my favorite thing about modern landscape of desktop apps is that… Electron apps are tinkerable! you go to the app's resources folder, extract an asar with one command, and then you can edit the node.js-side files. then, you can just change what the BrowserWindow instance is loading to resources you control, and you have end-to-end control over the entire application
A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#42My Dearest TI-85 Calculator Games, (I shall name a few by names) In lines of code and pixels fair, Within your realm, I find solace rare. A love that's forged in binary strings, A tapestry of malleable digital things. Oh, how you captivate my heart, With your C-programming art. Your 8001 pixels dance upon my screen, Creating worlds, both vivid & serene. Through endless loops and if-else's rhyme, We tinker in space, o…
You are one of the best.
Your words show your zest
for the games you hold so dear.
We can see they bring you cheer,
You even told us the names
of some of your best-loved games.
Now lets all give a cheer,
and toast your hobby with beer.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#43I'm currently playing with Pharo Smalltalk and everything is very accessible. I wonder why Smalltalk Environments did not catch on as operating systems, let alone just as languages, where everything can be tinkered with and modified on the fly. Apple sounds like the kind of company that would successfully build a smalltalk device, yet they go the opposite way of locking down their devices hard.
Version control. Small talk is amazing, but dumping the binary to distribute is so scary. Did I unload my email client? Are my credentials in there? Gah. Scary.
The Pharo hackers write Pharo to enable them to make Pharo better. They are a shining manifestation of eating their own dog food.
Outcomes of this effort are powerful version control and package management. I don’t know, but it seems quite clear to me that Pharo folks start with base images, load their package dependencies on top of it, then hack away on their own code. Inevitably they create a new package with a list of dependencies for others to use.
What they don’t appear to be doing is “living” in their images. Rather they create application specific instances from source code.
Emacs users tend to “live” more within it than the SmallTalk/Pharo people do.
In the end they distribute images assembled much like a Docker image is today, made from a deterministic set of sources and then snapshot.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#44You can still tinker with software as you please.
Things got a lot more complex these days. When I was a kid I was able to hold in my mind how DOS works, how x86 works and was able to learn a bit of C and assembler to do about anything. Hack software, build my own, have fun.
Doing small games was pretty easy if you knew some graphic modes and had some undocumented source codes for drivers for various 2D graphics cards. Trying now to learn modern DirectX, Vulkan, shaders and graphics stacks is more complex.
Nobody can now hold in their heads all the important details of how operating systems work, how networks work, how graphics woks, how web apps work, how mobile apps work, how backend works, how desktop apps work, how ML and AI works.
You have to specialize in something. Get an Arduino and learn how to flip a led. Right click a popular website, paste the source code in Notepad and try to modify it.
It's not less fun tinkering, but it's going to be specialized fun if you ever want to learn something and get good at it.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#45I remember playing with Deluxe Paint II on PC when I was a kid. Somehow it was not the same version that I saw people use on the Commodore Amiga. I also read somewhere in a magazine that there was Deluxe Paint Animation, but I did not have that on my computer.
So I set out to write a TSR (Terminate & Stay Resident) program that would pop up extra functionality in Deluxe Paint. Using some keyboard shortcuts I could add a rectangle to the screen, and select a grid of images. The separate images would then animate on another part of the screen. Needless to say that the integration with the rest of Deluxe Paint was somewhat limited, but it was good enough for me.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#46I think there’s a bit of survivorship bias in the tech industry. Many of us got into tech because we were able to explore computers with few limitations. But I’m not convinced it was mostly due to the tech of the 90s being more open. We are the ones who did that kind of stuff, so we’re a filtered audience posting on HN about tinkerable software. We likely tinkered for a lot of reasons that didn’t have much to do what…
I think it is reasonable to say the prevalence of smart phones with a better security model means that young people do not have the same skillset you possessed in general.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90859083/gen-z-tech-skills-gap-d...
Add to this console gaming, and "view source" not working as well with the prevalence of optimised web frameworks, or the centralisation of compute services (you can't resedit Tinder or Snapchat and change what others experience); tinkering via tech is much much harder.
The creative types who want to have fun are off making innovative tiktok memes.
To help fix this, we need more open source apps with a "view source" button in the about tab taking you straight to GitHub with a "code now" button, to kill the app store in favour of sideloading apks from your local sneakernet, and an absolute buttload of Easter eggs.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#47I think there’s a bit of survivorship bias in the tech industry. Many of us got into tech because we were able to explore computers with few limitations. But I’m not convinced it was mostly due to the tech of the 90s being more open. We are the ones who did that kind of stuff, so we’re a filtered audience posting on HN about tinkerable software. We likely tinkered for a lot of reasons that didn’t have much to do what…
If you look at the state of drones an robotics right now, the 90's were nowhere near that.
So to any kid that is interested in technical things, there are currently 0 things holding you back: You all of the worlds information at your fingertips, can order any electronics part for cheap, can build cool things with tiny computers.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#48A love letter to tinkerable hardware as well...
If you think about how many people entered electronics via "the Arduinos of this world". How many kids learned that you can actually build physical "stuff" that is nice & blinks. How many artists created "stuff" due to tinkerable hardware.
Shoutout to https://www.geekmomprojects.com/ and the others. Thank you for tinkering. Makes our world better.
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#49As 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…
Decker looks lovely. Can you speak more about how you create the wonderful HyperCard theme? Did you create your own graphical toolkit to match the Hypercard theme and draw everything yourself with that toolkit?
And is this available as a desktop too? or is it web only?
Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
#50I'm trying to inspire my children with the same ideas. I spent my youth tinkering with an Amstrad CPC 464.
Looking for what could inspire them to tinker in the same way without always wanting a YouTube video or book to follow.
How would you create a love of experimenting and trying without fear of failing or doing something wrong?