Build Software Quickly

Omar has worked at Dynamicland and built experimental computing interfaces like Hijack Your Feed and TabFS.  We talked about:

• Communicating computing design principles through demos, rather than manifestos.
• Embodying computational objects as things the user already knows how to manipulate, like files, screenshots, or pieces of paper.
• What it takes to make a computing environment complete enough to live on.
• Molding a temporary user interface that fits the current task.

Links:

• Oberon operating system
• Canon Cat computer
• Geoffrey Litt
• Acme text editor
• GoldenEye - a history
• Omar's website
• Omar's GitHub Sponsors page

David Cole designs the incredible game making app, Castle. Before that, he was VP of Design at Quora. We talked about:

• The design decisions that make it quick and accessible to build expressive games with Castle.
• How Castle eschews some goals (like teaching coding or enabling professional quality games) so it can nail its actual goals.
• The techniques Castle uses to let people use latent time on their phone to create, rather than consume.
• Why games are valuable as culture. And why it's worthwhile working on a tool to make games.
• How game design techniques like emergence can be applied to non-game software.

Links:

• Castle
• This podcast is part of Mary Rose Cook's research to build software quickly.

Geoffrey is doing a PhD at MIT on Human Computer Interaction and end user programming. He also does research projects with the independent R&D lab, Ink & Switch. He is working on helping more non-programmers build their own software tools.

We talked about:

• Potluck, Geoffrey’s latest experimental tool that lets a user start with a meaningful document (like a recipe) and progressively enhance it with computation (like automatically adjusting timings).
• Trade-offs between concrete use cases, building for others and giving research time to show results.
• Orienting thoughts around end user programming around the context the user is in, rather than who they are.
• The ways that different communities help foster research.

Links:

• Formality considered harmful
• Geoffrey’s website
• Geoffrey on Twitter
• Christopher Alexander
• This podcast is part of Mary Rose Cook’s research to build software quickly.