User Editable

Editing a running program…

The Universal User Primitive for current OSes is the file. But files are opaque, monolithic, non-standard, and not designed for runtime usage.

But still relatively compact and efficient. Something that a program could work with efficiently at runtime. In its simplest form it could be similar to JSON with some assumptions around naming and structure.

What operating systems are missing is what I would call a Universal User Primitive. Like an object but slightly higher level for the user. Has properties, possibly other things like type, icon, etc. and understood by all programs and something users can interact with.

I would put up with buggy software if it was doing something interesting and useful.

@eshear I’m going with “no”. Our brains are wired for imprecision.

Is there a difference between interacting with some object vs interacting with an arbitrarily precise finite approximation of that object?

@jayendra_ram Humans have a grand loop which at the top is something like don’t die. Any idea emerges under a deep hierarchy of grand loops.

Why are some humans so good at idea generation when it appears models are handicapped at this? Mystics, Jung etc think ideas come from another source, but assuming this isn’t true, how can our brains do this so well?

@DarrellRoot @BasicAppleGuy Back in those days they used to give out gifts and that year every attendee got an iSight camera.

During the iSight launch keynote (WWDC 2003), there were (as always) two stage computers: primary and backup. So the two iSights wouldn’t look weird, one iSight was aimed up, but one was aimed down. Earlier in the Keynote, there was an issue with the primary computer and they switched to backup. But the backup computer’s iSight was aimed straight down! One of the leaders in the crew (I won’t give the name) saw that there was going to be a problem. He went near the stage and waited. Once Steve Jobs was on the other side of the stage, he went up on stage to the demo computers and reversed which iSight camera was aimed correctly. Then he left the stage. He was on stage with Steve Jobs during a keynote! Nobody saw him. Nobody noticed him. This is why backstage crew always wear black: so we can do what needs to be done without being noticed.

If you used these growing up, don't forget to take a couple ibuprofen for your back today...

Also there seems to be a general move away from this level of object interaction in apps. But this is associated with taking power away from the user. User level OOPiness seems to be associated with power/control/autonomy/creativity.

User facing objects and internal program objects are two different things, but it doesn’t change the fact that the GUI itself appears very object-oriented to the user. Although kiosk-style GUIs on web and mobile devices move away from this.

Even though OOP isn’t so trendy at the moment, from a user’s perspective things feel quite OOPy. You can click and drag complex objects, even to other applications, and the desktop. You can do the same operations on the object no matter which application it is in.

Lots of possibilities, yet simple, natural, intuitive, non-threatening, and uncluttered.

Not to mention page breaks, word wrap, paragraph wrap, image wrap, justification, foot notes, auto updating table of contents and indexes, selection, drag and drop.

One of the most impressive UIs even to this day is the Word Processor. Open environment, no fixed grid, every character is a different size, WYSIWYG, yet you can also bring order, with rulers, tab guides, outlines. Still very difficult to build from scratch.

Continuing on from my Slower == Better theme, Microsoft Word for at least a decade was notoriously slow.

Interesting tidbit of history: Charles Simonyi who created the first GUI Word Processor at Xerox PARC in 1974 (Bravo) was hired by Microsoft in 1981 and went onto create Microsoft Word. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_S…

The last two big trends were/are excruciatingly slow compared to contemporary tech: Crypto and LLMs. Developers first reaction: how do we speed this up? That’s fair enough, but note the innovation is in the slowness.

@dexterleng I think @jacobtechtavern did some testing and found List had the best scrolling performance.

has anyone managed to build a LLM chat app in SwiftUI that supports rich text and embedded content that doesn't lag with long chat histories?

@logerhaus @thekitze MacOS 8 and 9 had this it was called Platinum Sounds. youtu.be/Kxe1WQjFR4A

@thekitze Didn't know i needed sound effects for window resizing

this was in 1988 and computers still don't work this way, incredible

Build things worth waiting for.

Anyone who complains about performance clearly doesn’t think the thing they are waiting for is worth the wait. Maybe that’s the real problem.