Embark: Dynamic documents for making plans

Today’s software is far from personal. Unbundling the app is just one important step; we must also invent new interactions around a new set of core primitives.

We believe that rather than forcing people to adapt to rigid, one-size-fits-all interfaces, our software environments should adapt to each person’s needs, context, and mental models. With a proper set of new primitives, the digital realm could support more thoughtful engagement with the things that matter most to each of us

very day computers offer ever more powerful substitutes for traditional analog tools: calendars become dynamic, weather forecasts get regular updates, driving directions change with traffic predictions, and so forth. But these essential tools live in a restrictive environment dominated by siloed app architectures. Interfaces inside apps, and integr

Most software entangles the abstract functionality of the application with the interface that presents it to the user. For example, in Google Maps, users can search for a route between two points, but neither the resulting route nor the process of computing that route can be separated from the visual interface.

As a result, many compositional tasks

Documents capture thought process and context

In our early prototypes, we explored ways for GUI widgets to compose with one another. For example, we tried many variations of putting map and weather views side by side and having them share data with each other.

An early prototype of Embark which emphasized composition between GUI widgets

These prototyp

We found that being able to freely write notes anywhere in our planning tool provided a graceful fallback for any situation: we could write down anything as text if a more ideal structured data format was not available. We frequently found ourselves mixing mentions and formulas together with freeform text notes and annotations to capture thoughts i

People want to take notes on things. In the physical world, we write on sticky notes, magnetic whiteboards, or the margins of a book or paper.

In the digital realm, our modern systems fail to support this inclination. We find ourselves wanting to write in the margins of our digital things, but are unable to. Sometimes, a notes field is supported on

Composing data from multiple sources in this way is harder to do in the conventional app model. For example, if you open Google Calendar and pull up the weather forecast in another tab, there is no way to combine these two data sources in a single view. This is possible in Embark because the weather forecast and the time information live in the sam