be careful with cement it hardens
solutionising, componentising, systematising,
be careful with cement it hardens
There’s another important dimension of inflexibility: apps create rigid data schemas that define the kinds of information we can record within them. We can fill out the available form fields, but we can’t add new fields or scribble in the margins. Structured data inputs struggle with ambiguity—when faced with a list of radio buttons, there’s no way
... See moreGeoffrey Litt • Dynamic documents as personal software
We survive by naming shapes.
Lion, lightning, invoice. Commit to memory, move on.
That shorthand spares calories, keeps skin intact, and lets us cross streets without philosophizing about trucks.
The tradeoff: the moment a thing fits a label, its edges fade.
Nuance gets deleted, anomalies slip through the net, the field of possibility shrinks.
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Lion, lightning, invoice. Commit to memory, move on.
That shorthand spares calories, keeps skin intact, and lets us cross streets without philosophizing about trucks.
The tradeoff: the moment a thing fits a label, its edges fade.
Nuance gets deleted, anomalies slip through the net, the field of possibility shrinks.
Useful... See more
Jack Butcher
This feels infinitely related to the quote from Ian McGilchrist that Rory stated at the OK-RM table discussion event for their exhibition
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
... See moreEmbark: Dynamic documents for making plans
One workaround for these kinds of problems is to find an app with a broader scope, like a travel planning app that combines wishlists, maps, routing, and more. These kinds of apps are convenient, but they still suffer from the challenges of the app model. It is impossible for companies to create apps for the infinite variety of combinations that
... See moreEmbark: Dynamic documents for making plans
We can't write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well -- people even younger than yourselves --are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits.
pbs.org • John Gardner : Education and Excellence
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
... See moreEmbark: Dynamic documents for making plans
waaah this exactly what eugene expressed in his talk about how our hardware conforms is because they must be explicitly built to work the nth user not just one user
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
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