing at that.

edit: as for not being as bad as people describe it... you could literally read any file on the filesystem... that's a pretty bad "sandbox" ... It was fixed later, but there were different holes along the way, multiple times.

Re: Apps SDK

#157

Post by somuchdata »

d4mi3n wrote: post #136
helloguillecl wrote: post #133

Chat offers a far better experience than using Google—no more searching through spam-filled results, clicking between sponsored links, accepting endless cookie banners, and trying to read a tiny bit of useful content buried among ads and clutter. It has the potential to bridge the gap between pure conversation and the functionality of a full website.

I’m just worried they we’ll go from very obvious advertising to advertising that’s a lot harder to spot. I can block adds on a search engine. I cannot prevent an LMM from having hidden biases about what the best brand of vodka or car is.

Google could also have allowed invisible pay-for-placement without marking it as an ad. Presumably they didn't do that because undermining the perceived trustworthiness of their search results would have been a net loss. I wonder if chat will go in that same direction or not.

Re: Apps SDK

#158

Post by jerojero »

glenstein wrote: post #115
fidotron wrote: post #50

This conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the universal user interface of the future. If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface paradigms.

There's a lot of appropriate blowback against stupid AI hype and I'm all for it. But I do think in many respects it's a better interface than (1) bad search results, (2) cluttered websites, (3) freemium apps with upgrade nags, as well as the collective search cost of sorting through all those things. I remember reading some not-Neuromancer book by William Gibson where one of his near-future predictions was print maga…

I think you need to be careful here because you shouldn't be comparing chat apps to the current state of search results. Instead you compare it to the ideal or to the state of them before companies decided that instead of providing what people are looking for it was more profitable to provide them with related content that they're paid to show.

We are at a moment where we're trying to figure out how to design good interfaces, but very soon after that the moment of "okay, now let's start selling with them" will come and that's really what we're going to be left with.

In that regard, things like adblockers which now a days can be used to mitigate some of these defects you talk about are probably going to be much more difficult to implement in a chat-app interface. What are we going to do when we ask an agent for something and it responds with an ad rather than the relevant information we're seeking? It seems to me like it's going to be even more difficult to be in control for the user.

Re: Apps SDK

#159

Post by nthypes »

chat is the best interface for information retrieval and REPL-like experiences. for all the rest, chat is horrible.

Re: Apps SDK

#160

Post by jerojero »

thebigkick wrote: post #49
nicce wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means OAI won't need ads. Ads are defenitely there. Just hidden so deeply in the black box which is generating the useful tips :)

If you ask it to build a headless frontend web app, it immediately starts generating code with Next.js. I’ve always wondered how it was trained to default to that choice, given the smorgasbord of web frameworks out there. Next.js is solid, but it’s also platform-ware, tightly coupled to commercial interests. I wish there were more bias toward genuinely open-source technologies.

There's probably different ways the LLM converged to it.

One could be for example: from people asking online which tools they should use to build something and being constantly recommended to do it with Next.js

Another could be: how many of the code that was used to train the LLM is done in Next.js

Generally, the answer is probably something along the lines of "next.js is kind of the most popular choice at the time of training".

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