Blog: #hci

• Bret Victor’s Dynamicland — they had me at “a non-profit long-term research group in the spirit of Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC”
• James Somers on how more people should write — amen and amen
• Joel Hooks on blogs and digital gardens — this makes me want to finish my revamp of Slash so I can more easily add an actual digital garden to this site (and at some point I’ll write about that revamp since I don’t think I’ve gone into any detail on it)
• Amy Hoy on how blogs broke the web — it’s not quite as bad as the headline sounds, but still some good food for thought (you could say this is another way of looking at stock vs. flow)
• Deekay’s Animator Creating Animation — charming, loved this

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• Jennifer Jacobs’ interview on the Future of Coding podcast — this is the area of HCI I’m most interested in
• Muse — an intriguing spatial canvas idea
• RFC8890, on the Internet being for end users — hear, hear
• Steven Johnson on the spark file — great idea
• The microCOVID Project — a layman’s method for quantifying Covid risk (probably not extremely accurate but interesting nonetheless)

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Some quick thoughts about the project space I see myself working in (meaning personal coding projects that aren’t the productivity tools I mentioned before), both now and for the foreseeable future. To be honest, it’s mostly a roadmap for myself, posted here as part of working in public.

Bookmaking tools

One of the areas in the project space is bookmaking tools: tools that help with making either print books or ebooks. What I’ve worked on in that area (and some of these are still in progress or in the future):

• Press — low-level typesetting (PDF compiler)
• Ink — higher-level typesetting
• Curves — programmatic type design
• Typlate — type design templates
• md2epub/Caxton — ebook compiler
• epubdiff — ebook differ
• Fledge — text processing shell
• Storybook — writing tool (covered under the productivity tools, yes, but I feel it fits in here)

Creativity tools

The next area, somewhat related, is creativity tools: tools for making art, music, etc. I do realize that there’s a bit of overlap between the two areas — art can be used in books, for example. This is not a rigorous taxonomy.

What I’ve worked on:

• Trill — music composition REPL
• Grain — command-line tool for texturing art

While I haven’t done much in this area so far, the intersection of software and art has been calling to me more lately. I expect creativity tools to become much more of a focus for me, probably even more so than the bookmaking tools.

Human-Computer Interaction

Last but not least, HCI. My master’s thesis is in this area, and much of my other work also touches on it in limited ways. (What I mean by that, I think, is that with projects like Trill, Curves, and Press, the parts that have most interested me are the interfaces. Also, those interfaces have been textual in these particular cases, but I’m also interested in other kinds of UIs.) So I plan to start building more proofs of concept and interface experiments — like the spatial interface ideas I mentioned several weeks ago.

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