This week:
Making books and watching deer.
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Alexander Obenauer
@alexobenauer
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Exploring the interfaces we think with & the future of personal computing.
You can see that it pulled quotes out of my notes (Kay's in this screenshot) and intersected ideas that I hadn't myself (Fermi Paradox and interfaces as the main bottleneck, two things I'd taken separate notes on).
I gave Claude Code access to my Obsidian vault and asked it to give me some questions / prompts. It asked things like:
- What forces preserve mediocre interfaces?
- How do we escape vendor-imposed constraints on our thinking?
Here's a small taste:
Ivan Reese@alexobenauer Poor iTunes/Music. Perhaps, other than Safari, it's the app that has earned the most cumulative hours running on my machine. I can't remember the last time it felt well-polished, free from incomplete implementations of dubious designs. 20 years? Alas.
This Ars article from 2010 is fun to read now.
Discussion of Carbon vs. Cocoa apps, pointing out the portion of the user base eager for the Cocoa rewrite, evoking the Human Interface Guidelines in the face of unseemly UI decisions...
Such a different era.
The system Smith went on to describe (for programming by demonstration) in part elicited some fascinating thoughts from Alan Kay:
Completed another trip around the sun this week. With gratitude, something to share:
Creative work is hilariously unintuitive to the adult mind. We are like beavers, blocking flow at the first sound of running water with dams made of any debris around.
Here are reminders I hold close:
(1/2)
“By comparison, systems like HyperCard offer no more than a pidgin version of what is possible on the Macintosh. It doesn't qualify by my standards.” was the first critique of HyperCard’s technical and conceptual ideas I was able to find on a long search years ago.
