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Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

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Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#81

Post by visarga »

ptx wrote: post #13

> We need computing environments ... without the concept of applications appearing at all. Platforms keep trying to enable this, but application vendors want to control the UX and branding, so they're not going to provide these generic reusable building blocks. Android, for example, lets apps make use of views from other apps and securely delegate a task (e.g. take a photo, pick a file, etc.) to the user's preferred…

> We need computing environments ... without the concept of applications appearing at all.

GPT-3 :-)

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#82

Post by dodobirdlord »

bloaf wrote: post #67
hedora wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost every attempt at such an environment has failed for a reason. Basic and spreadsheets are notable exceptions. However, they don’t scale to complex programs.

Spreadsheets basically run entire massive companies. What is the standard of complexity which this fails to meet?

Pretty much anywhere that depends heavily on spreadsheets also depends heavily on humans in complex ways. Humans are checking that different versions of the spreadsheet haven't gone out of sync, have been sent to the right people, are only updated when they are supposed to be, etc.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#84

Post by shalabhc »

A lot of replies are missing the point.

It's not "apps integrate better with each other".

It is "there are no apps".

So what would Adobe sell, if not the "Photoshop app"? It would sell the Photoshop "menu of filters", the "selector toolbox", the "color histogram view" and such. But the workspace where you see the image and apply the selectors or filters would be outside Photoshop itself. It would be a standard part of the system, where the image could come from and go into another organizing system (possibly provided by another vendor). You could mix organizing systems, sharing/versioning systems and filters/selectors/menus/views from various vendors, commercial or free or open source.

This would apply not just to images, but to all kinds of media - movies, documents, including "code".

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#85

Post by ribs »

pavlov wrote: post #63

OpenDoc was a mid-‘90s Apple software framework that basically did this. It was also adopted by IBM on OS/2 as part of the technology exchange that also resulted in Apple and Motorola using IBM’s POWER CPU architecture. Steve Jobs killed OpenDoc when he returned to Apple in 1997 because it wasn’t NeXT software. The IBM side of the project had already died at that point as Windows 95 trounced OS/2.

Windows 95, with OLE, which became ActiveX, which is pretty isomorphic to OpenDoc.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#86

Post by kasperni »

> We must build much higher level shared meaning - Images, Tables, Conversations and beyond, building a common implementation and understanding used by everybody.

Thinking you can build something like this is extremely naive. If you have been working in any company over a certain size. You will know that even inside a single company, people often don't use the exact same vocabulary. For example, what constitutes a product is very different across departments such a sales, production, design, customer service. Martin Fowler talks a bit about in this post on bounded contexts [1].

[1] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BoundedContext.html

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#87

Post by djrobstep »

kasperni wrote: post #86

> We must build much higher level shared meaning - Images, Tables, Conversations and beyond, building a common implementation and understanding used by everybody. Thinking you can build something like this is extremely naive. If you have been working in any company over a certain size. You will know that even inside a single company, people often don't use the exact same vocabulary. For example, what constitutes a pr…

But we already do this, with a whole variety of different objects - strings, sockets, integers, floats, URLs for instance.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#88

Post by pedro1976 »

johnisgood wrote: post #48
rubyn00bie wrote: post #42

Oh yeah; we have/had this-- it is called HTML and none of us got the idea behind it (I certainly didn't); so, instead we re-created the prisons we were, and are, trying to escape. It also is really hard to profit from ONLY meaningful data thus the death of things like RSS feeds. Can't shovel advertisements, trackers, and spyware down someone's throat just sending a nicely formatted HTML table that the client decides…

> the death of things like RSS feeds This is really sad[1]. RSS feeds are amazing. Thankfully they are not completely gone! [1] Actually, the whole state of the Internet is sad.

I share the passion for feeds. IMHO the decision of whether a site exports feeds should not be just up to the owner. There should be a neutral transformation layer that translates any html to rss. Shameless plug [0]. Feel free to support it.

[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#89

Post by thibran »

I'm thinking about those ideas since years. For me it is strange that it seems for many such a hard concept to grasp, since the advantages are huge and obvious.

Today some tasks like mass renaming of files of a certain type require an extra tool for a casual users, which is in most cases not available and the task therefor not doable. This is a pity and wastes a lot of potential/productivity.

If programs where things you could easily talk to - and I don't mean by using a programming language - then filtering and renaming some files should be easy.

This kind of mechanism would also allow to blur the line between the traditional desktop, the cloud and AI (something that has been tried before, but failed because the use-case where not compelling). For example, if Microsoft would update Windows in such a way, every user could have some cloud points for AI image recognition per month. If for some reason you needed to do a lot of image recognition, you would have to pay extra. Which would be okay, since using "more resources" creates costs somewhere and we as society agree that someone has to pay for it -> capitalism. This blending of ecosystems and capabilities is where things should be going, but strangely none of the big tech companies seem to pursuer such a path.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#90

Post by belugacat »

shalabhc wrote: post #84

A lot of replies are missing the point. It's not "apps integrate better with each other". It is "there are no apps". So what would Adobe sell, if not the "Photoshop app"? It would sell the Photoshop "menu of filters", the "selector toolbox", the "color histogram view" and such. But the workspace where you see the image and apply the selectors or filters would be outside Photoshop itself. It would be a standard part o…

The big issue here being that Adobe has zero interest in selling this, and this kind of model would not lead to a $250B market cap business. Adobe wants to tightly control the experience, record how you use the software, display their own branding, try to upsell you on their other products and services, etc etc.

Software businesses care about controlling the UX/branding/etc. tightly, because that's where the money is - not selling "menus of filters". That's why every webpage is nowadays is a SPA that hijacks standard browser features like scroll and copy paste and no one looking to make money was ever interested in the semantic web.

I'm very aligned with the views exposed in the article and your comment, and have been working on some open source approaches to it in my free time for a few years now. I figure that the only way that it can maybe work is to make something for myself that I love using, and maybe some other enthusiasts will like it too and it can grow a bit from there. But there's probably no way it would ever meaningfully compete with Photoshop, because it goes against every economic incentive that software companies have.

In parallel, I also suspect that that's why the design/UX of open source applications tend to be extremely poor in general - great, tight design is expensive and needs strong economic incentives.

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