Lobe was a tool for creating image recognition machine learning models
littleBits was a toy that offered circuit creation and code augmentation at the speed of playing with Lego
Website for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, designed with IN-FO.CO and Standard Library
Explorable fractal drawings
The 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor from MOS Technology. It powered the Atari 2600, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, BCC Micro, and the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The web has traditionally been server-rendered pages: a server sends out HTML for a specific URL, the browser refreshes the page, starting at the top with a new document.
There’s good documentation covering iOS and macOS development on the Apple Developer site, but what do you read after that?
https://agiusscorpo.com
Designing an Authentication System: a Dialogue in Four Scenes, which arrives at the protocol used at MIT in the 90s.
This past Christmas, after ten years of asking, my grandfather finally received the gift he had always wanted: the Battery Daddy. As seen on TV, the Battery Daddy is a clear plastic suitcase that holds 180 batteries in individual compartments....
“Calm technology”, born out of mid-nineties research at Xerox PARC, is the notion that technology should blend into the background most of the time and should engage more than our sense of vision when it’s time to get our attention....
People lump a lot of early games/media exploration into the “Myst copycat” genre, but there are some really interesting experiments if you dig a bit. CDs let people experiment with video, 3D scenes, and mixed media over a unique 5...
Basilisk Unity Mode lets you share classic Mac windows within macOS.
A thesis covering an alternative to browser extensions and in-app settings for customization of web sites.
It’s easy for me to think that Dynamicland is the ideal software collaboration environment: the computer is the room, personal devices and objects in that room are the interface, the privacy model is the one we’re used to.
Comments sections on most websites were removed a while back when people’s inboxes filled with spam and psychos. The solution? People used Facebook and Twitter to share and comment on links.
The algorithms and fundamentals of computer graphics are not intuitive. For the sake of performance, we execute graphics operations in parallel on a separate piece of hardware: the GPU.
How should people be able to customize the software they use?
Content negotiation allows the same URL to return different types of resources.
A zipper is an immutable data structure useful in navigating a tree-like structure.
Some strategies proposed by archivists on how to preserve media on computers:
E-Ink displays are mostly relegated to 6-8” screens on book readers, but have some applications in signage and ambient displays. They are purely reflective, blending into the environment instead of emitting light, which makes them great for reducing eye strain....
Magic Ink makes the claim that a lot of what we think of as “interaction design” is actually busywork. Re-creating state, clicking around to tell the computer what we’re interested in, is unnecessary work in most cases when we can...
“Explorable explanations” is is a broad idea, but most people use it as a term of art for long-form writing that embeds interactive diagrams or graphics of the subject.
Apple Lisa setup Comparing the Xerox Star to the Apple Lisa Sprite OS webos cards The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal
TRON Smart House ITRON History
Alan Kay has a succinct answer to the question: “what should we work on?”
Hypercard was one of the first general purpose, hyperlink-able, multimedia creation software environments.
Maggie Appleton’s Xanadu Patterns covers the less-abstract published work of Ted Nelson.
The <iframe> element lets you embed another website within a page.
Tango by Zbigniew Rybczynski was the first experiment in using compositing to duplicate movement in the same frame:
A just-in-time information retrieval agent (JITIR agent) is software that proactively retrieves and presents information based on a person’s local context in an easily accessible yet nonintrusive manner. This paper describes three implemented JITIR agents: the Remembrance Agent, Margin Notes,...
Not everything needs to be Kai’s Power Tools, but we shouldn’t discourage it either.
2023: Twitter has collapsed, generative AI is creating noise, the hyperlink has replaced the dollar. People are wondering what kind of web presence they want to have again.
William Byrd on “The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written” Lisp Machines
littleBits created a system of magnetically connected circuit building blocks. It didn’t do much to teach you about circuit design and electrical engineering, but was intended to abstract signal as a toy and prototyping tool. This let people make experiments...
Visualizing embeddings by finding associated images (Max Bittker)
Magic Ink is Brett Victor’s thesis on software design and its implementation. It posits that interactivity should be considered harmful and that the computer is more than capable of making an educated guess based on context found:
In November 1930, in Indiana, United States, one of the great feats of modern engineering was executed: a team of architects and engineers moved an 11,000-ton (22-million pound) telephone exchange without ever suspending its operations either basic supplies for the...
It’s possible to save the state of multiple terminal windows, tile programs side-by-side, attach to sessions over the network, and switch between different contexts. Unix’s screen is maybe the most famous of these, but there are several others.
Building a Typescript package for hosting on NPM
“Operating system” covers a pretty wide spectrum of abstraction. Lower levels of the stack are concerned with managing what work gets performed when, how to communicate with peripherals, and persisting data to various kinds of storage. The higher levels are...
Parsing: The Solved Problem That Isn’t GLR parser Efficient and Flexible Incremental Parsing
lamps, a collaboration between BERG and the Google Creative Lab. (Matt Jones writeup).
Time-of-flight sensors allow for computers and participating objects to have awareness of their relative positions to one another in space. This allows for very natural interactions between devices: a laptop and an external display can know which direction to extend...
Kay Liang and Maria Gerdyman put on Tiny Town, a kind of tabletop roleplaying game for kids using an HTML file, the drag-and-drop jquery plugin, and a melting pot of collaborator’s drawings.
Python is everywhere, but not all corners are “pythonic”. Machine learning in particular has a decent amount of Python in the service of being the glue between a bunch of c++ libraries.
Radiance fields are volumetric representations of a scene using neural networks. Gaussian splatting is a technique to render these scenes efficiently by rasterizing a stretched oval of color.
Article tackling the low information density designs that are common when there’s inadequately resourced mobile-first websites
Ambient Displays: Turning Architectural Space into an Interface between People and Digital Information
The Tangible Media Group at MIT explores and invents new materials to be used in communicating information.
Pinwheels: Visualizing Information Flow in an Architectural Space
One of the criticisms of ubiquitous computing is the privacy risk: a “smart room” can easily be used for surveillance in the wrong hands. Bradley Rhodes, Nelson Minar, and Josh Weaver argue for wearable computing as a solution:
Habitat, an early LucasArts MUD. (Neohabitat is a recreation)
People have been experimenting with the form factor of “personal computing” ever since it became clear that such devices could be made small enough to fit on our bodies. The smart phone has won this form factor battle to date,...
How do we archive web content?
https://macwright.com/2024/01/24/on-web-components.html https://blog.carlana.net/post/2023/web-component-alternative-futures/
For content-heavy native applications, web views can be a useful tool to render the same material between a website and app. Done right, it can feel native and reduce maintenance.