Podcasts about engelbart

Haize talks about the roster changes coming to the Chicago Sky as well as Angel Reese's successful wrist surgery. He then goes in on WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert Links: https://linktr.ee/chicagoskycentral Get at us: Email: ChicagoSkyCentral@gmail.com Twitter:@ChicagoSkyPod Phone: ‪(773) 270-2799‬ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/chicago-sky-central/support

Jon and Keith are back at it ladies and gentleman. We are here at the Shat Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in a highly guarded and secretive location in of all places, Alabama, with some exciting SHAT to share with you. So, have you ever heard of Douglas Engelbart? We hadn't either until recently. He is most famously known as the inventor of the ubiquitous computer input device known as the mouse! But there's much more you fabulous flumadiddlers. On December 9th of the tumultuous year of our Lord, 1968, he did a thing! A big thing! He demonstrated the future of computing, or as the wikipedias puts it... He did a 90-minute presentation demonstrating for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system.  So sit back and enjoy as we caress your earholes with this amazing story.

Free, ungated access to all 275+ episodes of “It's 5:05!” on your favorite podcast platforms: https://bit.ly/505-updates. You're welcome to

Diamo uno sguardo all'evoluzione delle nostre relazioni d'amore (e a volte odio) con i computer.Vi ricordate quando i computer erano bestioni mastodontici che invadevano interi ambienti e necessitavano di un codice arcano per essere domati? No? Io neanche, ma così è cominciato il viaggio, credetemi.Da allora non avete idea di quanto siano cambiati nel corso degli anni... tantissimo!Tutti i miei link: https://linktr.ee/br1brownFonti:https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001083.htmhttps://www.tiny.cloud/blog/copy-paste-inventor/https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-first-new-ui-paradigm-60-years-jakob-nielsenTELEGRAMINSTAGRAMSe ti va supportami https://it.tipeee.com/br1brown

Le parti in luce e quelle in ombra di due percorsi dell'informatica del millennio trascorso, che passano da Engelbart e Jobs, da un lato, e da Von Neumann e Gates, dall'altro, ci offrono indicazioni su come può essere interpretata e indirizzata un'epoca tanto idealizzata quanto temuta. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/shortcaster/message

In der heutigen Folge des Experten-Podcasts spricht Gaby Engelbart, leidenschaftliche Expertin für Hundegesundheit und Hundverhalten, darüber, wie man Schmerzen beim Hund erkennen kann und was zum Thema Geräuschängste wichtig ist. Du erfährst außerdem, einige Information für ein langes, gesundes und entspanntes Hundeleben. Außerdem verrät Gaby Engelbart ihre besten Tipps, für eine bessere Auslastung eines jungen Hundes.Wenn auch Du wissen willst, wie Du zahlreiche Tipps wie Du Deinen Hund bei Problemen im Bewegungsapparat unterstützen kannst, dann solltest Du diese Folge des Experten-Podcasts nicht verpassen. Hat Dir der Experte des Tages gefallen, hast Du etwas für Dich mitnehmen können? Weitere Informationen bekommst Du unter https://canes-sani.de/_ oder Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gaby_engelbart/?hl=de See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

NLS, or the oN-Line System, is often looked at as a mile marker in the development of modern computing. It was the first system to use a mouse, one of the first functional examples of hypertext, pioneered remote collaboration, and so much more. But how much do you know about NLS itself? In this series of episode I'm picking apart the system behind the legend. Part 1 deals primarily with the early roots of NLS, Augmenting Human Intellect, and Doug Engelbart's vision of hypertext. Surprisingly, a lot of this episode has to do with punch cards and a more obscure related technology: the edge notched card. Selected Sources: https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/138 - Augmenting Human Intellect https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/englebar.htm - Engelbart Oral History, with the Smithsonian

In today's episode, Rusty and Robyn talk to Grant Engelbart, Senior Portfolio Manager at Brinker Capital. Grant has been in the industry for more than a decade. His focus is on trading and managing assets, including ETF mutual funds and single securities. Before working as a portfolio manager, Grant was part of the trading and investment research team at Orion Advisor Solutions. Grant talks with Rusty and Robyn about ETF investment strategies, crypto as a new alternative asset class, and the non-financial skills needed in finance. "One of the biggest issues we have in the advisor and investor world today is income generation. With cryptocurrencies, if done the right way, you can create pretty substantial income streams and uncorrelated income streams off of these products." ~ Grant Engelbart Main Takeaways  When choosing an ETF, the first step is to know the exposure you'll gain from it. Other factors to consider are ETF concentration, maximum security weight, index ETF, and consistent growth. Crypto can be a new alternative asset class. The possibilities with crypto are endless, especially with the creation of crypto ETFs and the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi). Getting familiarized with programming languages, improving your writing, and maintaining positive client relationships are non-financial skills needed in finance. Be disciplined and recognize the power of staying in the market long-term. Having a consistent yet adaptable process that is aligned with the client's investment beliefs is important. Links Grant Engelbart on LinkedIn Sirius by The Alan Parsons Project Brinker Capital Brinker Capital on Twitter CLS Investments Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association (CAIA) Index Methodology Morningstar ETFs Davis ETFs JP Morgan US Value Funds Simplify ETFs Matt Hogan Dave Abner Python R Animal Spirits Podcast Corey Hoffstein's Liquidity Cascades: The Coordinated Risk of Uncoordinated Market Participants Flirting With Models Podcast Upside-Down Markets: Profits, Inflation, and Equity Valuation in Fiscal Policy Regimes By Jesse Livermore+ | O'Shaughnessy Asset Management Long Vol: It's Always Different by Dave Nadig ETF Trends - ETF Strategist Channel - Brinker Capital Nebraska Huskers Connect with our hosts Rusty Vanneman Robyn Murray Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts 2011-OAS-7/13/2021

Wer hat den Massai die Sohlen gestohlen? Mit den beiden so überschriebenen Short-Storys aus Ostafrika ist es nicht getan. Von Hartmut Barth-Engelbart. Eigentlich müsste ich eine Monatsdosis schreiben. Denn der angeblich rein humanitäre Besuch Macrons in Ruanda und Burundi und die dazu erfolgte Berichterstattung (1) ist die Perpetuierung des europäischen Kolonialismus auf höherer Stufe. Macron soll dafür um Entschuldigung gebeten haben, dass Frankreich die Hutus gegen die Tutsis bewaffnet hat. Der Herr und seine Pressemeute haben dabei ganz „vergessen“, dass Deutschland, Frankreich und Belgien die Tutsi als Sklaventreiber benutzt und sie bewaffnet haben. Die Hutu haben die Unabhängigkeit dieser Länder gegen die Kolonialmächte und ihre Kompradoren-Kalfaktoren erkämpft und wollten ihre Henker nicht wieder über sich sehen. Macrons Besuch galt dem Zugang zu den seltenen Erden, dem Tantal, dem Koltan, dem Kupfer in der Region und nicht nur den Usambara-Veilchen. Da gleichen sich EU von der Leichen und das Pariser Macronat wie das Berliner Matronat Wie schön man Neo-Kolonialismus tarnen kann, hat nicht erst Nina Hoss als „Die weiße Massai“ bewiesen. Das ging schon in den 1950ern mit Professor Bernhard Grzimek und seinem Sohn sehr gut, mit der Rettung der Serengeti vor den bösen „Massai-Wilderern“, denen rund um die Weidegründe geraubt wurden. Die zur Vergrößerung ihrer Herden auf überweideten Restflächen gezwungenen Massai gerieten nicht nur mit den europäischen Nationalparkfreunden in Konflikt. Sie konkurrierten jetzt zusätzlich mit den auf noch nicht kapitalisierten Böden Kleinlandwirtschaft-betreibenden Stämmen. Ein wunderbarer Ansatz für das Teile und Herrsche neokolonialer „Entwicklungshelfer“ und weiterer Landgrabber in den Startlöchern… Der Ngorogoro-Krater und die Serengeti als Übersee-Museum und renaturierter Zirkus Hagenbeck zur Bespaßung denaturierter Europäer, als Ausweichfläche für den zu engen Frankfurter Zoo, der wegen seiner Immobilienpreis-Steigerung im Schatten der EZB-Twintower so oder so nicht länger zu halten ist. Da jubeln sich selbst Grüne schwarz, wenn endlich in Afrika artgerechte Zoohaltung durchgesetzt wird. Schluss mit lustig, jetzt wird es blut-ernst...hier weiterlesen: https://kenfm.de/wer-wird-die-serengeti-erben-von-hartmut-barth-engelbart +++ Jetzt KenFM unterstützen: https://de.tipeee.com/kenfm Dir gefällt unser Programm? Informationen zu weiteren Unterstützungsmöglichkeiten hier: https://kenfm.de/support/kenfm-unterstuetzen/ Du kannst uns auch mit Bitcoins unterstützen. Bitcoin-Account: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/1edba334-ba63-4a88-bfc3-d6a3071efcc8 +++ Abonniere jetzt den KenFM-Newsletter: https://kenfm.de/newsletter/ +++ KenFM jetzt auch als kostenlose App für Android- und iOS-Geräte verfügbar! Über unsere Homepage kommt Ihr zu den Stores von Apple und Google. Hier der Link: https://kenfm.de/kenfm-app/ +++ Website und Social Media: https://www.kenfm.de https://www.twitter.com/TeamKenFM https://www.instagram.com/kenfm.de/ https://soundcloud.com/ken-fm https://t.me/s/KenFM See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Bonjour à toutes et tous. Voici le Podcast #261 de GeekOrama ! Cette semaine, Ikson a déroulé le ruban d’une route virtuelle et musicale... Il s’est tellement pris à ce jeu de rythme qu’il a du demander à ses doigts de ne pas partir sans lui ! Octokom quant à lui, a faillit faire une indigestion de bananes, tant son personnage en a mangé ! Même qu’elles ont faillit avoir sa peau (de banane), et qu’il a du courir pour sa vie ! Un instant culture animé par notre Miss Culture, où Addycyclette raconte comment le plus célèbre des petits rongeurs a réussi à prendre autant de place dans nos vies ! Bonne écoute ! ^_^

There was a nexus of Digital Research and Xerox PARC, along with Stanford and Berkeley in the Bay Area. The rise of the hobbyists and the success of Apple attracted some of the best minds in computing to Apple. This confluence was about to change the world. One of those brilliant minds that landed at Apple started out as a technical writer.  Apple hired Jef Raskin as their 31st employee, to write the Apple II manual. He quickly started harping on people to build a computer that was easy to use. Mike Markkula wanted to release a gaming console or a cheap computer that could compete with the Commodore and Atari machines at the time. He called the project “Annie.” The project began with Raskin, but he had a very different idea than Markkula's. He summed it up in an article called “Computers by the Millions” that wouldn't see publication until 1982. His vision was closer to his PhD dissertation, bringing computing to the masses. For this, he envisioned a menu driven operating system that was easy to use and inexpensive. Not yet a GUI in the sense of a windowing operating system and so could run on chips that were rapidly dropping in price. He planned to use the 6809 chip for the machine and give it a five inch display.  He didn't tell anyone that he had a PhD when he was hired, as the team at Apple was skeptical of academia. Jobs provided input, but was off working on the Lisa project, which used the 68000 chip. So they had free reign over what they were doing.  Raskin quickly added Joanna Hoffman for marketing. She was on leave from getting a PhD in archaeology at the University of Chicago and was the marketing team for the Mac for over a year. They also added Burrell Smith, employee #282 from the hardware technician team, to do hardware. He'd run with the Homebrew Computer Club crowd since 1975 and had just strolled into Apple one day and asked for a job.  Raskin also brought in one of his students from the University of California San Diego who was taking a break from working on his PhD in neurochemistry. Bill Atkinson became employee 51 at Apple and joined the project. They pulled in Andy Hertzfeld, who Steve Jobs hired when Apple bought one of his programs as he was wrapping up his degree at Berkeley and who'd been sitting on the Apple services team and doing Apple III demos. They added Larry Kenyon, who'd worked at Amdahl and then on the Apple III team. Susan Kare came in to add art and design. They, along with Chris Espinosa - who'd been in the garage with Jobs and Wozniak working on the Apple I, ended up comprising the core team. Over time, the team grew. Bud Tribble joined as the manager for software development. Jerrold Manock, who'd designed the case of the Apple II, came in to design the now-iconic Macintosh case. The team would eventually expand to include Bob Belleville, Steve Capps, George Crow, Donn Denman, Bruce Horn, and Caroline Rose as well. It was still a small team. And they needed a better code name. But chronologically let's step back to the early project.  Raskin chose his favorite Apple, the Macintosh, as the codename for the project. As far as codenames go it was a pretty good one. So their mission would be to ship a machine that was easy to use, would appeal to the masses, and be at a price point the masses could afford. They were looking at 64k of memory, a Motorola 6809 chip, and a 256 bitmap display. Small, light, and inexpensive. Jobs' relationship with the Lisa team was strained and he was taken off of that and he started moving in on the Macintosh team. It was quickly the Steve Jobs show.  Having seen what could be done with the Motorola 68000 chip on the Lisa team, Jobs had them redesign the board to work with that. After visiting Xerox PARC at Raskin's insistence, Jobs finally got the desktop metaphor and true graphical interface design.  Xerox had not been quiet about the work at PARC. Going back to 1972 there were even television commercials. And Raskin had done time at PARC while on sabbatical from Stanford. Information about Smalltalk had been published and people like Bill Atkinson were reading about it in college. People had been exposed to the mouse all around the Bay Area in the 60s and 70s or read Engelbart's scholarly works on it. Many of the people that worked on these projects had doctorates and were academics. They shared their research as freely as love was shared during that counter-culture time. Just as it had passed from MIT to Dartmouth and then in the back of Bob Albrecht's VW had spread around the country in the 60s. That spirit of innovation and the constant evolutions over the past 25 years found their way to Steve Jobs.  He saw the desktop metaphor and mouse and fell in love with it, knowing they could build one for less than the $400 unit Xerox had. He saw how an object-oriented programming language like Smalltalk made all that possible. The team was already on their way to the same types of things and so Jobs told the people at PARC about the Lisa project, but not yet about the Mac. In fact, he was as transparent as anyone could be. He made sure they knew how much he loved their work and disclosed more than I think the team planned on him disclosing about Apple.  This is the point where Larry Tesler and others realized that the group of rag-tag garage-building Homebrew hackers had actually built a company that had real computer scientists and was on track to changing the world. Tesler and some others would end up at Apple later - to see some of their innovations go to a mass market. Steve Jobs at this point totally bought into Raskin's vision. Yet he still felt they needed to make compromises with the price and better hardware to make it all happen.  Raskin couldn't make the kinds of compromises Jobs wanted. He also had an immunity to the now-infamous Steve Jobs reality distortion field and they clashed constantly. So eventually Raskin the project just when it was starting to take off. Raskin would go on to work with Canon to build his vision, which became the Canon CAT.  With Raskin gone, and armed with a dream team of mad scientists, they got to work, tirelessly pushing towards shipping a computer they all believed would change the world. Jobs brought in Fernandez to help with projects like the macOS and later HyperCard. Wozniak had a pretty big influence over Raskin in the early days of the Mac project and helped here and there withe the project, like with the bit-serial peripheral bus on the Mac.  Steve Jobs wanted an inexpensive mouse that could be manufactured en masse. Jim Yurchenco from Hovey-Kelley, later called Ideo, got the task - given that trusted engineers at Apple had full dance cards. He looked at the Xerox mouse and other devices around - including trackballs in Atari arcade machines. Those used optics instead of mechanical switches. As the ball under the mouse rolled beams of light would be interrupted and the cost of those components had come down faster than the technology in the Xerox mouse.  He used a ball from a roll-on deodorant stick and got to work. The rest of the team designed the injection molded case for the mouse. That work began with the Lisa and by the time they were done, the price was low enough that every Mac could get one.  Armed with a mouse, they figured out how to move windows over the top of one another, Susan Kare designed iconography that is a bit less 8-bit but often every bit as true to form today. Learning how they wanted to access various components of the desktop, or find things, they developed the Finder. Atkinson gave us marching ants, the concept of double-clicking, the lasso for selecting content, the menu bar, MacPaint, and later, HyperCard.  It was a small team, working long hours. Driven by a Jobs for perfection. Jobs made the Lisa team the enemy. Everything not the Mac just sucked. He took the team to art exhibits. He had the team sign the inside of the case to infuse them with the pride of an artist. He killed the idea of long product specifications before writing code and they just jumped in, building and refining and rebuilding and rapid prototyping. The team responded well to the enthusiasm and need for perfectionism.  The Mac team was like a rebel squadron. They were like a start-up, operating inside Apple. They were pirates. They got fast and sometimes harsh feedback. And nearly all of them still look back on that time as the best thing they've done in their careers.  As IBM and many learned the hard way before them, they learned a small, inspired team, can get a lot done. With such a small team and the ability to parlay work done for the Lisa, the R&D costs were minuscule until they were ready to release the computer. And yet, one can't change the world over night. 1981 turned into 1982 turned into 1983.  More and more people came in to fill gaps. Collette Askeland came in to design the printed circuit board. Mike Boich went to companies to get them to write software for the Macintosh. Berry Cash helped prepare sellers to move the product. Matt Carter got the factory ready to mass produce the machine. Donn Denman wrote MacBASIC (because every machine needed a BASIC back then). Martin Haeberli helped write MacTerminal and Memory Manager. Bill Bull got rid of the fan. Patti King helped manage the software library. Dan Kottke helped troubleshoot issues with mother boards. Brian Robertson helped with purchasing. Ed Riddle designed the keyboard. Linda Wilkin took on documentation for the engineering team. It was a growing team. Pamela Wyman and Angeline Lo came in as programmers. Hap Horn and Steve Balog as engineers.  Jobs had agreed to bring in adults to run the company. So they recruited 44 years old hotshot CEO John Sculley to change the world as their CEO rather than selling sugar water at Pepsi. Scully and Jobs had a tumultuous relationship over time. While Jobs had made tradeoffs on cost versus performance for the Mac, Sculley ended up raising the price for business reasons. Regis McKenna came in to help with the market campaign. He would win over so much trust that he would later get called out of retirement to do damage control when Apple had an antenna problem on the iPhone. We'll cover Antenna-gate at some point. They spearheaded the production of the now-iconic 1984 Super Bowl XVIII ad, which shows woman running from conformity and depicted IBM as the Big Brother from George Orwell's book, 1984.  Two days after the ad, the Macintosh 128k shipped for $2,495. The price had jumped because Scully wanted enough money to fund a marketing campaign. It shipped late, and the 128k of memory was a bit underpowered, but it was a success. Many of the concepts such as a System and Finder, persist to this day. It came with MacWrite and MacPaint and some of the other Lisa products were soon to follow, now as MacProject and MacTerminal. But the first killer app for the Mac was Microsoft Word, which was the first version of Word ever shipped.  Every machine came with a mouse. The machines came with a cassette that featured a guided tour of the new computer. You could write programs in MacBASIC and my second language, MacPascal.  They hit the initial sales numbers despite the higher price. But over time that bit them on sluggish sales. Despite the early success, the sales were declining. Yet the team forged on. They introduced the Apple LaserWriter at a whopping $7,000. This was a laser printer that was based on the Canon 300 dpi engine. Burrell Smith designed a board and newcomer Adobe knew laser printers, given that the founders were Xerox alumni. They added postscript, which had initially been thought up while working with Ivan Sutherland and then implemented at PARC, to make for perfect printing at the time. The sluggish sales caused internal issues. There's a hangover  when we do something great. First there were the famous episodes between Jobs, Scully, and the board of directors at Apple. Scully seems to have been portrayed by many to be either a villain or a court jester of sorts in the story of Steve Jobs. Across my research, which began with books and notes and expanded to include a number of interviews, I've found Scully to have been admirable in the face of what many might consider a petulant child. But they all knew a brilliant one.  But amidst Apple's first quarterly loss, Scully and Jobs had a falling out. Jobs tried to lead an insurrection and ultimately resigned. Wozniak had left Apple already, pointing out that the Apple II was still 70% of the revenues of the company. But the Mac was clearly the future.  They had reached a turning point in the history of computers. The first mass marketed computer featuring a GUI and a mouse came and went. And so many others were in development that a red ocean was forming. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985. Acorn, Amiga, IBM, and others were in rapid development as well.  I can still remember the first time I sat down at a Mac. I'd used the Apple IIs in school and we got a lab of Macs. It was amazing. I could open a file, change the font size and print a big poster. I could type up my dad's lyrics and print them. I could play SimCity. It was a work of art. And so it was signed by the artists that brought it to us: Peggy Alexio, Colette Askeland, Bill Atkinson, Steve Balog, Bob Belleville, Mike Boich, Bill Bull, Matt Carter, Berry Cash, Debi Coleman, George Crow, Donn Denman, Christopher Espinosa, Bill Fernandez, Martin Haeberli, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Rod Holt, Bruce Horn, Hap Horn, Brian Howard, Steve Jobs, Larry Kenyon, Patti King, Daniel Kottke, Angeline Lo, Ivan Mach, Jerrold Manock, Mary Ellen McCammon, Vicki Milledge, Mike Murray, Ron Nicholson Jr., Terry Oyama, Benjamin Pang, Jef Raskin, Ed Riddle, Brian Robertson, Dave Roots, Patricia Sharp, Burrell Smith, Bryan Stearns, Lynn Takahashi, Guy "Bud" Tribble, Randy Wigginton, Linda Wilkin, Steve Wozniak, Pamela Wyman and Laszlo Zidek. Steve Jobs left to found NeXT. Some, like George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, and Susan Care, went with him. Bud Tribble would become a co-founder of NeXT and then the Vice President of Software Technology after Apple purchased NeXT. Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld would go on to co-found General Magic and usher in the era of mobility. One of the best teams ever assembled slowly dwindled away. And the oncoming dominance of Windows in the market took its toll. It seems like every company has a “lost decade.” Some like Digital Equipment don't recover from it. Others, like Microsoft and IBM (who has arguably had a few), emerge as different companies altogether. Apple seemed to go dormant after Steve Jobs left. They had changed the world with the Mac. They put swagger and an eye for design into computing. But in the next episode we'll look at that long hangover, where they were left by the end of it, and how they emerged to become to change the world yet again.  In the meantime, Walter Isaacson weaves together this story about as well as anyone in his book Jobs. Steven Levy brilliantly tells it in his book Insanely Great. Andy Hertzfeld gives some of his stories at folklore.org. And countless other books, documentaries, podcasts, blog posts, and articles cover various aspects as well. The reason it's gotten so much attention is that where the Apple II was the watershed moment to introduce the personal computer to the mass market, the Macintosh was that moment for the graphical user interface.

Quando a internet foi criada? Na década de 1990? Efetivamente sim, mas o compartilhamento de informações entre computadores já existia através de outros sistemas desde 1973. Porém, antes mesmo do século 20, o ser humano já compartilhava informações através outras máquinas que não eram computadores – os telégrafos desde o século 19. A ideia de criar uma rede de informações globais, onde alguém fosse capaz conversar com outras pessoas através de máquinas, veio junto com a invenção do telégrafo. Em 1891, dois advogados belgas criaram um projeto com um propósito semelhante a internet, o Mundaneum. A máquina possuiria uma grande biblioteca digital que poderia ser acessada por telégrafos diferentes. Por limitações tecnológicas e com a 1º Guerra Mundial, o Mundaneum nunca foi construído. Na década de 40, durante a 2 ºGuerra Mundial, o cientista Vannevar Bush que estava diretamente envolvido no conflito, percebeu que se as pessoas não adquirissem mais conhecimento estariam fadadas a travar guerras devido aos seus desejos egoístas. Caso o “QI coletivo” não fosse aumentado, seria só questão de tempo até o mundo destruir-se em uma guerra nuclear. Vannevar Bush cunhou o conceito de “Memex”, um dispositivo que acessaria a “Rede Mundial de Informações”, tornando possível ler e receber mensagens de diversas pessoas, assim como acessar bibliotecas no mundo inteiro. O Memex nunca foi produzido, mas ele influenciou profundamente um engenheiro na década de 60 chamado Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart foi o primeiro cientista e utilizar um computador – até então uma calculadora – para enviar mensagens através da ARPANET, uma antecessora da internet. Além disso, Engelbart criou o primeiro mouse, o primeiro teclado e o primeiro computador pessoal, o OnLine System Graças as suas invenções, empreendedores como Steve Jobs e Bill Gates apropriaram-se de suas tecnologias na corrida para criar o primeiro computador pessoal acessível na década de 70.

Drew Engelbart from Fox 31 joins the lads to talk about his life as a Broncos fan, his career and hopes for the 2020 season.

Few people can say they've made a lasting impact in the Nebraska craft brewing scene, but Jim Engelbart doesn't have that problem. Serving as the Operations Manager at Empyrean Brewing Co. (for 16+ years) and current President of the Nebraska Craft Brewers Association, Jim is truly a seasoned beer veteran in Nebraska. Jim and Grady talk about how the NCBG helped push for less restriction in taprooms during the COVID-19 pandemic, how Jim got started at Empyrean, and how Lazlo's Grill has some killer food. Grady drank Empyrean Brewing's (Lincoln, NE) ESB and Peanut Butter Porter while Jim sipped on an Empyrean Watchman IPA. - Leave a voicemail on the Nebraska Beer:30 Hotline: 402 370-9900 - Learn more about Empyrean Brewing Co.: https://empyreanbrewingco.com/https://www.facebook.com/EmpyreanBrewingCohttps://twitter.com/EmpyreanBrewinghttps://www.instagram.com/empyreanbrewingco/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKnTJ42l-dDD22I15WokACgSupport our sponsor, Steel Pig Forge.https://www.steelpigforge.comhttps://www.facebook.com/steelpigforgeSupport NE Beer:30 on Patreon! You can help us keep the show going.https://www.patreon.com/nebeer30The Nebraska Beer:30 Podcast is beer-centered entertainment focused on people who are doing great things in Nebraska. #NEBeer30https://www.Facebook.com/NEBeer30https://www.Twitter.com/NEBeer30https://www.Instagram.com/nebeer30https://www.Teespring.com/stores/nebeer30store

In a world of rapidly changing technologies, few have lasted as long is as unaltered a fashion as the mouse. The party line is that the computer mouse was invente d by Douglas Engelbart in 1964 and that it was a one-button wooden device that had two metal wheels. Those used an analog to digital conversion to input a location to a computer. But there's a lot more to tell. Englebart had read an article in 1945 called “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. He was in the Philippines working as a radio and radar tech. He'd return home,. Get his degree in electrical engineering, then go to Berkeley and get first his masters and then a PhD. Still in electrical engineering. At the time there were a lot of military grants in computing floating around and a Navy grant saw him work on a computer called CALDIC, short for the California Digital Computer. By the time he completed his PhD he was ready to start a computer storage company but ended up at the Stanford Research Institute in 1957. He published a paper in 1962 called Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. That paper would guide the next decade of his life and help shape nearly everything in computing that came after. Keeping with the theme of “As We May Think” Englebart was all about supplementing what humans could do. The world of computer science had been interested in selecting things on a computer graphically for some time. And Englebart would have a number of devices that he wanted to test in order to find the best possible device for humans to augment their capabilities using a computer. He knew he wanted a graphical system and wanted to be deliberate about every aspect in a very academic fashion. And a key aspect was how people that used the system would interact with it. The keyboard was already a mainstay but he wanted people pointing at things on a screen. While Englebart would invent the mouse, pointing devices certainly weren't new. Pilots had been using the joystick for some time, but an electrical joystick had been developed at the US Naval Research Laboratory in 1926, with the concept of unmanned aircraft in mind. The Germans would end up building one in 1944 as well. But it was Alan Kotok who brought the joystick to the computer game in the early 1960s to play spacewar on minicomputers. And Ralph Baer brought it into homes in 1967 for an early video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey. Another input device that had come along was the trackball. Ralph Benjamin of the British Royal Navy's Scientific Service invented the trackball, or ball tracker for radar plotting on the Comprehensive Display System, or CDS. The computers were analog at the time but they could still use the X-Y coordinates from the trackball, which they patented in 1947. Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor had seen the CDS trackball and used that as the primary input for DATAR, a radar-driven battlefield visualization computer. The trackball stayed in radar systems into the 60s, when Orbit Instrument Corporation made the X-Y Ball Tracker and then Telefunken turned it upside down to control the TR 440, making an early mouse type of device. The last of the options Englebart decided against was the light pen. Light guns had shown up in the 1930s when engineers realized that a vacuum tube was light-sensitive. You could shoot a beam of light at a tube and it could react. Robert Everett worked with Jay Forrester to develop the light pen, which would allow people to interact with a CRT using light sensing to cause an interrupt on a computer. This would move to the SAGE computer system from there and eek into the IBM mainframes in the 60s. While the technology used to track the coordinates is not even remotely similar, think of this as conceptually similar to the styluses used with tablets and on Wacom tablets today. Paul Morris Fitts had built a model in 1954, now known as Fitts's Law, to predict the time that's required to move things on a screen. He defined the target area as a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. If you listen to enough episodes of this podcast, you'll hear a few names repeatedly. One of those is Claude Shannon. He brought a lot of the math to computing in the 40s and 50s and helped with the Shannon-Hartley Theorum, which defined information transmission rates over a given medium. So these were the main options at Englebart's disposal to test when he started ARC. But in looking at them, he had another idea. He'd sketched out the mouse in 1961 while sitting in a conference session about computer graphics. Once he had funding he brought in Bill English to build a prototype I n 1963. The first model used two perpendicular wheels attached to potentiometers that tracked movement. It had one button to select things on a screen. It tracked x,y coordinates as had previous devices. NASA funded a study to really dig in and decide which was the best device. He, Bill English, and an extremely talented team, spent two years researching the question, publishing a report in 1965. They really had the blinders off, too. They looked at the DEC Grafacon, joysticks, light pens and even what amounts to a mouse that was knee operated. Two years of what we'd call UX research or User Research today. Few organizations would dedicate that much time to study something. But the result would be patenting the mouse in 1967, an innovation that would last for over 50 years. I've heard Engelbart criticized for taking so long to build the oNline System, or NLS, which he showcased at the Mother of All Demos. But it's worth thinking of his research as academic in nature. It was government funded. And it changed the world. His paper on Computer-Aided Display Controls was seminal. Vietnam caused a lot of those government funded contracts to dry up. From there, Bill English and a number of others from Stanford Research Institute which ARC was a part of, moved to Xerox PARC. English and Jack Hawley iterated and improved the technology of the mouse, ditching the analog to digital converters and over the next few years we'd see some of the most substantial advancements in computing. By 1981, Xerox had shipped the Alto and the Star. But while Xerox would be profitable with their basic research, they would miss something that a candle-clad hippy wouldn't. In 1979, Xerox let Steve Jobs make three trips to PARC in exchange for the opportunity to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock pre-IPO. The mouse by then had evolved to a three button mouse that cost $300. It didn't roll well and had to be used on pretty specific surfaces. Jobs would call Dean Hovey, a co-founder of IDEO and demand they design one that would work on anything including quote “blue jeans.” Oh, and he wanted it to cost $15. And he wanted it to have just one button, which would be an Apple hallmark for the next 30ish years. Hovey-Kelley would move to optical encoder wheels, freeing the tracking ball to move however it needed to and then use injection molded frames. And thus make the mouse affordable. It's amazing what can happen when you combine all that user research and academic rigor from Englebarts team and engineering advancements documented at Xerox PARC with world-class industrial design. You see this trend played out over and over with the innovations in computing that are built to last. The mouse would ship with the LISA and then with the 1984 Mac. Logitech had shipped a mouse in 1982 for $300. After leaving Xerox, Jack Howley founded a company to sell a mouse for $400 the same year. Microsoft released a mouse for $200 in 1983. But Apple changed the world when Steve Jobs demanded the mouse ship with all Macs. The IBM PC would ;use a mouse and from there it would become ubiquitous in personal computing. Desktops would ship with a mouse. Laptops would have a funny little button that could be used as a mouse when the actual mouse was unavailable. The mouse would ship with extra buttons that could be mapped to additional workflows or macros. And even servers were then outfitted with switches that allowed using a device that switched the keyboard, video, and mouse between them during the rise of large server farms to run the upcoming dot com revolution. Trays would be put into most racks with a single u, or unit of the rack being used to see what you're working on; especially after Windows or windowing servers started to ship. As various technologies matured, other innovations came along to input devices. The mouse would go optical in 1980 and ship with early Xerox Star computers but what we think of as an optical mouse wouldn't really ship until 1999 when Microsoft released the IntelliMouse. Some of that tech came to them via Hewlett-Packard through the HP acquisition of DEC and some of those same Digital Research Institute engineers had been brought in from the original mainstreamer of the mouse, PARC when Bob Taylor started DRI. The LED sensor on the muse stuck around. And thus ended the era of the mouse pad, once a hallmark of many a marketing give-away. Finger tracking devices came along in 1969 but were far too expensive to produce at the time. As capacitive sensitive pads, or trackpads came down in price and the technology matured those began to replace the previous mouse-types of devices. The 1982 Apollo computers were the first to ship with a touchpad but it wasn't until Synaptics launched the TouchPad in 1992 that they began to become common, showing up in 1995 on Apple laptops and then becoming ubiquitous over the coming years. In fact, the IBM Thinkpad and many others shipped laptops with little red nubs in the keyboard for people that didn't want to use the TouchPad for awhile as well. Some advancements in the mouse didn't work out. Apple released the hockey puck shaped mouse in 1998, when they released the iMac. It was USB, which replaced the ADB interface. USB lasted. The shape of the mouse didn't. Apple would go to the monolithic surface mouse in 2000, go wireless in 2003 and then release the Mighty Mouse in 2005. The Mighty Mouse would have a capacitive touch sensor and since people wanted to hear a click would produce that with a little speaker. This also signified the beginning of bluetooth as a means of connecting a mouse. Laptops began to replace desktops for many, and so the mouse itself isn't as dominant today. And with mobile and tablet computing, resistive touchscreens rose to replace many uses for the mouse. But even today, when I edit these podcasts, I often switch over to a mouse simply because other means of dragging around timelines simply aren't as graceful. And using a pen, as Englebart's research from the 60s indicated, simply gets fatiguing. Whether it's always obvious, we have an underlying story we're often trying to tell with each of these episodes. We obviously love unbridled innovation and a relentless drive towards a technologically utopian multiverse. But taking a step back during that process and researching what people want means less work and faster adoption. Doug Englebart was a lot of things but one net-new point we'd like to make is that he was possibly the most innovative in harnessing user research to make sure that his innovations would last for decades to come. Today, we'd love to research every button and heat map and track eyeballs. But remembering, as he did, that our job is to augment human intellect, is best done when we make our advances useful, helps to keep us and the forks that occur in technology from us, from having to backtrack decades of work in order to take the next jump forward. We believe in the reach of your innovations. So next time you're working on a project. Save yourself time, save your code a little cyclomatic complexity, , and save users frustration from having to relearn a whole new thing. And research what you're going to do first. Because you never know. Something you engineer might end up being touched by nearly every human on the planet the way the mouse has. Thank you Englebart. And thank you to NASA and Bob Roberts from ARPA for funding such important research. And thank you to Xerox PARC, for carrying the torch. And to Steve Jobs for making the mouse accessible to every day humans. As with many an advance in computing, there are a lot of people that deserve a little bit of the credit. And thank you listeners, for joining us for another episode of the history of computing podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Now stop consuming content and go change the world.

9 grudnia 536 - wojska Belizariusza zajęły opuszczony Rzym9 grudnia 1688 - Jakub II Stuart został pokonany przez zięcia i córkę w bitwie pod Reading9 grudnia 1803 - w USA przyjęto 12 poprawkę i od tej pory głosuje się na prezydenta i wiceprezydenta9 grudnia 1824 - bitwa pod Ayacucho w Peru9 grudnia 1922 - Gabriel Narutowicz został wybrany przez zgromadzenie narodowe na pierwszego prezydenta RP9 grudnia 1960 - wyemitowano pierwszy odcinek Coronation Street9 grudnia 1968 - pokazano demonstrację nazywaną Matką Wszystkich Dem (ang. The Mother of All Demos)9 grudnia 1990 - w II turze wyborów Wałęsa pokonał Tymińskiego9 grudnia 1991 - rozpoczęło nadawanie Radio Maryja9 grudnia 1997 - uchwalono, że imiesłowy przymniotnikowe zawszy piszemy łącznie z partykułą “nie”

Possibly our newest episode yet (11/7/2019)

All my troubles seemed so far away - Paul McCartney

Here's one with Xav by himself.

I'm not sure.

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to cover a special moment in time. Picture this if you will. It's 1968. A collection of some 1,000 of the finest minds in computing is sitting in the audience of the San Francisco Civic Center. They're at a joint conference of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fall Join Computer Conference in San Francisco. They're waiting to see the a session called A research center for augmenting human intellect. Many had read Vannevar Bush's “As We May Think” Atlantic article in 1946 that signified the turning point that inspired so many achievements over the previous 20 years. Many had witnessed the evolution from the mainframe to the transistorized computer to timesharing systems. The presenter for this session would be Douglas Carl Engelbart. ARPA had strongly recommended he come to finally make a public appearance. Director Bob Taylor in fact was somewhat adamant about it. The talk was six years in the making and ARPA and NASA were ready to see what they had been investing in. ARPA had funded his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI, or the Stanford Research Institute. The grad instigator J.C.R. Licklider had started the funding when ARPA was still called DARPA in 1963 based on a paper Engelbart published in 1962. But it had really been going since Engelbart got married in 1950 and realized computers could be used to improve human capabilities, to harness the collective intellect, to facilitate truly interactive computing and to ultimately make the world a better place. Englebart was 25. He'd been from Oregon where he got his Bachelors in 48 after serving in World War II as a radar tech. He then come to Berkely in 53 for is Masters, sating through 1955 to get his PhD. He ended up at Stanford's SRI. There, he hired people like Don Andrews, Bill Paxton, Bill English, and Jeff Rulifson. And today Engelbart was ready to show the world what his team had been working on. The computer was called the oNLine System, or NLS. Bill English would direct things onsite. Because check this out, not all presenters were onsite on that day in 1968. Instead, some were at ARC in Menlo Park, 30 miles away. To be able to communicate onsite they used two 1200 baud modems connecting over a leased line to their office. But they would also use two microwave links. And that was for something crazy: video. The lights went dark. The OnLine Computer was projected onto a 22 foot high screen using an Eidophor video projector. Bill English would flip the screen up as the lights dimmed. The audience was expecting a tall, thin man to come out to present. Instead, they saw Doug Englebart on the screen in front of them. The one behind the camera, filming Engelbart, was Stewart Russel Brand, the infamous editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. It seems Englebart was involved in more than just computers. But people destined to change the world have always travelled in the same circles I supposed. Englebart's face came up on the screen, streaming in from all those miles away. And the screen they would switch back and forth to. That was the Online System, or NLS for short. The camera would come in from above Englebart's back and the video would be transposed with the text being entered on the screen. This was already crazy. But when you could see where he was typing, there was something… well, extra. He was using a pointing device in his right hand. This was the first demo of a computer mouse Which he had applied for a patent for in 1967. He called it that because it had a tail which was the cabe that connected the wooden contraption to the computer. Light pens had been used up to this point, but it was the first demonstration of a mouse and the team had actually considered mounting it under the desk and using a knee to move the pointer.But they decided that would just be too big a gap for normal people to imagine and that the mouse would be simpler. Engelbart also used a device we might think of more like a macro pad today. It was modeled after piano keys. We'd later move this type of functionality onto the keyboard using various keystrokes, F keys, and a keyboard and in the case of Apple, command keys. He then opened a document on his screen. Now, people didn't do a lot of document editing in 1968. Really, computers were pretty much used for math at that point. At least, until that day. That document he opened. He used hyperlinks to access content. That was the first real demo of clickable hypertext. He also copied text in the document. And one of the most amazing aspects of the presentation was that you kinda' felt like he was only giving you a small peak into what he had. You see, before the demo, they thought he was crazy. Many were probably only there to see a colossal failure of a demo. But instead they saw pure magic. Inspiration. Innovation. They saw text highlighted. They saw windows on screens that could be resized. They saw the power of computer networking. Video conferencing. A stoic Engelbart was clearly pleased with his creation. Bill Paxton and Jeff Rulifson were on the other side, helping with some of the text work. His style worked well with the audience, and of course, it's easy to win over an audience when they have just been wowed by your tech. But more than that, his inspiration was so inspiring that you could feel it just watching the videos. All these decades later. can watching those videos. Engelbart and the team would receive a standing ovation. And to show it wasn't smoke and mirrors, ARC let people actually touch the systems and Engelbart took questions. Many people involved would later look back as though it was an unfinished work. And it was. Andy van Dam would later say Everybody was blown away and thought it was absolutely fantastic and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact. People thought it was too far out and they were still working on their physical teletypes, hadn't even migrated to glass teletypes yet. But that's not really fair or telling the whole story. In 1969 we got the Mansfield Amendment - which slashed the military funding pure scientific research. After that, the budget was cut and the team began to disperse, as was happening with a lot of the government-backed research centers. Xerox was lucky enough to hire Bob Taylor, and many others immigrated to Xerox PARC, or Palo Alto Research Center, was able to take the concept and actually ship a device in 1973, although not as mass marketable yet as later devices would be. Xerox would ship the Alto in 1973. The Alto would be the machine that inspired the Mac and therefore Windows - so his ideas live on today. His own team got spun out of Stanford and sold, becoming Tymshare and then McDonnel Douglas. He continued to have more ideas but his concepts were rarely implemented at McDonnel Douglas so he finally left in 1986, starting the Bootstrapp Alliance, which he founded with his daughter. But he succeeded. He wanted to improve the plight of man and he did. Hypertext and movable screens directly influenced a young Alan Kay who was in the audience and was inspired to write Smalltalk. The Alto at Xerox also inspired Andy van Dam, who built the FRESS hypertext system based on many of the concepts from the talk as well. It also did multiple windows, version control on documents, intradocument hypertext linking, and more. But, it was hard to use. Users needed to know complex commands just to get into the GUI screens. He was also still really into minicomputers and timesharing, and kinda' missed that the microcomputer revolution was about to hit hard. The hardware hacker movement that was going on all over the country, but most concentrated in the Bay Area, was about to start the long process of putting a computer, and now mobile device, in every home in the world. WIth smaller and smaller and faster chips, the era of the microcomputer would transition into the era of the client and server. And that was the research we were transitioning to as we moved into the 80s. Charles Irby was a presentter as well, being a designer of NLS. He would go on to lead the user interface design work on the Xerox star before founding a company then moving on to VP of development for General Magic, a senior leader at SGI and then the leader of the engineering team that developed the Nintendo 64. Bob Sproull was in the audience watching all this and would go on to help design the Xerox Alto, the first laser printer, and write the Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics before becoming a professor at Conegie Mellon and then ending up helping create Sun Microsystems Laboratories, becoming the director and helping design asuynchronous processors. Butler Lampson was also there, a found of Xerox PARC, where the Alto was built and co-creator of Ethernet. Bill Paxton (not the actor) would join him at PARC and later go on to be an early founder of Adobe. In 2000, Engelbart would receive the National Medal of Technology for his work. He also He got the Turing Award in 1997, the Locelace Medal in 2001. He would never lose his belief in the collective intelligence. He wrote Boosting Our Collective IQ in 1995 and it has Englebart passed away in 2013. He will forever be known as the inventor of the mouse. But he gave us more. He wanted to augment the capabilities of humans, allowing us to do more, rather than replace us with machines. This was in contrast to SAIL and the MIT AI Lab where they were just doing research for the sake of research. The video of his talk is on YouTube, so click on the links in the show notes if you'd like to access it and learn more about such a great innovator. He may not have brought a mass produced system to market, but as with Vanevar Bush's article 20 years before, the research done is a turning point in history; a considerable milestone on the path to the gleaming world we now live in today. The NLS teaches us that while you might not achieve commercial success with years of research, if you are truly innovative, you might just change the world. Sometimes the two simply aren't mutually exclusive. And when you're working on a government grant, they really don't have to be. So until next time, dare to be bold. Dare to change the world, and thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Have a great day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

On our annual holiday, Xav receives underwear finally.

This is next week's episode, today.

This one is about playing the guitar and talking. Twinkle twinkle.

Listen to this one second, and the next one first.

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to cover the first real object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Many people outside of the IT industry would probably know the terms Java, Ruby, or Swift. But I don't think I've encountered anyone outside of IT that has heard of Smalltalk in a long time. And yet… Smalltalk influenced most languages in use today and even a lot of the base technologies people would readily identify with. As with PASCAL from Episode 3 of the podcast, Smalltalk was designed and created in part for educational use, but more so for constructionist learning for kids. Smalltalk was first designed at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s. Alan Kay had coined the term object-oriented programming was coined by Alan Kay in the late 60s. Kay took the lead on a project which developed an early mobile device called the Dynabook at Xerox PARC, as well as the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language. The first release was called Smalltalk-72 and was really the first real implementation of this weird new programming philosophy Kay had called object-oriented programming. Although… Smalltalk was inspired by Simula 67, from Norwegian developers Kirsten Nygaard and Ole-johan Dahl. Even before that Stewart Nelson and others from MIT had been using a somewhat object oriented model when working on Lisp and other programs. Kay had heard of Simula and how it handled passing messages and wrote the initial Smalltalk in a few mornings. He'd go on work with Dan Ingalls to help with implementation and Adele Goldberg to write documentation. This was Smalltalk 71. Object oriented program is a programming language model where programs are organized around data, also called objects. This is a contrast to programs being structured around functions and logic. Those objects could be data fields, attributes, behaviors, etc. For example, a product you're selling can have a sku, a price, dimensions, quantities, etc. This means you figure out what objects need to be manipulated and how those objects interact with one another. Objects are generalized as a class of objects. These classes define the kind of data and the logic used when manipulating data. Within those classes, there are methods, which define the logic and interfaces for object communication, known as messages. As programs grow and people collaborate on them together, an object-oriented approach allows projects to more easily be divided up into various team members to work on different parts. Parts of the code are more reusable. The way programs are played out is more efficient. And in turn, the code is more scalable. Object-oriented programming is based on a few basic principals. These days those are interpreted as encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism. Although to Kay encapsulation and messaging are the most important aspects and all the classing and subclassing isn't nearly as necessary. Most modern languages that matter are based on these same philosophies, such as java, javascript, Python, C++, .Net, Ruby. Go, Swift, etc. Although Go is arguably not really object-oriented because there's no type hierarchy and some other differences, but when I look at the code it looks object-oriented! So there was this new programming paradigm emerging and Alan Kay really let it shine in Smalltalk. At the time, Xerox PARC was in the midst of revolutionizing technology. The MIT hacker ethic had seeped out to the west coast with Marvin Minsky's AI lab SAIL at Stanford and got all mixed into the fabric of chip makers in the area, such as Fairchild. That Stanford connection is important. The Augmentation Research Center is where Engelbart introduced the NLS computer and invented the Mouse there. And that work resulted in advances like hypertext links. In the 60s. Many of those Stanford Research Institute people left for Xerox PARC. Ivan Sutherland's work on Sketchpad was known to the group, as was the mouse from NLS, and because the computing community that was into research was still somewhat small, most were also aware of the graphic input language, or GRAIL, that had come out of Rand. Sketchpad's had handled each drawing elements as an object, making it a predecessor to object-oriented programming. GRAIL ran on the Rand Tablet and could recognize letters, boxes, and lines as objects. Smalltalk was meant to show a dynamic book. Kinda' like the epub format that iBooks uses today. The use of similar objects to those used in Sketchpad and GRAIL just made sense. One evolution led to another and another, from Lisp and the batch methods that came before it through to modern models. But the Smalltalk stop on that model railroad was important. Kay and the team gave us some critical ideas. Things like overlapping windows. These were made possibly by the inheritance model of executions, a standard class library, and a code browser and editor. This was one of the first development environments that looked like a modern version of something we might use today, like an IntelliJ or an Eclipse for Java developers. Smalltalk was the first implementation of the Model View Controller in 1979, a pattern that is now standard for designing graphical software interfaces. MVC divides program logic into the Model, the View, and the Controller in order to separate internal how data is represented from how it is presented as decouples the model from the view and the controller allow for much better reuse of libraries of code as well as much more collaborative development. Another important thing happened at Xerox in 1979, as they were preparing to give Smalltalk to the masses. There are a number of different interpretations to stories about Steve Jobs and Xerox PARC. But in 1979, Jobs was looking at how Apple would evolve. Andy Hertzfeld and the original Mac team were mostly there at Apple already but Jobs wanted fresh ideas and traded a million bucks in Apple stock options to Xerox for a tour of PARC. The Lisa team came with him and got to see the Alto. The Alto prototype was part of the inspiration for a GUI-based Lisa and Mac, which of course inspired Windows and many advances since. Smalltalk was finally released to other vendors and institutions in 1980, including DEC, HP, Apple, and Berkely. From there a lot of variants have shown up. Instantiations partnered with IBM and in 1984 had the first commercial version at Tektronix. A few companies tried to take SmallTalk to the masses but by the late 80s SQL connectivity was starting to add SQL support. The Smalltalk companies often had names with object or visual in the name. This is a great leading indicator of what Smalltalk is all about. It's visual and it's object oriented. Those companies slowly merged into one another and went out of business through the 90s. Instantiations was acquired by Digitalk. ParcPlace owed it's name to where the language was created. The biggest survivor was ObjectShare, who was traded on NASDAQ, peaking at $24 a share until 1999. In a LA Times article: “ObjectShare Inc. said its stock has been delisted from the Nasdaq national market for failing to meet listing requirements. In a press release Thursday, the company said it is appealing the decision.” And while the language is still maintained by companies like Instantiations, in the heyday, there was even a version from IBM called IBM VisualAge Smalltalk. And of course there were combo-language abominations, like a smalltalk java add on. Just trying to breathe some life in. This was the era where Filemaker, Foxpro, and Microsoft Access were giving developers the ability to quickly build graphical tools for managing data that were the next generation past what Smalltalk provided. And on the larger side products like JDS, Oracle, Peoplesoft, really jumped to prominence. And on the education side, the industry segmented into learning management systems and various application vendors. Until iOS and Google when apps for those platforms became all the rage. Smalltalk does live on in other forms though. As with many dying technologies, an open source version of Smalltalk came along in 1996. Squeak was written by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace, John Maloney, Andreas Raab, Mike Rueger and continues today. I've tinkerated with Squeak here and there and I have to say that my favorite part is just getting to see how people who actually truly care about teaching languages to kids. And how some have been doing that for 40 years. A great quote from Alan Kay, discussing a parallel between Vannevar Bush's “As We May Think” and the advances they made to build the Dynabook: If somebody just sat down and implemented what Bush had wanted in 1945, and didn't try and add any extra features, we would like it today. I think the same thing is true about what we wanted for the Dynabook. There's a direct path with some of the developers of Smalltalk to deploying MacBooks and Chromebooks in classrooms. And the influences these more mass marketed devices have will be felt for generations to come. Even as we devolve to new models from object-oriented programming, and new languages. The research that went into these early advances and the continued adoption and research have created a new world of teaching. At first we just wanted to teach logic and fundamental building blocks. Now kids are writing code. This might be writing java programs in robotics classes, html in Google Classrooms, or beginning iOS apps in Swift Playgrounds. So until the next episode, think about this: Vannevar Bush pushed for computers to help us think, and we have all of the worlds data at our fingertips. With all of the people coming out of school that know how to write code today, with the accelerometers, with the robotics skills, what is the next stage of synthesizing all human knowledge and truly making computers help with As we may think. So thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day!

We tell you all the important secrets you would need to know to land a hot babe. This is one that all the virgins should listen to, so you get some tips from a couple hot foxes.

Imagine if you were listening to these episodes out of sequence. This would be the episode that was supposed to take place before the most recent one.

We are here to talk about things that you would love.

One time we had a party here and George had a bottle of goodish whiskey and this guy had this big old glass. He poured himself a tumbler of straight whiskey and just downed half the bottles. Then several if not sooner hours later he was puking his gajoobies out. Dumb MF. It's a sin to waste good whiskey.

On this episode, tune in!

Is this the week these guys finally lose it?

On this episode, we discuss all of the important things in life. I think you could learn a lot from Mr. Bing Bong.

Enjoy, you fools

In which we discuss being a retail clerk in the city of Glendale, California.

In this weeks episode of "the world's most popular podcast (™)" we go through some amazing lists of things you want to know about.

"You're kind of loose and free during that period. And then you create a new nest. It could be a family, it could be that your career becomes... you get a serious just teaching at a university for example. You kind of mellow out too, as you get older." - Xav Leplae

The Bing Bong Boys are finally back. We discuss politics for once. Maybe you can skip this one. (But it's a good episode!)...No no no don't skip it! Listen!

I can't remember what this is called.

You should listen to this one, because penis is in the title. I understand how these algorithms work.

The title says it all! And we do Caribbean Queen (Billy Ocean).

Hey here's a new episode. We sang some stuff and talked about stuff.

On this episode, we drink Cutty Sark. We also discuss Xav's ultramarathon, and random news of the weird. Check us out?

Doug Engelbart was the first to actually build a computer that might seem familiar to us, today. He came to Silicon Valley after a stint in the Navy as a radar technician during World War II. Engelbart was, in his own estimation, a “naïve drifter,” but something about the Valley inspired him to think big. Engelbart's idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs—communication and collaboration.

Lang niet iedereen die harddrugs gebruikt belandt met een overdosis in het ziekenhuis of raakt verslaafd. Hoe zit het met de mensen die positieve gevolgen van harddrugs ervaren? Volkan onderzoekt hoe drugs bijdragen aan creativiteit, liefde en geluk. In de eerste reportage: Nobelprijswinnaar Kary Mullis. Wat heeft zijn drugsgebruik te maken met z'n belangrijke ontdekking op het gebied van DNA? In deze Andere Tijden meets Trees reportage hoor je archiefmateriaal afgewisseld met delen uit de autobiografie van Kary Mullis. De verwijzingen naar de geluidsfragmenten vind je hieronder: In zijn levendige autobiografie Dancing Naked In The Manfield beschrijft Mullis onder andere zijn lsd trip en gaat hij ook dieper in op wat de polymerase kettingreactie inhoudt, z'n hele autobiografie lees je hier terug: bit.ly/autobiografie_Mullis Een van de YouTube videos met daarin uitvinders die aan de drugs zouden zitten, kijk je hier terug: bit.ly/uitvindingen_drugs1 en hier een andere link: bit.ly/uitvindingen_drugs2, De uitvinder Douglas Engelbart excuseert zich voor de naam computermuis. In hetzelfde zwart-wit beeldfragment vertelt Engelbart ook over zijn andere technische hoogstandjes: het internet en het toetsenbord, nu zo normaal toen o zo revolutionair. Je kan het allemaal hier terugkijken: bit.ly/engelbart_computermuis De Ted presentatie waarin Mullis vertelt over zijn geboren liefde voor experimenteren, is hier te zien: bit.ly/2liefde_experimenteren In de documentaire d’Autres Mondes van Jan Kounen beschrijft Mullis hoe lsd bijdroeg aan z’n ontdekking van PCR. In hetzelfde beeldfragment is ook de uitreiking van de Nobelprijs te zien. De beide fragmenten uit documentaire kun je hier bestuderen: bit.ly/mullis_lsd_nobelrpijs Mullis krijgt vele lofuitingen van zijn collega's. Dezelfde collega's vertellen ook welke impact zijn ontdekking had en nog steeds heeft op de wetenschap. Beide geluidsfragmenten zijn in één video te bekijken: bit.ly/collega_mullis

Bloomberg Markets with Carol Massar and Cory Johnson.u0010u0010GUEST:u0010Grant Engelbartu0010Portfolio Manageru0010CLS Investments u0010Discussing strategic beta through the eyes of investors. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Bloomberg Markets with Carol Massar and Cory Johnson.u0010u0010GUEST:u0010Grant Engelbartu0010Portfolio Manageru0010CLS Investments u0010Discussing strategic beta through the eyes of investors.

Colin Ray joins us to discuss the evolution and potential future of computer input methods, and strange twists and turns through the landscape of game controllers - most notably the Steam controller. In the words of Andrew: ENGELBART IS LOVE, ENGELBART IS LIFE. ENGELBART IS GENIUS. ENGELBART IS REMEMBERED FOR AN INPUT DEVICE HE DIDN'T EVEN INVENT. COLIN MADE HIS OWN STREET FIGHTER CONTROLLER DECAL. HOVER GESTURES. TOUCH GESTURES. LINE WOBBLER. ENGELBART. ENGELBART. ENGELBART. -The Mother of all Demos (1968) -A brief history of video game controllers -Sketchpad (1963) -Bret Victor of Worrydream -The insane GameCube keyboard controller -The Xbox Chatpad (which is stupid) -Enhance! Let's find some snakes. -🙌 S T E A M C O N T R O L L E R 🙌 -Steam Controller for video editing -Imbroglio -Andy Baio raised his son through the history of video games -A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design -10/GUI -Microsoft hand tracking -Leap Motion -Super-cool hover gestures from Microsoft research (they can't be totally wrong about everything, after all)

Conversation with Dirk Engelbart, Founder & Owner Engelbart Software, reveals the innovation value in Avaya Breeze and how focus on this platformed helped earn them the Partner of the Year innovation award. 2:10 - Total Focus on Avaya Breeze 2:21 - Did he say the C word? 2:35 - A Customer Solution in 2 Days!!! 3:38 - Another Snap-In success. SAP Integration call on part lookup 6:00 How Does Breeze bring it all together? http://snappstore.avaya.com http://www.devconnectmarketplace.com

Mit der Digitalisierung werden die Kulturtechniken der Schrift nicht einfach in ein neues Medium übertragen. Vielmehr werden sie durch das digitale Medium geprägt und verändert, und parallel dazu verändern sich auch die Texte. Während das Zeitalter des Buchdrucks als „Gutenberg-Galaxis“ (Marshall McLuhan) bezeichnet wurde, kann man heute von einer "Engelbart-Galaxis" sprechen: Douglas Engelbart, der Erfinder der Computer-Maus, entwickelte die erste computergestützte Textverarbeitung in den 1960er Jahren und verband so die Kulturtechniken der Schrift mit den grundlegenden technologischen Entwicklungen seiner Zeit. Diese Entwicklungen - Automatisierung, Medienintegration und Vernetzung - bestimmen heute mehr denn je unseren Umgang mit Schrift. Im Vortrag wird gezeigt, wie sich dies auf Kulturtechniken und die Schriftkultur insgesamt auswirkt und auf was wir uns für die Zukunft einstellen müssen. Henning Lobin (*1964) studierte Germanistik, Philosophie und Informatik. Nach Promotion (1991, U. Bonn) und Habilitation (1996, U. Bielefeld) wurde er 1999 auf den Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft und Computerlinguistik an die Universität Gießen berufen. Seit 2007 leitet er das Zentrum für Medien und Interaktivität und fungierte dort als Sprecher mehrerer Forschungsverbünde. Lobin ist Autor von sieben Monografien (zuletzt 'Engelbarts Traum', 2014, 'Die wissenschaftliche Präsentation', 2012, 'Computerlinguistik und Texttechnologie', 2010) und Herausgeber zahlreicher Sammelbände. Foto: © Goethe-Institut. Martin Mařák

章节（时:分:秒）： 00:00:00: 前戏（微软 HoloLens） 00:03:39: Daisy Bell 00:04:16: 如何成为《IT 公论》会员 00:04:58: 如何用小费支持《IT 公论》（支付宝 / PayPal: hi@itgonglun.com） 00:05:11: 如何订阅 IPN 最近开通的 Telegram Channel 00:06:41: 上期不鸟万书评提到的《Far from the Tree》 00:12:33: 他们说 Apple Watch 让妳可以少看手机，但频频看手表比频频看手机更加无礼 00:14:41: 听众反馈三则 00:33:29: 新的 21 寸 4K iMac 00:40:50: 802.11ac / 5G 的欺骗性 00:43:09: Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2, Magic Trackpad 2 01:04:25: Steven Levy 在 Backchannel 关于苹果设计实验室的报道 01:11:43: iWork 升级 01:18:51: Dropbox Paper 和多人协作文本编辑产品的设计 01:30:39: Overcast 2 的商业模式争议 / 品牌光环和价值判断 02:23:52: 尾声 本期会员通讯将于稍后发至各位会员邮箱。每月三十元，支持不鸟万如一和 Rio 把《IT 公论》做成最好的科技播客。请访问 itgonglun.com/member。若您无意入会，但喜欢某一期节目，也欢迎用支付宝或 PayPal 支付小费至 hi@itgonglun.com，支付宝用户亦可扫描下方二维码： 相关链接 IPN 最近开通的 Telegram Channel 失读症（dyslexia） 《Far from the Tree》 《Far from the Tree》繁体中文译本《背离亲缘（上）》 Sheeple 《無次元》 iBeacon Steven Levy Steven Levy: What I Saw Inside Apple’s Top Secret Input Lab Steven Levy: Exclusive: Why Apple is Still Sweating the Details on iMac Stephen Hackett 评 El Capitan 和 iOS 9 里的 Notes Dropbox Paper Quip Simplenote nvALT Bret Victor: A few words on Doug Engelbart Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing: SRI’s 1968 Demo (Highlights) CAP theorem Marco Arment: Pragmatic App Pricing Samantha Bielefeld: The Elephant in the Room Samantha Bielefeld: Big Money is Coming ATP 第一三九期 《纽约客》Emily Nussbaum: The Price is Right Stitcher Richard Stallman IPN 播客网络常见问题解答 人物简介 不鸟万如一：字节社创始人。 Rio: Apple4us 程序员。

Fredrik och Kristoffer snackar öl och vin. Sedan arbetsergonomi, värk i muskler och att försöka minimera musanvändandet. Hur kan VR påverka ergonomin och våra kontor? Några inslag av filmsnack och boksnack inklusive nyss utkomna boken Becoming Steve Jobs. Lite diskussion om React och ramverk för webbapplikationer. Numera är det inte lika viktigt att alltid slänga med stora ramverk när man ska bygga enkla saker på webben. Därifrån snackar vi om Darts ambitioner. Sedan snackar vi om Umeå kommuns skadeståndskrav på Erik Sundkvist. Man kan vara så dålig vinnare att man inte förtjänar att vinna. Finns det andra språk som utvecklas på samma sätt som Javascript, där nya versioner byggs med gamla byggstenar. Framför allt vill Kristoffer ta tillbaka ordet polyfill. Detta leder givetvis (?) vidare in på en diskussion av Common lisp, dess egenheter och utveckling. Därifrån kommer vi tillbaka till att använda tangentbordet och kraftfulla textredigerare. Och så ett litet utbrott om löpsteg och tunna skor. Ett stort tack till Cloudnet som sponsrar våra livesändningar och erbjuder finfina  VPS! Har du kommentarer, frågor eller tips? Vi är @kodnsack, @tobiashieta, @isallmaroon och @bjoreman på Twitter och epostas på info@kodsnack.seom du vill skriva längre. Vi läser allt som skickas. Länkar Cloudnet VPS Code night Coppersmiths the bishop’s rye ale No-go zone Sveriges närmaste stad Piccini chianti orange Favabönor och chianti RSI Tendonitis Tiling window manager Virtuella skrivbord Appar som hjälper en att placera fönster på OS X Gnome 3 Spotlight - Apples sökfunktion för OS X Ubuntu Unity - Ubuntus gnomebaserade skrivbordsmiljö Accelerando Svävarstolarna i Wall-E Masterminds Patrick Stewart Vincent Kartheiser - Pete i Mad men som också är med i Masterminds Wargames Jupiter ascending Nätet Singularitet The leviathan Leviathan - den ryska filmen Dune Pacific rim Neil Blomkamp Chappie Elysium Nästa Star wars Nästa bondfilm Warcraftfilmen China Miéville Perdido street station The city & the city Gone Girl Mad Max-filmen Nya Steve Jobs-boken Isaacson - författade den officiella Steve Jobs-biografin 99% invisible - om Engelbart och datormusen Next Pixar The changelog Changelog om Go Changelog om React Browserify Bower Grunt Google lägger ner sin virtuella maskin för Dart i Chrome Coffeescript Typescript Self hosting Lars Bak V8 Google code nedlagt DDOS Gitlab Gogs Gitweb Codeplex - Microsofts tjänst för öppna projekt Team foundation server Perforce används på Microsoft 17-åring blir hjälte efter dataintrång | Inrikes | SvD ECMAscript 6 Python 3000 Polyfill Objektivkonverterarapter Common lisp Fortran Cobol Clojure CL21.org format i Common lisp Stränginterpolering i Ruby Scheme Suses hack week Quicksilver Drafts - anteckningsprogram för IOS Vivobarefoot Fivefingers Titlar Jobbig systembolagsflyttupplevelse RSI-varning Jag kommer inte ifrån att jag måste koda En helt datorfri helg Man kommer inte ifrån musen helt En vettig mus med riktiga knappar Antingen åksjuk eller trött i nacken Jag råkade titta på Youtube på min telefon Minst ett sinne som fallit bort Om man inte har någon fysisk hårdvara Står mitt i ingenstans och tittar ut i luften Så dålig att den inte ens var bra Inte Jupiter ascending-dålig Internet var fullständigt obegripligt för Hollywood En människa som sitter kvar hemma En fotbollsstor rymdkapsel Knö in människor i alla prylar Här i datorernas stenålder Ännu ett syntaktiskt socker Nu sjönk dartskeppet Ett slavorgan till folket De absolut bästa fantasisiffrorna Bakportad transpiling eller något Ta er polyfill och gå hem Rör inte min polyfill Ett språk per problem Sitter och läser manualerna eller googlar i panik

Douglas Engelbart (M.S.'53, Ph.D.'55 EECS) At Stanford Resarch International, Engelbart pioneered such firsts in computer technology as the mouse, display editing, windows, cross-file editing, idea/outline processing, hypermedia, and groupware. Awarded the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor given to America's innovators by the U.S. President.

Douglas Engelbart (M.S.'53, Ph.D.'55 EECS) At Stanford Resarch International, Engelbart pioneered such firsts in computer technology as the mouse, display editing, windows, cross-file editing, idea/outline processing, hypermedia, and groupware. Awarded the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor given to America's innovators by the U.S. President.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think at some point I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell. And for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about use the product, it’s about mus the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest, Jason Yuan. Hello. And Jason, you are a prolific creator of all sorts. The one that struck me as very interesting from your background is that you got your start in stage design, which you described as a bit of a two-way interface. I’d love to hear about that. 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about stage design and theater design in general is that It’s so inherently multidisciplinary. So even if you say I’m designing on a show, you might mean costume design, stage design, set design, sound design, and all of those have to be choreographed perfectly. They have to work together. And then, obviously, the stage needs to be used by the actors. It needs to be functional. People need to be able to enter and exit. It needs to be safe. So that’s one aspect of like, I guess the people that it needs to work for and then obviously you have the audience who rely on. The culmination of how the stage design works in conjunction with all the other elements to bring them into a world and to tell the story. And so it’s fairly high pressure because so many people rely on it and because theater is sort of in the moment, if something doesn’t work or God forbid if something unsafe happens, like that’s on you, partially, so. Design has always sort of felt very high stakes, even in interaction design now where you could always ship a bug fix or you might be able to delay the launch or incrementally improve things over time in theater unless you’re a very prolific show, you don’t really get that luxury. 00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can imagine the live performance element creates a sense of, well, I suppose drama would be the word for it, but for the people who are creating it as well, you have this showtime moment and everything’s got to come together and work right, and if it doesn’t, the problems are all up there for everyone in the audience to see very dramatically. 00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, something that frustrates a lot of people that I’ve worked with in tech, sort of, I’ve always carried the show must go on mentality. That sometimes, you know, applies, but then if you’re working on indie projects where like there’s no real deadline, people are like, why, why though? It’s ready when it’s ready. And I’m like, no, like the show must go on. So that’s been interesting trying to find elements I want to keep from my past now that I’m practicing something that’s fairly different. 00:03:01 - Speaker 2: At some point you made the transition to the digital technology world and lots of interesting work in your portfolio there, including Mercury OS we’ll talk maybe a bit on a little bit, which was how I first discovered your work. You’ve also been working on MakeSpace. What else is on the recent portfolio. 00:03:21 - Speaker 1: You know, after Mercury came out, there was so much feedback from people who wanted to see it become real in some way. I worked on several smaller spin-off projects that were inspired by the initial vision, like, I don’t think it was ever designed to be a thing that I saw ship as this. It’s a very point of view. Mercury was designed from a very specific point of view through the lens of someone who is frustrated that my own mind as someone who lives with ADHD and PTSD and just, I find a lot of things particularly stressful in computers like file systems and how I have to constantly open and close apps and switch context uses. It was a very specific point of view there about like operating systems, but, you know, trying to think about a way to make some of the ideas actually happen. Has taken up a lot of my past year, I think. And in some ways makespace is kind of an offshoot of that in the sense that I think the spirit of reimagining something that I felt like could have a lot more potential exists in Maspace. And, you know, when Asa and I first started working on it, the code name was untitled OS. So I think from Makespace came this fascination. Of like exploring platforms, but then also exploring smaller, more contained experiences that attempt to deliver sort of flow state to people. I think I’ll be sharing some of them soon, is what I’ll say. There’s two particularly I’m excited about. The first one is sort of looking at screenshots as a metaphor, sort of inspired by. I saw this guy tweet once like screenshots and then you save and then obviously Omar’s work on screen notate. 00:05:15 - Speaker 2: Universal solvent is usually the way we put that now. 00:05:18 - Speaker 1: A screenshot sort of experience is something I’ve been working on with a collaborator called Tyler Egert, and he’s currently at this startup called Reple. And then a separate project is sort of like a take on a to do list that sort of imagines to do lists in the context of your social media feed. But that’s a much longer conversation, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that soon. 00:05:40 - Speaker 2: We’ll be excited to see those. Well, yeah, I’ll link the projects we’re mentioning here other than the ones that aren’t out yet, of course, in the show notes. So yeah, Mercury OS, which is kind of a rethink everything in the sort of the operating system interface, and then MakeSpace, I can see the thread there, I can see how that’s related. Makespace is an app for lack of better word for kind of spatial video chat experience if I’m understanding that correct. But you can see how that’s an offshoot or a different way to cut the kind of the operating system space, but maybe a little bit more focused specifically around the video meeting domain. Does that sound about right? 00:06:18 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I think the original prototype that Asa hacked together was just spatial browsing. I think video was the second thing we added. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so it kind of started as a vision for a spatial browser. And when we brought Wei Wei into the project, she had all these amazing ideas about like bidirectional linking and then we had ideas about like how to use web apps, like how this might enable people to disassemble and reassemble web apps. And like use them as modules and how you could essentially author your own ideal interface environments. And then sort of the faces going into that experience is sort of like COVID was raging here. It was having a grand old time and we just felt like, why not coexist next to, we think about breaking boundaries between app silos. What about the silo between what I do on my computer and people. So yeah, that’s a little bit about how that project came together. 00:07:14 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good way to tee up the topic that we’re kind of theming around today, which is rethinking the OS, and I wrote an article recently kind of talking about some core interactions and I listed off some of these what I would call concept projects. You tell me if you think it’s fair to group these together, but I put Mercury Desktop Neo is one that our colleague. Leonard, the Muse designer did while he was in university. There’s another one called artifacts, which is very interesting, goes very deep, and all of these have maybe the quality of sort of really rethinking from the ground up. It’s not just how do we remake one part of this, but if we really had a blank slate, how would we, how, how would we want. to be knowing what we know now in terms of new software, new paradigms with, yeah, whether it’s social media or video capabilities or really large screens or touch screens. A lot has changed since the core interactions that make up certainly the desktop operating systems, even mobile in a way is now well established compared to all that’s come up. 00:08:19 - Speaker 1: I remember I seen Desktop Neo and then this other project artifacts and around the time that I was writing the story around Mercury, and I remember thinking like, oh fuck, am I allowed to swear? 00:08:32 - Speaker 2: Oh, it just means that when I edit the XML for the episode, I have to flip the explicit switch from yes to no. Although it is very good that the podcast RSS feed format lets you flag specific episodes. I had to first do this for Josh Miller from the browser company. He was an enthusiastic swearer, and I felt like editing that out would be taking away some of the. The character. So please proceed. 00:08:55 - Speaker 1: You, you can feel free to add a bleep somewhere. I think that’s always fun and dramatic and it feels like you’re in a sitcom. Anyway, so, yeah, I remember seeing Desktop Neo and artifacts, and I was like, fuck. People are gonna be like, you ripped them off, because the things that I recognized was this desire to extend the desktop horizontally. To have the component of like your windows should be able to flow horizontally and off this arbitrary bounding box. And I think like Mercury is definitely not the first project to sort of envision that. And I really think that all of these speculative projects point towards that future of people wanting, for lack of a better word, more space, and also, I think it’s something that I would be curious to see. Happening in some way. I mean, one could argue that with iOS 14 widgets, I know that it seems like quite an incremental or even catch up, so to speak, but if you look into the future and you imagine like widgets and also app clips, and now things can live in your home screen that are more than just icons, and then your home screen having the ability to obviously swipe between pages, some interesting connections there that I would be curious to see where that leads. 00:10:11 - Speaker 2: Hm. Mark, what’s your take on rethinking the OS, these concept projects, and then more to the point maybe where they point, which is, do we need or is there value in a fairly dramatic rethink of the fundamental interactions versus, you know, what we have is tried and true. 00:10:30 - Speaker 3: Well, I think it’s certainly always worth trying. There’s so much upside if you get it right, if you land on something interesting. So I’m glad to see all the experiments, and I do think that the fundamentals underpinning all of our work are changing, so we’re getting bigger screens, we’re getting touch screens, we’re getting new. Graphics pipelines that are much more GPUs and parallellyzed, and I think a huge one is we’re getting very different economic models around the operating systems and the platforms and all of those have, and I think will continue to drive changes. So iOS was about touch and the new economic model mostly. And things like these new desktop explorations, I would say are more powerful, bigger screens and touch moving into the desktop platform and things like that, as well as having enough processing power and media that things become much more rich, interactive, visual in a way that they weren’t really even 10 years ago. So, I think it’s worth pursuing. 00:11:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s one of the things I think a lot about with what do computing for productive uses look like in the relatively near future is we now have this huge screens, the multimedia stuff, you know, video is just absolutely everywhere, for example, but we also have the diversity of input. This is one thing I like a lot about the. iPad stylus, touch with the fingers, trackpad, keyboard, you can throw voice in the mix there, and then if you go to, OK, everyone’s waiting for that drafting table sized or maybe just IMAX sized iPad that seems likely to come in the not too distant future or something like it. And then you can imagine something that feels a lot more like a room-sized thing where maybe you have multiple screens, which is already the case that we all kind of have our phones sitting there in the desktop and maybe you’ve also got the tablet. You got the voice interfaces, you’ve got the different kinds of inputs, and you put all that together and I don’t know what it adds up to necessarily, but it does seem to imply some fundamentally different relationship with your computing devices, even just how you relate to them in physical space, your posture as you use them. 00:12:28 - Speaker 3: And speaking of the human element here, we’ve done a kind of systems analysis of why might you different operating systems to emerge. There’s also the human side, which is when you put these new OS’s in front of people, you get a very positive reaction. They say things like, yes, this is how I want to feel as a user of my computer. It’s a very visceral reaction. And so I think there is a, there’s a gap between how computers currently work and how people want to feel when they’re using their tools. And that I think is still a big space to explore. 00:12:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when I started with Mercury, it started as a purely like surface level ergonomics project. It was so funny. It started as a design system of like, let’s make things look better. And then I’m like, wait, no, like that’s not actually why I don’t like my computer. Things look OK, generally, and I’m like, OK, well, maybe let’s make things move better. And then I’m like, hm I don’t know that the choreography is necessarily a problem that much. And then there was a phase where I realized that the ways that we are conditioned to think about interaction design. When I first started learning about it, it was like you use sketch, and then you, which is basically illustrator, and you have art boards, and then you link art boards together and then you basically make a choose your own adventure presentation thing. And that’s interaction design. And I realized like the real ergonomics part that I felt like was missing was the in between. Each moment of transition should feel like a moment of power, should feel like you can sort of change your mind or keep going, but the way that we’ve been conditioned to design sort of digital products don’t really. I don’t really feel like it affords that way of thinking about how interfaces work, unless you use something like origami or court composer or code. And so it was at that moment that I’m like, maybe this ergonomic problem goes a little deeper, and that’s when I started to think on more of like a system level. I think before that, I didn’t feel like I had permission to, you know? During my internship at Apple, it was actually a friend of mine, Marissa. We were just having a conversation about Siri one night and she just started asking like, do you think this is really like what voice interfaces should be like? Do you think there should be all these different modes? Do you think that having a little brick in your phone that holds all the power is the right way for computers to sort of expand into and. I had just never thought about things like that before. I was just trying to make screens that moved, that looked and felt ergonomic. I wasn’t thinking about the actual base layer, why? And so after that, it sort of felt like suddenly a whole new world of just asking questions and digging myself into a rabbit hole was just possible. And the process behind thinking of Mercury was very similar. It was basically that, but in a design process. And I think what you’re saying about people being drawn to These very tactile experiences, I think, in the process of researching for Mercury, I read a lot of like white paper style things. And I was just incredibly bored or not stimulated by them because I’m like, yeah, you kind of have these drawings that look like memes of diagrams that look like they go in a patent. I care about this because I happen to like designing computers, but you put it in front of anyone else, and they’re like, why should I care? And so it became apparent that If I wanted to create a vision that people cared about, that I would have to focus a lot on the craftsmanship, the visual design, and also the storytelling delivery. 00:15:45 - Speaker 3: It’s funny you mentioned that Adam and I were just talking about this this morning. You basically can’t explainm to people with text. It just doesn’t work as an empirical matter. What really works is video and animation. And I think this is resonant with what you were saying, where you need the right medium to convey your emotional message. 00:16:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I learned about the concept of a tool for thought after moving to the bay. It’s one of those things where I just like kind of don’t get it, where kind of everything is a tool for thought. Um, but I kind of understand why there is this specific community that’s very obsessed over thinking about thinking tools, essentially. And I think giving something a phrase gives it power sort of reference points. And so I think absolutely like, I think when I first found news, I can’t remember the copywriting, but I can remember seeing the gesture on the iPad and seeing things zoom in and out and seeing writing being just all over it and just thinking like, yeah, that’s how it should work. And I think it’s successful in that it makes things seem very obvious in hindsight, and I think that’s sort of a quality that I really aspire to achieve when I design. News is interesting because you can tell a lot of OS or platform level thinking goes into it and it’s an app. And same with sort of makespace where even though internally we think about it as like a social collaborative operating system, it’s an app. And then my instinct is that there’s going to be a lot more in the coming years slash months, and I would be curious to see like, you know how Android has like launchers, that, but for my desktop experience. Though I’m unclear how that might happen. But something very compelling someone said to me was like, Google search is basically an OS now. And when I think about operating systems, it’s less like Unix and like how you actually what this is, and engineers are probably going to send me death threats, but like I really don’t care. Why should I care about that? As a person who likes computers and likes to play with computers, I just want to worry about how it feels and looks, and that’s really how customers were users. I don’t like that word either, but customers would think about it or people. So double edged sword, probably. 00:17:51 - Speaker 3: I think this is also kind of inevitable because operating systems are, by definition very general and complex. It’s about being able to host other programs, and it’s the nature of complex things that they inevitably arise from simple things. I forget the person this is named after, but that’s a lie if we can put it in the show notes. So that’s why we see most of the platforms evolve from something simpler, either from an app, so I would put the Web browser in this category, it started as an app on, you know, Windows and Mac and so on, but now it’s basically a whole other platform. Or you see basically a small kernel of fixed apps evolve into a platform. This is the iOS story. There wasn’t an app store, remember, it was just, there was the calculator and the male app and Safari, and that was, you know, kind of it. If you want something else too bad. But eventually they generalized it into a real platform, a real OS that can run user supplied apps. 00:18:36 - Speaker 2: If you want that back even further, I usually think the iPod is the start of the iOS story. So it really was a completely dedicated device for playing music and had a very, very simple, but in fact innovative interface, the little wheel was recognizable. It was fit for the purpose of on the go, music listening. Very simple screen, but all designed to really solve that problem extremely well in a way that maybe MP3 players at the time didn’t. And then yeah, that evolved upwards into more and more complex platforms to the point that today I think it’s one of the world’s most sophisticated places to build applications. 00:19:12 - Speaker 3: And this to me is a really interesting and important research question in. Operating systems, what’s the path that you take in the path dependent sense to get to the place you want to be? Like you need to have a vision, you need some provocations for, OK, I think we want this style of operating system, but it’s very much a social, economic path dependent question on how you actually get there. It’s extraordinarily expensive to develop an operating system these days. So you can’t just suppose the final step. 00:19:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and now it also has to live up to everyone’s expectations of not only what it can do, but the ecosystem that it brings. And I think, you know, I have zero idea how any of this will happen, slash if it’s ever going to happen, but I would love to live in a world one day where instead of having like 500 note taking apps, I can just piece together and buy a la carte elements of different experiences that I like. Obviously there’s an entire conversation around like how capitalism works and what’s profitable and blah blah blah, but, you know, one can dream. Mainly I’m just tired of I’m tired of opening all my Adobe apps, and they’re basically like a canvas that you draw things on and then different ways to make things adhere to or not adhere to the grid and treating things as faster versus vector blah blah blah. Like to me, uh, it just seems like mentally I just envisioned it as a canvas that I can bring in different tools as needed and that should be how my workflow is, which one day like, it would be amazing if something like Makespace would turn into that sort of platform. Given its inherently spatial nature. 00:20:50 - Speaker 3: The Canvas thing is interesting. We’ve seen that emerge as a key content type, I would argue over the past few years. By Canvas, I mean it’s free form, it’s mixed media, uh, you have some flexibility, so Figma, Makerspace, makespace, Muse, a lot of these apps have developed this and they’re all kind of circling around a similar idea. It’s like this thing where you can put whatever you want, however you want. And that hasn’t quite been baked into an operating system proper yet, although it’s funny, it kind of harkens back to the old school classic desktops, which we almost forget about, but that’s like the OG canvas. 00:21:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Something that we’ve talked about a lot internally is how used to our people to this canvas metaphor when they don’t spend their days clicking around in FigMA or using Adobe Suite. 00:21:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s sort of the opposite of the particularly the phone innovation of you have one app at a time, it’s full screen, and that’s all you can do. And actually that’s an improvement for certain cases on the desktop complex windows that overlap with buttons on them, and you can minimize things and they have these menus and there’s focus and there’s all this confusing stuff to keep track of, but at the same time. Time for a more powerful environment where you do have multiple documents open, you need to move things around between them. You have different kinds of media, different kinds of things that you need to look alongside each other, move stuff between things, copy paste, and so on, the mobile one app at a time is the wrong metaphor. And so yeah, in a way, these tools where the primary document is a canvas that you can put things on in a very free form way that does. and back to the GUI operating system, uh, metaphor that came out of Xerox PARC, but there you had something where you have one document, which is sort of your desktop, maybe you have 4 if you have virtual workspaces, and then the windows that you arrange, they’re very kind of temporary, right? They’re just what’s in memory, there’s no persistence, there’s no sense of a board and certainly I can’t share it. I guess there’s screen share, but. So in a way, there is something to that metaphor. I think what you find when you reinvent or rethink something is that the best qualities of a previous or of an older idea come through, but you also leave behind a lot of the things that maybe you don’t want or you can improve upon it in a dramatic way, but you can only do that, I think by having a little bit of a break. It would be hard to imagine, for example, Linux, Windows and Mac. Evolving into Figma or evolving into makespace or uses. I don’t think that could happen. They have too much baggage in history. 00:23:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the primary change that I’ve experienced in my year in the valley is, you know, last year I was all like, it’s not too late to we start delete everything, you know, everything sucks. We need to start from scratch, just everyone to stop, like, no more software. Um, whereas now I’m a lot less. I mean, I still live for speculative proposals or provocations. I love when people ask questions and when people rebel a little bit, but I think working on the sort of future stuff like it’s Tends to be a very lonely process, and you don’t get that satisfaction of like opening night when like audiences actually get to experience the work and walk away with a little bit of their lives may be changed. Sound like such a theater kid right now, but I swear that part has not died. Silicon Valley can’t kill me. Um, but I think I’m learning more as a creator to hold both truths at once, to have a series of clear North stars that I think. would really help people that I’m curious about exploring and also finding practical concrete ways to head there. So I’m not just like randomly in a lab somewhere, which is like that’s fine too, but I don’t think I’m there yet. 00:24:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that duality is really important. You got to dream big, but also be willing to find ways to bring that into practice. I feel like you have the one extreme, which is, you might call it ivory tower head in the clouds, dreamer thing, and it’s much easier to think the big thoughts and the inspiring ideas because you’re free of the baggage of, I don’t know, reality or the status quo or what have you. But I think it’s ultimately unsatisfying and I think I’ve seen people who are Maybe tend towards that dreamer side, be even frustrated or even become bitter because they think I have all these great ideas. I figured it all out, but those ideas, if they don’t see them come to fruition somehow, it ultimately feels sort of unsatisfying. But the flip side of that, of course, which is people who are really in the day to day and the practical and being very pragmatic and incremental, which I think certainly the tech world has a very strong iterative, you know, just make your MVP and build on that. thing which I think is very good for getting going and discovering a problem and so on, but sometimes you do that that means you’re losing the ability to think big thoughts, dream big dreams, go further, move past what’s here today. And so there’s some, I feel there is some way to resolve that duality, although in a way, I think as an industry and certainly for me as an individual, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how you get the best of both worlds and hopefully the worst of neither. 00:26:04 - Speaker 1: I kind of just do things through the lens of culture to get anything to actually take off or have impact. Essentially, you need to change culture in a certain way or to have an idea influence culture. And I think there’s a place for it, you know, speculative or utopian dystopian ideas, and certainly, you know, those ideas are exciting and can excite a lot of people as like sort of aspirational pressure. Which is a term I stole from Asa, where you make something and then if enough people care about it, then that creates momentum towards that one day. And then the sort of more incremental thing is a slower way to more immediately start bending culture. I don’t think everyone should care about computers as deeply as like, maybe I do, or obviously you guys do, cause people have their own stuff going on, divorces, and I think that’s it. I think that’s the only thing that happens to people. But Um, so like, like we don’t have time. Like, don’t make me fucking worry about that. But at the same time, because computers are basically worlds that we live in now, people should feel empowered to think about it or question it if they want to. It’s sort of like, I guess politics in a way. It affects you whether you like it or not. And I think more people feel empowered to have an opinion on politics versus on like the operating system. And I think I would love to help make that conversation more accessible in some way. 00:27:24 - Speaker 3: You might not be interested in operating systems, but operating systems are interested in you. 00:27:30 - Speaker 1: The old saying, oh my goodness, is that it really, that’s that’s the same. 00:27:34 - Speaker 3: Well, it’s a classic thing with politics, right, 00:27:37 - Speaker 2: um, yeah, right, you can ignore that I don’t want to think about that, but in the end it does affect your life and that’s why it’s important for us all to be concerned citizens. Now happily, part of the magic of capitalism or just the world we live in generally is that there’s specialization. And so it’s OK that there’s people like 3 of us who for some unknown reason seem to be. obsessed with computers and we’re devoting our careers to trying to make them better as we, um, as we see, take that word to mean, whereas there’s others who are obsessed with other things and they can work on those things and hopefully we can all together make a better world for all of us. But that said, I think it is a really great point. I’m often struck when I speak to friends who are not from the tech world, and I can talk about. I don’t know, a design decision that Facebook is making, for example, and for them, it’s more like just a force of nature. There’s no the concept that there’s people behind it who are actively making a decision to do one thing versus another thing versus that it’s far away, yeah, unchangeable thing, doesn’t even enter their minds. And I understand why technology is hard to understand if you’re not in the field. Even if you’re in the field, frankly, it’s pretty hard to understand to keep up with everything, but as you said, empowered to have an opinion at the very least seems worthwhile. 00:28:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember as I was trying to think about Mercury or operating systems, I think certain people I worked with were mentors would be like, why is it something you care about? Like, are you gonna ship this thing? Like, are you gonna go propose it to like Craig Federation? Like, why? Like it’s not gonna ship. What’s the point? And I disagree still, I think. If we just stop caring about anything that we can’t change, you might as well just stop caring, period. Certainly these days it’s quite easy to just associate your life away. I mean I’ve I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I think something that was very interesting to me when I first arrived here, I think one of the first things. I did was my friend took me to Dynamicland. but my friend informed me of who Brett Victor was slash I, I knew who Warrior Dream was, but not who Brett Victor was, you know, and then about Dynamic land and that it existed. So I went and like the first thing that I thought was like, oh my God, people should be using this to make theater. This is interactive theater. Like, why isn’t this in my black box? Where are the artists, you know? And that’s something that from what I understand, maybe community outreach is not necessarily like a focus of theirs in this present moment, but I think if you’re serious about getting people excited and therefore affecting change on a cultural level, I think it starts with getting culture makers excited and. It takes me longer to do write-ups than to design things because it’s so important to me that people who had no idea of why they should care about an operating system can read the story I wrote and then walk away feeling like, yeah, I care now too. And I received lots of emails from people who are also had certain neurodiverse tendencies or just like friends in theater who I didn’t think I had permission. Like, I, I didn’t know that. Like, now I’m a lot more angry at my devices, and I’m like, you’re welcome. And I love that. I want to be remembered for making lots of people really angry. In a good way. 00:30:56 - Speaker 2: Well, yeah, people in my life often point out how I seem to be more dissatisfied with the digital technologies that we interact with every day than anyone else they know, and that sort of maybe seems like a strange, a surprising juxtaposition when I work in the field and claim to enjoy computers and the internet and software and all those sorts of things, but my patience for things that, you know, are trying to hijack my attention. Or faces that are too slow, or things that just treat me in ways that I think are not the way that these devices which are designed to serve us and help us and make us better, often do sadly these days, but it’s connected part of my passion for it is precisely because I think we can do better. Yeah. So when you talk about Brett Victor, his work is just the pinnacle of inspiring, but as far as I know, he is not doing things to really Bring his work to practical. He’s not trying to produce spin out startups or take one of his code bases and make it open source so someone can build on it. He’s trying to show what might be possible to get us to aspire to something higher to to get us excited. And I know many people who point directly to his work as something that got them maybe specifically interested in design or specifically interested in productivity tools design or specifically interested in. And user programming or some other aspect of this kind of computing for thinking and productivity and creativity. And so you could say that that, you know, you could do it just that way and Jason, I see your work is seeing a lot of that. You do these pieces where it’s not just the design you’ve made, of course, but it’s also like you said, the write up where your intention is to help people understand why. And get excited and follow the story and you probably would be OK to stop there. Now you don’t have much say over maybe you lack the satisfaction of getting to deliver something all the way through to a customer and see it put a smile on their face. But one way to do it is kind of say, well, I’ve done my part, which is to inspire and step away, assuming that you can make that into a livelihood and let others kind of productionize, you might say. But it sounds like you don’t find that satisfying enough, or you want to take it past just that inspiration stage. 00:33:13 - Speaker 1: Um, I think if I lived in my ideal world, I would never worry about shipping anything ever. I kind of view that sort of more as art though, versus design in a way. Like it feels more like a personal provocation expression, like a need to do something driven internally and design is a lot more. I interpret it as a service, and you could argue that doing aspirational conceptual work is kind of a service, but I think of it more as art versus design. And so I think if I was able to, and if I had that pedigree and following and just sweet, sweet cash. Live in capitalism, can’t pretend to live out of it, you know, whatever. I would do it. To be honest, I don’t know how long I will spend in the tech industry because I think at some point, I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell, and for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business just for me personally. 00:34:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to me, part of the motivation for bringing things into the real world is to understand if you got it right, because here’s the deal with reality. It’s so complex, you can’t actually understand it. These design heuristics are about coming up with a better guess and then incrementally perhaps arriving at the solution and really the only way to know is to try it. So that’s one of the reasons why I like the balance we struck with ink and switch and Muse. You have this combination of academic thinking, far out planning and vision. But then you also force that to confront reality and see what comes up, and often it’s surprising, and it’s a little bit of a bummer when your visions are contradicted by the cold hard truth, but that’s important data if you ultimately want to move the needle in the real world. 00:34:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love exploring all the interesting gestures that you guys have in use, and there’s a certain point where I’m like, if I wanted to take this out of a layer, do I just hold on to it and then move and it turns out you actually just do that, which I loved. I love when things just naturally feel like. Connected to my intent in some weird magical way. Just ergonomically, I love it. And I think on the note of like designing productivity software, I think something that I wish I had done with Mercury or just in general, is thinking about all the ways that new paradigms are fun and playful. Like, I’m sure notion and Air Table are exciting advances towards tool for thought or whatever. But like, I don’t really associate spreadsheets and databases with fun. It’s like intriguing, but it’s not fun. And the thing you mentioned with iPod click wheel was it’s just fun. It was inherently fun. There’s no like real reason why that is more efficient than buttons or like a deep pad, but it was fun and because it was fun, people cared about it and it was also great for fidgeting, which I love. I think. Part of the reasons why I get so distracted in social media nowadays is my computer. I can’t really fidget. I can like move my mouse around and or I can like sort of just like fidge on my screen just by like moving things up now. But the interface itself is not really designed to let you fidget. Anyways, so iPod was so fun, and I want to see more tools for fun. Or tools for thoughts that happen to be playful and fun and really unapologetic about it. Like I could care less about bi-directional linking, like I have no fucking clue what that even means if it’s not fun and visually palatable. 00:36:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is a huge deal. And to my mind, the real poster child for this is emojis, and emojis, they seem goofy and insignificant, but they’re actually a huge deal. They’re a huge deal for Slack and to me, they’re a huge deal in notion. I was having trouble. It’s like, isn’t this kind of just like Google Docs, but you know, better and it’s like, well, yeah, but I can pick the emoji for each of my docs, oh, you know, and it just it gives you much more energy and it also allows you to communicate. more effectively, I would argue so. Yes, I think that’s a big thread. 00:37:15 - Speaker 2: The fun, the playfulness, the maybe joy, I think is one of the biggest things to come out of the mobile touchscreen iOS world. And of course, consumer applications sort of were the first to get that, but I absolutely think yeah, even the term productivity tools I use that just because, well, it’s the kind of the industry name. But I think when you look at, I’ve used the example before of Slack, and why I think Slack was successful is they make talking to your teammates fun. And it wasn’t really that much fun with hip chat and Campfire and IRC somewhat the Slack somehow tipped over between, I don’t know, animated gifts and unfurl cards and emojis and a couple of other things and just maybe the sleekness of the overall experience, good mobile app and stuff like that. They just made it the thing you wanted to do. And I think there is a version of that for almost any, yeah, what’s a spreadsheet for the TikTok generation, right? 00:38:11 - Speaker 1: So a cursed phrase. Oh my God, no. Oh my goodness. 00:38:17 - Speaker 2: But sort of embracing that, hopefully not the bad, you know, I think there’s a lot of downsides to the kind of engagement oriented social media stuff that is dominating a lot of, let’s say mainstream design thinking, but there is a version of that which does come down to the fun, the playfulness, the emotiveness, the just general joy you get when you think I want to use this. to do the thing you’re going to do more of it. And that’s, that was absolutely our thinking with Muse. We’re a little more understated. We’re less of the emojis everywhere and animated gifts everywhere thing, but we do try to make it fun and interesting and fast and a little bit playful to interact with your ideas. And so I think thinking of our overall mission to help people. Be more thoughtful when I talk to people about sort of deep thinking who maybe they know, maybe, for example, there’s an important decision in their life, they should really think through deeply, but it’s really hard. Deep thinking is hard. But if you had a tool that made it fun and you thought, well, this was a chance to use that thing, and I know it’s fun to use that thing, so therefore, you’re likely to do the activity, then maybe just a few more for more folks will want to do that. 00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I feel like play and fidgeting are just my tools for thought. I can’t think if I’m strapped to a chair somewhere. And some of my most exciting sort of revelations just always come from doing improv, which I deeply miss. But it seems like the world is kind of just on improv right now, in a way that’s really hard to say yes to. Anyway. 00:39:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, a little more specific nerdy tangent is like part of the reason why I think spring dampening works so well is because when you give something physics, Spring dampening here you’re talking about when you have a transition of some kind that instead of being a linear movement, it sort of speeds up at the beginning and then slows down as the transition is coming to a close, yeah. 00:40:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, except I don’t even like to think of it as a transition. I kind of think of it as just reaction, um, because like if something is like If, if something is responsive to physics, you like bounce something a certain way, then theoretically you could also bounce it from the other way and you can start to play with it. And it doesn’t actually have to serve a concrete purpose. It’s just by nature of being responsive to physics, it makes it more playful because it kind of grounds it in the real world somehow. Whereas like, the reason why I don’t think of this transition is sort of Because it’s not like a set timing that you’re like, this transition will last for 1 2nd, it means if it’s the middle of doing something and you want it to stop, you Very difficult to describe. But that’s the more nerdy take on it is that because when you think about motion, not animation, but motion design and how things respond and react to your touch, they enforce, they create the physical world of your application. And when there is that sense of physics, there is a sense of play because then people can start experimenting with like plotting things together or breaking them apart or things like that. And to me, that’s fun. Although I feel like I hesitate to promote this. 00:41:26 - Speaker 3: It’s like very trendy right now, so you’re just like throwing it everywhere and I feel like not everything has to bounce be bouncy, but anyway, well, I think you’ve come to a very interesting distinction here because transition and animation, it almost implies that there is this point where as a user, you’ve indicated what wants to happen, the machine will now take over and for the next 200 milliseconds will direct the activities and until then you can’t do anything else. And at the end, OK, the transition is complete. Now you can go resume clicking on things, whereas physics is more like every millisecond, you’re doing something and the machine is responding to what you’re doing and you’re never giving up control. And to me, the animation for the point of showing something isn’t as interesting as making it responsive to what you’re always doing, right, 00:41:58 - Speaker 3: the physics. 00:41:59 - Speaker 1: My pet peeve is when. Everyone designs motion for interfaces on the aftereffects and just have these like really specific 3 point motion curves and I’m like, literally no one’s gonna like that after the first round. They think, oh, this is fun and smooth. And the second time they’re gonna swipe something and it’s gonna have this perfectly choreographed transition and you’re like, oh, I don’t feel like that’s because I did something. I feel like I just triggered a 1 or 0. And that’s actually like, I think like for touch, like bounce and spring dampening works because your fingers are soft, so there is the inherent element of the input device has bounced. Whereas like, I don’t, for example, for mouse cursor interactions, since it’s very much like your mouse is either down or it’s not, it might be less appropriate. Yeah. But on the most surface level, it’s fun and that was my first impression, you know, I wasn’t like, oh, this responds to my input and therefore, it’s a prosthetic to like, no, this is super fun swipe to unlock. So therefore, I shall sell out my soul to tech forever. 00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Maybe what you said there ties together a couple of themes we’ve touched on here, which is the mouse versus touch and how the system should respond in terms of like how things feel within the physics of the virtual world you’re interacting with. I think there is this tendency, Mark usually calls it transliteration, which is if you take an application or a type of application that’s sort of for the desktop and you put it on to say a tablet or. vice versa, to basically bring across some of those same basic interactions. But in fact, the mouse or the trackpad is a much more precise tool than the finger. And there’s pros and cons to that. Sometimes the precision is actually really annoying. It’s too precise, it’s too fussy, and then other times it’s what you want, but in any case, the system responding to that. And so I think, for example, one of the places that the Windows. The surface platform falls down a little bit is that it essentially treats those as the same thing. When you touch the screen, it’s essentially just kind of moving your mouse cursor there and clicking. And you know, that’s a very sort of obvious thing. They’re both ways to point, so why not do the same thing? And to be fair, they were pretty early, so they were still just exploring this, but a more thoughtful or a more considered way to go about it is to think of each of these input devices and as we have more and more of them and the diversity of them, as we talked about before, and making each one serve its different purpose, and that also means that the physics of the system should react and feel different. And obviously, it will take us a long time to build all that out potentially, but I think it’s really worth doing to make the kind of creative environment, at least that I want to have. 00:44:31 - Speaker 1: When I think about things like head tracking or eye tracking or even voice recognition, those are the moments that I’m curious to look at. You know, not necessarily like, hey Alexa do blah blah blah blah blah, and it’s like very clear start and end, and you have a single thing you want to do, but more like as you’re in the process of doing something, maybe there are small ways that your body naturally responds to something that informs some part of the UI or how, I don’t know. That starts a whole other conversation about muscle memory, modular interfaces, pros and cons, but it is a specific curiosity of mine, especially as I think we start moving away from. We’ve been accumulating more and more devices and now I think we’re naturally headed to a world where your points of contact and essentially the, the power of the computer is more distributed. It could be all over your home, it could be everywhere you go because of headphones that you’re wearing or certain headsets. And I think when that world arrives, I’m interested in seeing the ways that interfaces change to sort of see if interfaces kind of move towards the direction of like multimodal input, if at all. 00:45:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s exciting. This is another example of where the fundamentals are changing because until basically very recently, voice recognition wasn’t viable, wasn’t fast enough, it wasn’t cheap enough, it wasn’t accurate enough, and it’s just now, I think, crossing the threshold and probably similarly with eye tracking, but I know for a while they’ve had specialized hardware that you can use at labs but it was expensive and uncomfortable. That’s also, I think they can do it with commodity cameras now. So interesting times for sure. 00:46:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and something that I hope to see more in new tools for thought or productivity tools is just, as I mentioned, more embrace of just fun, physics, and also things just being more sexy in general. I think making something desirable is Oh God, I was reading this tweet the other day of some like thought leader going like, if you have to pick between like what you’re wearing in the morning, that you’re not doing real work, I’m like, shut the fuck up. Like, literally take your Patagonia vest and I don’t know, jump off the go but that’s too harsh. Just like, no, like, that’s so important to people like that. That’s what makes people human. Like we just naturally or instinctively, we just find certain things desirable, and that’s OK. And that should absolutely be a part of the consideration and focus for when we design new sort of environments and interactions that we hope people will care about. And right now, Adam, I think you mentioned that it’s very hip and trendy to work on things like, you know, perhaps Instagram. Although probably not anymore, but like maybe TikTok, spreadsheets less. And I think part of it is just the inherent fun factor. And the other part of it is like, you don’t really associate culture with spreadsheets, but you absolutely associate culture with social media. And so I really think that if you can create software with the intention of creating a cultural movement or a cultural shift, that will really perhaps help you in some way. I say you as like a disembodied you, not like you, um. It’s like if I were, I don’t know, a meme generator, I would just have that diagram of Steve Jobs with the liberal arts and technology crossroads in his background, but yeah. 00:47:45 - Speaker 2: Now I love that tools are about the communities and the culture that come along with them. We don’t use them in a vacuum. We don’t get excited to use them, and we don’t continue to use them and we don’t certainly in a collaborative work environment which we almost all find ourselves in, yeah, sharing. You could argue that for For example, a collaboration tool like GitHub or one like Figma, those bring along with them certain culture. And that’s part of why you, let’s say get into the tool and part of what keeps you there and part of what shapes your work and part of what makes it fun, and part of what inspires you or upsets you, maybe depending. But the point is, it’s not this dry, sterile, just kind of solving a problem and moving on. Uh there is culture with it. 00:48:30 - Speaker 1: I love that. And there’s that continued discourse between culture and impact and what you’re making. And something I hope to see more is like, you know, as we create these new environments to live in and live with. That we become more aware of certain implications or results of use and misuse, and that we take responsibility for those results. That if our tool for, I don’t know, if I were to create a collaborative tool for thought and it was used to orchestrate DDOS attacks on women and minorities, I would personally take a long hard look on like the things that enable that, the culture that I have created around my tool and recognize that like. I’m a human, I’m a creator. It is OK to bring your own perspective into things because you’ve made it, and that’s just something that is on my mind a lot these days, and there really is no way to ensure that your tool is not being misused to harm people, I don’t think. 00:49:27 - Speaker 2: Design ethics has become much more of a topic or perhaps technology ethics very broadly and more here you see this in social media news and news tools and things like that that are more about spreading ideas on a wide scale, but one could imagine that coming to more sort of productivity tools style space and then maybe you want to think ahead and think, OK, so the folks that were working on social media 15 years ago didn’t really picture the ways that their work could be used for harm. And of course, you can never stop something. There’s always the potential to use something for harm, but there are ways to design it that maybe encourage more positive uses and strongly discourage more negative uses. And I think there’s a tendency for tech world people who skew young, who skew optimistic to just think of the positive cases and not think of the negative cases and therefore not hedge against potential risk and think about the responsibility of the power that they’re wielding. 00:50:27 - Speaker 1: Something I hear a lot is like you’re so negative, but I think at the root of everything, I think I’m very optimistic about what people can be as a species, as cultures, and what technology could help with. I’m very optimistic about technology and people in general, but because of that optimism, sometimes it is expressed as anger or negativity, but I really admire those who kind of just believe. Uh, fuck, I’m just gonna head into some, I’m gonna not say sappy shit on your on your podcast. I’m gonna save it for my memoir or my stand or my Netflix special. My Netflix special is coming out in about 15 years. It will be called My Career, and that is the joke. Um, I, I predict massive success from over two audience members, but um. Yeah, oops, nice. 00:51:22 - Speaker 2: I actually just watched uh David Attenborough’s uh sort of career memoir. So yeah, all, all you got to do is have um 60 years of really impressive career like that guy, and then you two can have an inspiring Netflix special. 00:51:38 - Speaker 1: 60 years is a long time. Um, I don’t know. It, I’m curious for you both is thinking about computers and tools for thought and operating systems and essentially world building. When was the first time in your life that you noticed that instinct or curiosity? 00:51:59 - Speaker 3: For me, computer programming in particular came relatively late. I didn’t really get into it until college, which is late for a lot of people that are, for example, currently in the industry, but I’d always had an interest in building things more generally, you know, model planes and rockets and Other things like that. So I think I just more struck on the right medium eventually versus a general interest. 00:52:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, for me, I certainly was fascinated by computers from my first encounter, but I think it probably connects to exactly what you said, which is the world building. So the interest in computers and the interest in games kind of came together and I pretty quickly got on from playing games to making my own games, and making games is fundamentally an act of world building and the really appeal to the systematic part of my mind. And I think it definitely influenced a lot of my views on the world, which includes calling back to right where we started, which is that the world around us is mostly constructed, the society we live in, the governments, even the physical structures, they’re constructed by humans and we can choose to make them different. very hard to change those things, but they’re not, well, I would say not set in stone, but some things actually are set in stone. But actually, even those are changeable. You just need a good jackhammer, right? And thinking of it as both this combination of, if you think systematically about the emergent effects of the world you’re building, whether that’s a game or something in the real world, something economic or social. And then similarly, as we have these increasing virtual worlds, even beyond games, but productivity tools. And collaboration spaces and online forums for a meeting to converse with our fellow citizens about the society we all live in. These are all things that we construct and we have the ability to think systematically about how the design choices that go into them, the outputs in the form of the world that we live in, and the way that that causes people to be prosperous and happy or not. And so to me, yeah, right from the start, I think that shaped how I see everything about the world. 00:54:06 - Speaker 1: When was that start for you? 00:54:10 - Speaker 2: I think maybe about 8 years old. 00:54:12 - Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. Oh my goodness. To paraphrase one of my friends and collaborators on Makespace Maily, she often speaks of her different disciplines. I mean, she’s an interaction designer and also a DJ and also she’s interested in the culinary arts, and she just thinks about like those different practices as kind of canvases of art, and then You connect the canvases through your life to eventually create a path of your own. That’s purely paraphrasing and probably fucked it up. My fascination also began with video games. Tomb Raider was the first movie I ever saw, very interesting choice for a 5 year old. But after that, I was just obsessed with this idea that you could inhabit someone’s life and body and adventure, and inhabit a space that might feel safer in some ways. Obviously a very utopian view on computation. And then I started graphic designing and PowerPoint. I don’t think I used a real design tool until college. 00:55:12 - Speaker 3: It’s the power of general purpose tools. 00:55:15 - Speaker 2: Well, it’s to your earlier point that everything is a tool for thought and so in this case, everything can be a way to design, right? I do designs and text files with AskiR where needed, so. 00:55:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah. What’s exciting about talking to folks like you is it reminds me of, and it opens my eyes to all the things that I’m so deeply curious about exploring and learning about. And it’s really inspiring in the sense that It feels like if you’re digging for diamonds and the more you dig, there’s more interesting shiny things and you just want to keep going until you end up burying yourself and then you end up living in Oakland forever alone. But that’s a different fanfiction. 00:55:56 - Speaker 2: That metaphor did not end the way I was expecting it to. 00:55:59 - Speaker 1: I don’t know. I feel like if you dig a tunnel deep enough, it’s eventually going to end up in Oakland. I feel like, I don’t know why everyone’s like, I’m in Oakland. Like how did you get there? But yeah, something I’m curious to hear your thoughts on. It’s sort of, as I’ve been more acquainted with the culture of human computer interaction, including important cultural figures and milestones and perhaps dreams that once were. I’ve moved through several stages of like, let’s say grief. Of like denial and then sort of acceptance or Hm, that’s poorly phrase. As I’ve I’ve accumulated more knowledge into this specific cultural dome. I hear from a lot of people that their North Star is they want to achieve Engelbart’s vision of computation, or they want to, you know, make Brett Victor proud or something, something Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, something something Xanadu, you know. And I’m curious to hear if that sounds familiar and in what ways do you relate or not relate to those modes of thought. 00:57:04 - Speaker 2: Oh, incredibly familiar. Mark, I’m curious to hear what your journey was on this, but there was a kind of Let’s call a research rabbit hole or just path to go down of discovering the works of these visionary folks that you just described and seeing the big ideas that they had and so long ago that it’s just really eye opening when you compare to on one hand that we’ve achieved so much and technology has come such a long way, particularly when you look at say just the raw horsepower, computational power of computers, but then you look and you feel like maybe we haven’t quite achieved. As much as it seems like we should in terms of what computers actually do for us, and all of those folks that you mentioned and others in that world are absolutely a source of inspiration and ideas in work that I’ve been doing in the last, I don’t know, now 5 or 6 years of my career. At the same time, I do think you can over, not sure what the word is, fetishize that, which is this kind of romanticized past or You know, first of all, that these folks as visionaries, they didn’t fully manage to make their ideas come true, and I think that is a gap and that is one reason why I’m so interested in the topic we talked about earlier, which is not just how to have the big inspiring ideas, but how to bring them to reality. And then the second part of it I think is that there is a version of the kind of the Aristotle problem, right, which is you don’t move on with new ideas because you’re so busy kind of treating the ancients as having the ultimate wisdom and you just need to unlock, you’re searching for the philosopher’s stone, and you know you can find it in the books, the coded books written by the ancients, and if you just look long enough rather than thinking, well, These folks were really impressive and amazing humans that did amazing work, but at the same time, I can do that kind of work too. And maybe there’s new ideas and fresh directions for us to explore. It’s not about somehow achieving some ideal that was set forth previously, but more that we can fold those ideas in, and also learn from what worked and didn’t work with them and then make new ideas for an inspiring future. 00:59:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a lot of similar thoughts. For me, certainly the desiderata that were lai

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Molly Milky. 00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey there. 00:00:45 - Speaker 2: And how was your spring break, Molly? 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: It’s pretty good, not long enough, but it was a lovely little escape in Berkeley, and I worked on a final project for my producing class, which was a pitch on a feature film on the Whole Earth Catalog, which didn’t go over as well as I had hoped, but I’m still fingers crossed that it’ll become something. 00:01:10 - Speaker 2: And the whole Earth Catalog here being the Stewart brand work from what was the 70s or 80s. 00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Confirmed, yes, it was basically a biopic on him and the era of the whole Earth Catalog, and it was very dramatic. 00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. First of all, I just love biopics. I’m a big fan of like abstract. Act on Netflix or that sort of like kind of maker documentary, but when you throw in like the weird history, I feel like the whole Earth that catalog was sort of, I don’t know, psychedelic culture meets rebel computing or something like that. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: 100% agree, yes. In a very interesting way that I think would translate really well to film, but we’ll see. 00:01:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let me know where I can sign up to screen that I guess. 00:01:53 - Speaker 1: Amazing, yes, you’ll be the first to know. 00:01:55 - Speaker 3: Wasn’t there actually another film about Stewart Brand in general that came out recently? 00:02:00 - Speaker 1: Yep, Stripe is on it. They made a documentary that’s coming out very soon, actually, I think, and it’s as part of the SF Film Festival currently, and it was more of like looking at his whole life and his impact legacy and also the more recent like environmental stuff he’s been doing, which is much more comprehensive and honestly a much better idea. But I started this project my freshman year, so I’m pretty committed at this point. 00:02:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it just shows that there’s a lot of interest in his work. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting, like, the deeper you dig, the more you find, and the more like of a web you discover, especially on Wikipedia, in the best way, so. 00:02:39 - Speaker 2: You seem to enjoy some unearthing the history of weird characters here, your collection of computing history, folks. I’ll link that in the show notes here as well. But before we get on to that, I think the folks would love to hear your background. You’re quite early in your career and yet already have a very impressive CV here. You’ve worked at Figma, you’re now at Notion, and you just finished a thesis at UCLA, so I think we all just want to know. What’s your productivity hack? How can we all be as uh as productive as you so early on? 00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Oh God, that’s not. First of all, my little background blurb. My name is Molly. I’m currently a student at UCLA. I studied digital media, and I’m in my last year. I only have a couple more weeks left, which I’m very excited about. 00:03:26 - Speaker 2: Wow, congratulations. 00:03:27 - Speaker 1: I know, so close, yet so far. 00:03:31 - Speaker 2: The senioritis kicked in already? 00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Oh man, yes, it has been very, very present in my life ever since like September of last year. Every single week is like counting down the days, but we’re getting there. And I’m currently designing a notion, and I will be returning to Sigma at the end of the year. And I come from more of a background in visual design and storytelling, specifically filmmaking, and I got my start leading design at a startup in the Bay Area while I was transferring schools, and through that I found product design specifically, and I found that it was like this very unique fusion of the creative and the analytical at the same time, that just really clicked for me. And ever since then I basically was just exploring kind of different industries and company sizes and problem spaces more broadly, and through that and working at startups and Sigma and most recently notion, I found that creative tools were what I was the most like just completely pulled towards and really wanted to just dig deeper and explore what impact they could have. I think that there’s something about making something that enables other people to make other things that is just like incredibly gratifying for me in a way that no other product design projects really touch. And I think more broadly, I’m really interested in the combined power of like design and tech to foster creativity and community across the board, and that was definitely like the inspiration behind this thesis and also like a through line to just things that interest me across the board and in terms of like doing school and work at the same time, I think it’s really just about The space that the pandemic has provided for free time, sadly, I definitely have profited. 00:05:30 - Speaker 2: Uh, so that’s your productivity hack is be doing this all during a massive lockdown that prevents other kinds of fun things that. 00:05:38 - Speaker 1: Exactly, it’s the best one. I highly recommend. No, it’s kind of the worst, and I feel honestly a little bit guilty to have like done so well during such a terrible time, but then at the same time, I’m very grateful. So there we have it. 00:05:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of that hits on things that speak very much to me, and I think others that I feel like are in our field, however you want to define that, they’re making tools to help others create, which I think is in many ways a harder or more interesting product design problem. It’s one that maybe historically has not been seen as very sexy when you think of, I don’t know, productivity tools, whether it’s a word processor or a video editing tool or something like that. They don’t have the same kind of sleek attention to detail that often more consumer products do. Maybe that’s starting to change now and at least I hope a little bit this concept of a tools for thought field which we talked about with all the way back in our podcast episode with Andy Matuschek about kind of transforming. From the stodgy idea of, I don’t know, word processors have been the same for 25 years and very utilitarian and just the word design doesn’t get associated with them. Maybe that’s starting to change now, which I’m very excited about. 00:06:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. And also it’s interesting because I think I’m young enough to have grown up with those tools and like been in Photoshop from a very young age, and there’s something. Definitely about them that is just so intimidating and so difficult to comprehend from somebody who is not like acclimated to the environment and doesn’t understand the principles that they operate on, and I think that that’s slowly changing, but it’s definitely like, it’s still happening, we’re still figuring out the best way to do it cause it is complicated, and they’re offering a lot of different things in the same place. 00:07:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one thing about computing in general and creative tools in particular is they’re just so new on a relative time scale. We’re still figuring it all out. There’s some established practices, but when you compare it to a lot of other fields where I don’t know if you’re a woodworker, the best tools for doing woodworking have been slowly refined over the course of hundreds of years, and here in computing we’re still kind of just banging two rocks together to figure out how to make things, so. 00:07:52 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, we’re definitely still figuring things out. 00:07:56 - Speaker 2: Have you found there’s any particular, I don’t know, skills or approaches that came from this kind of film visual design background that you talked about that translate well and give you unique insights that maybe some of your colleagues don’t have doing digital product design? 00:08:10 - Speaker 1: Hm, that’s an interesting question. I mean, inherently audio and video software is. Incredibly hard to understand, and I think that it takes a preexisting like knowledge and investment and really being able to go into these tools that are just like an incredibly blank slate, and they offer so much possibility, but where it is is like up to you to really figure out and even understand what you’re looking for. And so I think Having that background in feeling comfortable just tackling these like interfaces that are very unfriendly, honestly, it does help, and I think it also helps me to understand a lot of the principles that some of the other creative tools are just beginning to adopt, and there’s a lot of like efficiency and abstraction work that has been developed and cultivated in Video and audio tools that is just beginning to kind of pop up its head in just more simple, more like consumer everyday creative tools. And I also think that fundamentally having a background in like video is also just like a Background in storytelling, which is applicable everywhere, and I think it’s becoming even more applicable in tools like design tools and writing tools and being able to help foster those stories and also to kind of weave in the story of the tool is kind of an underrated thing. And it’s not the primary concern, but it definitely is a piece of the broader puzzle of getting people to feel comfortable enough to create in the tools. So there’s something interesting there, but it’s definitely still in its nascent form. 00:09:52 - Speaker 3: Molly, it’s interesting that you mentioned growing up with complex tools like Photoshop and that being a help in using other tools in the future. I didn’t grow up on Photoshop, I grew up on Kipics. I remember when I first tried to learn programming, the tools were so foreign and unapproachable that I almost completely bounced off the field. It was like VI, which is an incredible maze and like all the Java server side stuff. It was just completely wild. And it was only because of Ruby on Rails that I found something that I could basically get working and running end to end. And once you go through it a few times, you kind of calibrate on like how terrible things should be when you’re first learning something. But I do think a lot of people just bounce off these complex Pro Tools for a reason like that. 00:10:32 - Speaker 1: 100%. I feel very lucky to have become comfortable in them at a very young age, and that was through like pirating Photoshop and getting gifted a Wacom tablet and just really starting by making really, really rudimentary like digital art and things like that. But it definitely was like the type of thing that I would try to teach my friends and things like that and kind of bring it into other areas, and it was just not adopted. It was like my understanding and knowledge of the tool was something that I definitely took for granted for a very long time. And it definitely has made me think differently too about creative tools across the board of like, wow, if you really invest in like getting people in these tools at a young age and really acclimated and understanding how they work, like there’s a lot of potential there, but it’s not scalable. So like there has to be other approaches other than that, so interesting problem that we’re only beginning to run up into. 00:11:31 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is computers and creativity, which is not at all coincidentally, the name of your thesis which you published recently, and of course I’ll link that in the show notes here, and I recommend everyone go read it. Not only is it great content, but a beautiful presentation that really takes good advantage of sort of the web as an article format. So naturally folks can go read it, but maybe for those that haven’t yet, just to prime the discussion here, maybe you want to give us a brief summary of its contents. 00:12:01 - Speaker 1: Most definitely, yeah, so my thesis is really about how can digital creative tools best augment human creativity and collaboration. And it’s really looking at the potential of creative tools as co-creators with human beings and examining kind of returning to the original vision of creative tools and how we can extract some of the things that were realized and some of them that weren’t and kind of analyze that for the present of creative tools and to kind of contextualize that with an observation, from my vantage point, I really think that the power of tools lies in their ability to Amplify human action or thought versus the power of human beings is really about our ability to think creatively. And so if that’s true, then why do computers often ask us to act as almost execution machines ourselves to create something when that’s like very uniquely the computer’s strong suit. So the paper delves into a lot of different areas and kind of the history and analyzing the present, but The main point here and like the TLDR that I kind of reach is that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools really need to be interoperable or basically talk to each other. They need to be moldable or customizable to different phases of the creative process. They need to be efficient abstracted, which is similar to moldable. They basically just need to Accommodate more or less complexity at different stages, and lastly, they just need to be community driven so that people can be inspired and get help when they’re creating. So that is the very abbreviated version of my very long blog post, but I’d love to dig deeper into all of that. 00:13:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that resonates very much with stuff we’d love to talk about here and things Mark and I spent a lot of time talking about. Yeah, I guess maybe to dig in a little bit on, for example, that first section where you look back at what you called the original vision or or sort of the history. And folks who’ve been banging around in the tool space for some time will certainly recognize a lot of this, Engelbart and K and Hypercard and Flash, and Dynabook and so on, but I think it’s one of the nicer collections of summarizing all that, that isn’t, I don’t know, a super long book, so it’s a nice way to get up to speed on that. Now, it is interesting with Sort of look at this history, which I think is often presented as kind of yeah, there was these amazing visionaries who saw the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision way back in what seems like just the Stone Ages to us, the 1960s, the 1970s, and then in some ways we lost our way and we ended up with, I don’t know, social media and Kind of lock down appliance like smartphones and in fact there’s this glorious world of I don’t know, small talk and dying a book and mother of all demos style stuff that we still need to build or we haven’t built or something like that. Do you see it as like that’s an unfulfilled vision or the flip side could be, OK, well, they had some cool ideas, some of those worked out, practiced, some of them didn’t. The reason. We don’t have everything there is that maybe some of it wasn’t practical, and I’m never fully sure how to think about the kind of lionization that we do some of these past figures. 00:15:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel the same way. I think that there’s a lot of tension and just basically more analysis that needs to be done there. I think that it’s very easy to put these people on a pedestal and just say, wow, look at this incredible vision that they outlined, and we do that, and I think that they do present some really compelling ideas and their way of framing computers as being a tool to almost augment human intelligence is something that I particularly am pretty compelled by, but obviously a lot of their ideas did fail and there’s reasons for that. Um, and I also think that they were operating in an environment that was largely kind of independent from the actual business environment and like the technology sector as we see it today. So, like, will those ideas actually thrive in reality and especially in the consumer preferences and like relationship we have with tech today. Maybe not, but I think that they Still present some really interesting kind of principles and ways of looking at computers that we can definitely take some inspiration from. And I also think that like we rely on a lot of the principles that they established. And I think it’s just really important to like recognize that and kind of piece apart what we took and what we didn’t, and maybe what we can take more of or what we should reconsider. I just think that fundamentally This is great of history, especially in a field like tech, which is kind of in some ways pretty disconnected from its own history. And there’s almost kind of like a pride in that of moving so quickly that we don’t even look to the past. 00:17:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, or I’d almost listed as a sort of willful disregard of history because I think there’s the classic, I don’t know, why combinator or startup founder. Out of school, it’s actually their naivety that allows them to reinvent, you know, they’re not dragged down by the legacy baggage of how we do things today. They can just think about it in kind of a green field way and dream up a new idea and maybe technology has changed enough that there’s new parameters and they can really do something new, but that comes at the expense of, well, actual naivete and reinventing everything. And not using scholarship of the past to learn what’s worked and what hasn’t in order to kind of stand on the shoulders of giants or build the way that any other field would. Of course, you learn from the past and then you use that to inform what you should do going forward into the future. And yeah, the young naive startup founder or other types that we hold up as our role models sometimes in technology are not into scholarship of the past, let’s say. 00:18:11 - Speaker 1: Very well put. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I’m very curious though to hear what both of you think of, as you put it like the lionization of Engelbart and Kay and all of those people, cause it seems to be a pretty disputed topic. 00:18:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this opens a quite an interesting door for me. My sense is that a lot of people look at what these early pioneers did, and intuitively they feel like that is good, it should have succeeded. Why don’t we have this? They had it 50 years ago, what’s going on? And at the same time, the current reality, like you were saying, is not exactly that. And I think it’s really important to understand why that is, and I think you were alluding to what’s happening where a lot of this study and analysis has been at the level of the tools. So it’s like what’s on the screen, how do you program it? What’s the user interface even, but there’s an entire complex system around how software is developed and used. And like you were saying, I think the reason that the vision for the software and the reality of the software don’t line up is because we haven’t understood or Accounted for how that ecosystem works. So sometimes I call this the political economy of software development. There’s weird path dependence, there’s economic incentives. You got to understand all of that if you are going to understand how we came to where we are now. And on the flip side, if you want to predict and guide the future in that direction, you need to become a sort of political economist of software and get in not only the interfaces in the code, but also the funding and the incentives and legal stuff and all that. 00:19:39 - Speaker 1: Hm, yeah, that’s very well put too. I definitely agree. I think there’s so much complexity and also just like context that’s missing from so many of the analysis of these past tools, and they’re very like independent floating ideas versus actually tangible grounded concepts that could be turned into something real. 00:19:58 - Speaker 2: I think a lot of what you both said to me kind of just describes that these folks were visionaries in the sense of also being sort of ivory tower academics or whether or not they were an academic, they were purposefully somewhat disconnected from, for example, commercial realities and that is part of what allowed them to have big dreams. And those dreams are still inspiring to this day, but then if those dreams are to become reality, at some point they do have to be connected to the real world, and this is a huge problem in research generally, which is there’s a technology transfer, how does something go from the lab or From that more idea space that science excels at into something practical that you can use and there isn’t a good path. This is something that the I can switch research lab where Mark and I are both participants is trying to improve upon, but yeah, it’s a really hard problem because a lot of times the same people, it’s a very different kind of person that can have the big dreams versus that can kind of make it into reality. And when you think of one of the most famous examples, Xerox Park, and some of the ideas they had there, and Steve Jobs basically got a glimpse of it. He was a guy that was good at actualizing things. He got a glimpse of it and then basically stole it and then went and made a practical thing. And of course, often the visionaries feel, no, you left out important parts, but leaving out parts is actually part of how you make something come to reality. So I don’t want to dismiss these historic folks as The academics that don’t know how to bring their ideas to reality. In many cases they did make great working software or even hardware that in some cases went on to turn into underpinnings of tools we have today, right? Small talk turned into Objective C and that, you know, fed into Ruby and. SWF and other languages that, for example, we use heavily on the Muse team, you know, these are very much things that are in the real world. But maybe there is an acknowledgement that the big dreams aren’t enough, you need to do something to connect it to reality. Yeah. 00:21:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I also think there are two separate axes here. So there’s the axis of What are you looking at? So it could be pure software, or it could be called the software ecosystem, and then there’s the axis of visionary and idealist versus in the weeds pragmatist. And I think in our discussion that we might have been kind of conflating those two things, but in fact, I think you can have, and I think we need more visionary idealists on the political economy side of software. Probably the closest thing we’ve seen to that is the original free software movement and that obviously got some traction and made some progress, but I think we need to re-date that for the world of cloud and mobile, where the original free software vision basically broke down, I would say. Just as an aside, this is one of my favorite creativity techniques where you identify the axes, you know, the rows and the columns of the spreadsheet, and you label each row in each column, and you see often you know what the entries in certain of those boxes are, but you can perhaps intuit that one of the boxes hasn’t been filled. yet or given a name or explored and just by sort of drawing the map like that, you can identify new quadrants. There’s a cool research paper that I read on this about data structures where they kind of identified all the different ways you can build data structures and then found the blank spots in the maps and went and synthesized those new data structures just on the basis of this cell in the spreadsheet should exist. 00:23:24 - Speaker 1: So fascinating. That is awesome. I can like visually imagine that in my brain. It’s great. 00:23:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if it sounds like I have a critique for some of these historic visionaries, let me bring the positive side, which is I do totally agree that they did lay out a vision for computing that is grounding in a world where we do seem stuck in, yeah, social media, consumer, I’m not. Exactly sure what everything is oriented around commerce and again, things that are all good commerce, entertainment, these things are fine. I consume these, but the reason I got interested in computers at a very young age is seeing their potential for creativity and unlocking the noblest parts of the human spirit. And it’s a good reminder to go back and look at some of this history, maybe especially because these folks didn’t have any of that prior stuff. Computers were still so new, particularly personal computing was essentially, you know, they were in the process of inventing it, thinking what could people do if they had access to computers with graphics and networking and all the things that nowadays we take for granted, but they dreamed of something very different from the world we have today, and that can be very grounding to look back at that and take a bit of a blank slate from where we are today. So yeah, I personally take a lot of inspiration from all their work as well. 00:24:44 - Speaker 1: Totally agree. I think there’s something too very compelling about. At least for me when I was reading these texts, how they kind of frame computers as partners with human beings, and I kind of integrate that as like a co-creation relationship, which is definitely a very squishy one that I think we’re still defining, but there’s something that feels very like a breath of fresh air to think about the computer as like a counterpart instead of something that is Potentially replacing us or stealing our attention or something of that sort, even just asking so much of us. It’s more like, oh, the computer is here to help. And I think that that in particular is something that I hope we optimize more for in creative tools specifically, and there’s a lot of potential there. 00:25:26 - Speaker 2: Very well said. I do feel like more often than not in the modern world you’re stealing your attention as one example. You’re sort of fighting against the computer and perhaps it’s not the computer itself, it’s the whole world of computing, the internet, or email inboxes, notifications, the way that the web works, and so on that you’re often either fighting. Again this thing trying to make you do things you don’t want to do or take away your attention or distract you, or it wants you to do its chores, you know, click this, update this, do this, fill out this box, and it should be a tool quietly waiting for what you’re asking of it and to, as you said, co-create and help you in what you’re trying to do. I like this quote from the original Tron movie which is at one point the bad guy basically says, look, you know, the systems are overloaded because we don’t have time to handle every little user request, and the guy he’s speaking to is kind of the wise and old computer sciences, actually user requests is what computers are for, and I feel like it’s so often forgotten. They are here to serve us and sometimes it feels more often the human has to serve the computer or perhaps the business. Interests and I’m a capitalist, so don’t get me wrong, but the business needs, the KPI of whoever designed the product, it’s asking me to do things to serve that rather than my needs. 00:26:49 - Speaker 1: I love that quote. That is fantastic. I want that on a bumper sticker. 00:26:54 - Speaker 3: It’s great. Related to this, Molly, one thing I really appreciate about your thesis was you surface this idea of, I forget what you call it, but I would call it like vibe, basically, it’s like emotion, motivation, valence. I think that’s so important because if you have software that’s giving you a hard time, it’s not just a tactical or mechanical issue. It’s now you’re in a whole different mindset of, uh, you know, I’m dealing with the check boxes or whatever, and you’re much less likely to be creative and to keep doing it going forward and so I thought maybe you could talk a little bit in your own words about that aspect of creative software. 00:27:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that this is one that is like just beginning to form and it’s mainly because we’ve advanced to a point where there’s enough competition that we can actually focus on vibes or whatever you want to call it. And I think when I was writing about this, and it’s something I think about a lot. I definitely think about software like Figma, which I think that there’s something to be said for just bringing a more playful approach and just treating the user with more respect and really trying to validate them, not get in their way. It really comes back to establishing the baseline of being like a very good piece of software that does the job well. But beyond that, how you can actually differentiate the piece of software, especially in creative tools, it’s really just about like the personality and the kind of attitude that the software brings to the user, and I think you see that reflected in the way that it talks to the user and the colors and just little visual things and even just like the ambient environment of their landing page. It’s just very small things, but they do add up, and it in the increasing A larger landscape of creative tools, people are going to pick the one that they identify more with. And I think that that is incredibly interesting to me personally, from like a storytelling perspective of like how we can try to create things that are more inclusive to more people and just try to get more people in the tool that might not have a background and experience scaling these tools and really navigating these usually dark gray interfaces. But yeah, I think vibe is, it’s a nascent field for software. We’re still figuring it out. 00:29:04 - Speaker 2: So there’s a section in here titled Standardization, which I think is about file formats and ultimately is how tools work together and actually something we’ve talked about on this podcast before, including with Balant from Kraft talking about the different ways he wanted to try to have essentially toolmaker humility, which is realizing that the tool you were creating for your users. One of many that they are using and you should try to as much as possible, be a good citizen and work together, although in many ways it seems with the highly sandboxed world that we get in kind of mobile apps as well as to some degree, maybe the web and cloud, you have these silos and they just aren’t really designed to work together. So what do you see as kind of the future going forward from here for, I don’t know, tools working together? 00:29:51 - Speaker 1: I think honestly, if I had to pick one concept for this project that I really like strongly stand behind and is like the hill that I’m willing to die on, it would probably be this one. I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity. And specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. I think that there’s so much to be said for tools amplifying the power of our brains and really taking over the mechanical aspects of human thought and limiting creation to a single piece of software’s capabilities is just kind of crazy if you step back and think about it. And I just think that standardization and having tools talk to each other would just fundamentally change the tide of how we use them and introduce in more collaborators and really just expand the project’s constraints beyond any One tool. And this is a really hard one. Like, solving this problem is something that I feel like is a huge problem that I just don’t even know how to approach because it is pretty much in direct contradiction to the current business models of most creative tool companies. But I’d love to hear both of your thoughts on this because it’s a huge topic and it’s definitely one ripe with controversy. 00:31:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and just to expand on the motivation here, I think collaborating across tools can mean several different things. It can mean, like you were saying, you have a given project and at different stages of the project, you want to be able to use different tools. That’s one case where an open format would help. You might want to collaborate with other people. And they might want to use their own tools, which is different from yours. It’s another case. And also there’s this element of time where over time software tools tend to atrophy. Companies come and go, you know, platforms change, but you at least want your data and to be able to carry that with you in some sort of archive at least. So there are many cases where having such interoperability would be helpful. Yes, it’s extremely hard and by the way, I think this is a prime example of the political economy issue. It’s very easy to say we should have X, and even if X is relatively easy to do, which is not in this case, there’s still this huge issue of the. We should. That’s quite the weasel phrase, right? Really, it’s, if we were to accomplish this, we would need a bunch of companies or individual developers to temporarily make more work for themselves, lower their profitability, make their products worse for the customers in the short term to get to some other global maximum. It’s a case where the coordination problem is really important. 00:32:36 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, and it’s definitely like invisible work that does not really result in much actual profit for the company, it’s much more of like a long term investment that would require all the companies getting on the same page and really agreeing to terms and it’s really a long term relationship with each other too, which is kind of crazy to even fathom how that could happen. 00:33:00 - Speaker 2: I guess to highlight what I consider a bright spot or a positive version of this, I do think files on some of these flat file formats, which includes plaintext.txt, markdown. Image formats, PNG, JPEG, probably yeah, MP4 movies increasingly audio clips, PDFs. Now PDFs come with a lot of baggage. They are very complex to render, but ultimately there are pretty standardized ways to do that. And importantly, yeah, PDF does not demand. You have, for example, Adobe Acrobat, maybe it did at one time, but now it’s a tool you can open with. very standard viewers on any platform you can edit it and so on. It’s something we strive for in Muse because we kind of have this value but again where we are subject to the same constraints as others working with, especially making an app on a platform like iOS. But for example, we do store most of the raw, you know, when you drag an image in, we store that as a raw image in one of these standard file formats and in fact, if you do a bundle. Export you just get a zip archive that it contains as much as possible formats, you know, the ink is in SVG and that sort of thing. So we try to do that as much as we can. Now in practice, a muse bundle zip archive that has a bunch of loose media in it and is not sort of you know arranged on this board maybe is of mixed value. So I guess that does lead into maybe one of the more standard objections. The standardization, which is essentially that it is maybe counter to innovation. It creates a lowest common denominator. If every markdown editor, for example, has to support that format, if you want to do something interesting like make it really easy to embed video with captions of particular time clips, and that’s just not part of the format, so you just can’t do it or you break away and do something, you basically break the format in order to add that innovation to your tool. 00:34:51 - Speaker 3: I do remain optimistic that it can, and in fact will be solved. I think we will get a general purpose data medium that’s kind of like JSON is for the synchronous single user case. It natively allows collaboration. Obviously we’ve been working a little bit towards this with automerge and so forth in the lab, but I think it’s eventually going to happen, but it’s gonna take a lot of work and I suspect it’s probably not gonna happen by a bunch of people getting in a, you know, enormous room and everyone saying, OK, let’s form the consortium for X and do a two year study, and blah blah blah. I think it will be an organic, messy process led by some champions somewhere, whether they’re individuals or companies, but I do think it’s possible. And when we get there, it’ll be great. And like you were saying, we are, I don’t know if you were saying this on the podcast or if I read this in your thesis, but we’re relatively early in this world of collaborative software. It seems so obvious to us that you have Google Docs and Figma, but that’s I don’t know what, 10 years old or something, so also just gotta give it a little bit of time. 00:35:49 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, I think we’re still figuring it out and really trying to understand like what to prioritize and what is the most important in the long term and just beginning to think long term, that this is going to be around and I think we’re still like even developing the social norms and values that we as like the users and the makers like care about. There’s a lot of development still happening. There that is like incredibly interesting and I think it’ll all shake out OK, but we just have to like really nail down what’s important and how we’re gonna like think about this in the long term, because even though things like standardization are not particularly enticing, like if we want it to be around for a while and if we want our work to be compounding, then it’s like you said, increasingly important. 00:36:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll offer as a counter example to the, you know, standardization and innovation dilemma, the web, where essentially there has been a lot of innovation on the web, but no one company owns that format, and perhaps there’s some complaints you can have about a particular browser monoculture at any given time, Google Chrome at the moment. It is truly an open format, you can parse it with a lot of different tools, and it will have, I think, the longevity that will go beyond any particular browser. 00:37:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s some, we do a whole podcast on protocols and stuff, but I do think there are some important lessons in the web stack, one of which is they’re relatively thin layers, or at least the layers that work the best are pretty thin. So whenever you make a layer that’s an abstraction or protocol, you get the benefit of aligning some decision space, and if it’s a relatively thick layer, you get the benefit of you’re aligning a lot of decisions together, so there’s a lot of interoperability, but then you run a sort of exponential risk of one of those things being wrong and then the whole game breaks apart. So the layers for the web are thin enough that, at least in the lower layers, you could plausibly say there aren’t huge mistakes, such that people would want to go off and do something totally different, at least for the original web use case. So here in this case, I think we’re more likely, for example, to have success with the interoperability standard that’s more like JSON and less like address book standard format, right? Something that’s less like the business objects, or if you have those, they emerge kind of organically out of more general purpose data medium, so I don’t know, we’ll see. 00:38:03 - Speaker 1: Can’t wait to see. 00:38:04 - Speaker 2: We’ve hinted a few times, I think you’ve mentioned a few times kind of the the relationship between collaboration and creativity and the co-creation element, and from my perspective, this is a relatively new element of computing creativity. You mentioned using Photoshop, growing up on Photoshop. That was a private activity. Maybe you could send a file to someone else at very great effort by putting it on a floppy disk and carrying it over to them. But you didn’t really do that very often. It was typically a private activity and furthermore, I think for many creativity is often something that is a little bit done in private. It’s sort of this vulnerable act, but then perhaps that’s changing partially because of collaborative software like Google Docs and FigMA and Notion and others. And in fact, we had a whole episode with Nicholas Cline from Sigma, who I think you might know, basically talking about, he’s also a younger guy, and I think, you know, for him, there is less of this creativity is this thing done in private, of course you make stuff together with friends, with colleagues. That’s just how it’s been. So maybe that’s culture is changing partially because the tools are changing. But for the purposes of computers and creativity and how you see it Molly, what do you see as the relationship between creating together versus a more private activity? 00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I think this is a really interesting one, and I think we’re still figuring it out from my perspective. I think creative tools, ideally should accommodate for both, um, from my perspective, I think right now they kind of still fall into two buckets of either solo or collaborative and collaborative in like the Google Docs or FIMA sense. And I think there’s immense value in having tools that do both. They optimize for incredible solo creation and incredible multiplayer building upon each other’s ideas, and I admittedly, I think I lean more in the direction of like how Nico thinks about these things of allowing in more collaborators earlier on and feeling comfortable doing so because I grew up with these tools in a fully collaborative Google Docs form. But I do think that what’s interesting here is that these tools are so new, and we’re still just like as human beings figuring out what is expected and like what does ownership mean in these environments and just trying to establish like social norms there, and that is like a very squishy one that I think will just take time. But for me, this really just like reinforces the value of moldability and ideally the tool would just accommodate, like I said, both solo and collaborative work and provide you like the resources and tools that you need to create those environments for yourself because I think Tools being less opinionated about an assumptive about what you need in those modes is going to be a great thing. I would love to see for tools to give you the features that you need to really create your unique creative space, whatever that looks like. And I think this also comes back to what Niko was talking about when he was talking about like the flywheel effect of collaboration. And really creating in the same spaces and building upon each other’s ideas. I think that that is a very different mode than like the solo creation kind of brainstorming, but ideally the tool could scale to both. So that’s like my current thinking. But I think that’s really hard, and I think that that’s two completely different things and optimizing for very, very different, almost in some ways audiences like those are sometimes the same person, but oftentimes they’re not or they’re a different subset of people and I don’t know, I think news is an interesting example here too, and I’m curious to hear what both of your thinking is because obviously that is optimizing more for the generative like solo environment in a really wonderful way. 00:42:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the challenge of a true thinking tool and really, you know, we’re trying to cover the very earliest part of the ideation funnel, let’s call it, or the creation funnel, which is that early ideation where you normally use a sketchbook or a whiteboard, something that is not at all intended to be a final artifact, but is about figuring out what you want to make in the first place or making a decision or just forming up your vision rather than any deliverable artifact. And that is something that does tend to be maybe creativity at its most private, like something about a sketchbook is just something that you really feel is truly private. And in fact, you know, we’ve been looking into things to try to add some collaborative capabilities, hopefully building on our values around privacy and sort of a calm sanctuary and all that sort of thing, but it is a real challenge. We could easily lose what’s good and we have even heard from Users and customers, they say no, or they’re worried, right? They say, I don’t necessarily want you to add that because then it’ll turn into this more chaotic environment that I associate with these team spaces, for example. So, I think there is a way to cut that Gordian knot, but it’s a huge design challenge, obviously. 00:43:16 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the goal is definitely to eventually accommodate all the different types or topologies of social or non-social collaboration, and it is my hope that we’re able to eventually do it in one tool, because as you have a project, you tend not to want to be jumping around through different tools, or at least to do so only with very good interoperability, and every time you do do a jump there’s a bit of an activation energy costs. And yeah, as we’ve studied the creative process by talking with creative professionals and in other ways, we have found that there’s maybe a half dozen different typical topologies. There’s you’re basically ideating alone, there’s call and response feedback, there’s real time, kind of everyone at the whiteboard collaboration, there’s a sync building up a corpus together like a tracker, uh and there’s like presentation and sharing in real time. And I think it’s possible to get all of those in one tool, but it will take some time. The reason we started with the initial ideation phase was a felt like that was the most underserved, and the one we had the most unique angle on, and also there’s something to doing the first step first, if you will, just in terms of building up the full user journey over time. 00:44:25 - Speaker 2: One thing I do imagine with any tool that has both collaborative capabilities as well as solo capabilities, and by the way, exactly as Mark said, collaborative actually covers a whole host of different modalities, even just talking about synchronous versus asynchronous, for example, I think one of the big things we’ve learned. From Google Docs, it’s not really about the real-time collaboration. It’s about having a document you know is up to date and in practice it probably is asynchronous. You sent it out, you shared it out, and someone added comments or added something to it while you were asleep, and then you’re looking at it again later, so it’s asynchronous, but you know it’s up to date. But I think if you’re clever or if you’re able to find the right combination, it shouldn’t be hopefully you’re serving those two audiences or the whatever all the modalities are, but that each one needs their own features and then pretty soon you’ve got this overstuffed product that does too many things that in fact you can find things that serve many or all of those cases. One great example to me, which is very much about creative process and how you work as version control as a developer. The first really good quality version control system I used was something called CBS many years ago. It’s kind of a precursor to this version, and then that was kind of replaced by Git in the world of decentralized revision control. But in any case, when I discovered revision control was sort of pitched as well, this is so you can work with someone else. And so in theory you don’t need it if you’re on a solo project, but I really quickly found, oh actually this is really nice. It brings a sense of OK, I’m going to work on something for a while and then package that up into what I would now call a commit, give that committed name. I can look back at my own history. I get kind of a log, you know, an undo, sort of like a large scale undo history, but it also creates a lot more structure for my own thinking about it. Obviously that’s made its way into now this collaborative space as well, which is when you’re writing the commit message, it’s for yourself, understanding what you’ve done, but also for your colleagues, so they’ll be able to see what you’re doing. And so it feels like a lot of the tools of revision control or a lot of the features of it, including how the discs work and how commits work, and all that sort of thing, both serve an individual working on a solo basis, maybe collaborating with themselves through time, you might say, and a small team or a big team working together on something. 00:46:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. I think it’s also just like retraining ourselves a little bit to once we acclimate to the standards of like a collaborative tool or something that’s optimized for that, usually that actually directly translates to the more solo experience, not always, but I mean, having different practices in different areas, that doesn’t seem particularly intuitive either, um, and a lot of these. Processes for organization are applicable everywhere. There’s a lot of crossover between the features. I think it’s just about like establishing where we are and really like, I think making people more aware of where they are in their creative process is something that’s going to become increasingly relevant to, and that’s something that we’re still kind of figuring out in creative tools is like, which tool is used for what and like how do they, again, how do they talk to each other? Can they talk to each other? And how are we going to like use them together, which is like the bigger question and very difficult today. 00:47:39 - Speaker 2: I’m definitely a fan of the pipeline approach, at least in my own work, which is, it’s less about that I want to use 3 different tools simultaneously. At one stage, but more at a particular stage, I’m using a particular tool, so that’s the case for something like writing, where when I’m trying to figure out what I want to say, I’m using news or sketchbook or some other ideation tool for thought thing. But when I’m writing, that’s actually not the right thing. Now I want a writing tool, a scrivenner, a craft, a Google Docs. But that’s not my publishing platform. From there I’m going to go to something that’s usually on the web, but it might also be in PDF or it’s Lawtech if it’s an academic format, and sort of at each stage, in a way, the transition to the new tool, which does involve some labor to translate it across, even when they’re fairly interoperable. For me, it’s almost good for my creative process because there’s this little ritual of now I’m ready to jump over into this next stage, it’s graduated. 00:48:37 - Speaker 1: Totally, yeah, and I think acknowledging that process and paving the way and making it as seamless, but also I don’t know, building in the opportunity for you to use that as a point of reflection and almost editing cause I totally relate to that as well as like moving from ideation to first draft or something like that. That’s really like also uh editing and refinement moment as well, and you don’t want to cut that out completely. So it’s again kind of letting people choose how they want the tool to behave. I think it’s gonna become increasingly relevant for creative tools. 00:49:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this idea of acknowledging is really important. So there is the underlying platonic ideals of multi-step creative processes of social creative processes, and in fact it’s like always has been, and we can link to the always has been me here. But people have always been, you know, taking pictures of their whiteboard under their phone or like shuttling around USB sticks in the case of social collaboration. So I think if you do the careful ethnographic research and take off your blinders about what software we currently do or don’t have, you’ll see these underlying patterns and a lot of what we’re doing with Muse and a lot of what we talked on this podcast is how do you align the software with those platonic ideals of creative work. 00:49:51 - Speaker 2: All right, Mark, I think you’ve signed yourself up to create the always has been meme with that content that we can include in the Twitter thread for this episode. 00:50:00 - Speaker 3: All right, I’ll bust out the meme editor. 00:50:03 - Speaker 1: Cannot wait to see it. 00:50:06 - Speaker 2: Now when I’ve worked on really long pieces, sometimes 5 or 10,000 word pieces we did for ink and Switch or the 12factor app or other larger pieces, for me it’s the case that you ship not by finishing writing everything you want to write, but by choosing to cut out a lot of it. And so I’m curious what things might have ended up on the cutting room floor that you think are worth telling us about here. 00:50:29 - Speaker 1: Oh man, so many. I completely relate to, I think it’s so hard to know when to ship something like this, and my current rule of thumb is like, if I have way more questions, but I know just how long it’ll take to investigate them. And it’ll kind of distract from the focus of the piece. That’s when I’m like, OK, maybe I’m getting closer than I thought I was. But in terms of ideas that I’ve cut, this project actually started off focused on flow state, and I was very interested in how software could facilitate more flow state in human beings. And that’s a very broad question. I realized that’s exactly why I cut it, is because it is actually, the deeper you dig into. flow state, the more you discover that it’s very subjective and the definition of it is still kind of up in the air, depending on the discipline that you look at it through. So while it’s super interesting, that is definitely something I cut, but not before doing a lot of research on kind of the psychological conditions and what goes into flow state and how people report to experience it, which I think is really interesting still. And I would love to write a whole another thesis on that. But it’s still a tough topic to nail down. 00:51:46 - Speaker 2: And just to briefly define that one this is probably one of the most quoted or cited concepts from modern psychology, which is there’s a state that I think originally they were looking at athletes maybe when they’re sort of at their peak performance, but maybe in our own lives we’ve experienced this on running. Or doing some kind of sports or something where you’re just in this well state of flow where everything seems to come effortlessly and it seems like you’re higher, somehow you’re questioning brain narrator shuts itself down and you’re just in the moment in a way that’s very satisfying. And we talk about this a lot in the tech industry because of, I don’t know, even just a simple thing like making sure you have big blocks of time to really focus on stuff. We’ve talked about deep work, for example, that concept here before, but the idea that you want to optimize for flow state and yet technology and especially The internet now is so kind of anti-optimized for that that it wants to offer you information about things that are happening in the world and messages and notifications about everything that in the right moment can be connecting, but when you’re in flow state can be distracting. 00:52:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a really rich topic and it is interesting too something I realized in some feedback that I actually got when I was focused on flow state specifically was more academics, but they were like, what is the relevance of this? This seems like something that you’re just throwing in as like a buzzword to get people to immediately understand that you’re talking about deep creativity, but do I actually know what flow state is? Not really. And I hear that. I think that that’s true. I think we still need to kind of define what it looks like in different contexts. And that was kind of the reason that I decided to broaden up the inquiry to just look at creativity more broadly, because I think it Functions in a lot of forms, then you don’t have to be completely 100% into your work and thinking of nothing else and just ideas are flowing. Like there’s other forms where it’s more generative, or maybe you’re building upon other people’s ideas, and that’s not encapsulated into flow state, which is interesting, and I almost think that that calls for a more definition of like what creativity looks like in human beings, but that’s another topic entirely. Another topic that ended up on the cutting room floor was actually just more closely examining the emergence of more collaborative software and like what that looks like and actually basically examining the social conditions and the psychological needs that we have when we’re in collaborative environments because from my vantage point and I feel like the collective experience of most people, it’s kind of just been a free for all, and we’re still figuring it out, and there’s a lot of potential, obviously, and we’re already benefiting from it, but it’s interesting to think about kind of returning to Some of the work that’s already been done in like academia that looks at what people need to feel comfortable collaborating and almost like in the context of arts education and creativity research, there’s a lot that can be pulled from that that is obviously much more squishy. But it also has a lot of applicability to thinking about plopping people into creative environments and expecting them just to immediately generate ideas. I think that that is a common theme in a lot of tools today, especially collaborative tools, and I’m very curious how we can try to kind of break down what we know about human beings to address like their common concerns and possible drawbacks from the current experience. 00:55:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously when people talk about collaborative software, it’s very easy for that to quickly get into design or even very technical things of, you know, is it using operational transform or CRDTs, and there’s very hard technical challenges that we’re still working on, but the social side of it, the social norms as you’ve mentioned, and also people adjusting their own attitudes about what’s expected of them or what they can feel comfortable doing. You need to be comfortable to be creative, and we’re still figuring out how to do that well. I’m reminded of Tuckman’s stages of group development, which is sort of a psychologist looking at just how teams work together, but really just any group of people, and that there’s kind of this process, these five stages that that they define, which is this forming, storming, norming, performing, and mourning, just sort of how the team comes together, but what I thought was really interesting is once I’ve read this, I can spot this. Not with just any kind of team loosely defined. As a company or a subset of a company, but really any combination of people doing anything, even friends planning an event together or something like that, and there’s typically these early stages where everyone’s super polite and they don’t wanna step on any toes, but actually that stops you from really getting into it and really the true creativity happening, and then there has to be some level of conflict and discovering of roles in the group through, yeah, friction and problems and Even fights or whatever, and then social norms emerge from that, and then that’s when you really go into sort of the magic time, they’re performing stage because it’s sort of all figured out how to do things, and then you can be truly creative. 00:57:05 - Speaker 3: This also reminds me of the satir change model, which is a similar idea, maybe just generalize a little bit, where when things change, they don’t get uniformly better. It’s not all up to the right. You have some foreign element that comes in and instigates the change, and then you go through a period of chaos where your performance is worse, people are scared and they’re reluctant, and then eventually you got to find some transforming idea to bring you into the period of better performance. The way this connects back to this collaborative software discussion is. I think when we first introduced from a technological perspective, the ability to have real-time collaboration, that was a sort of foreign element where you have some of the things that you would expect with collaboration, like you can see what other typing, but you don’t have, for example, body language on facial expressions, you don’t have vocal intonation. And and so it feels like weird, like, basically you’re in the chaos of this Google Doc feels weird or something. But then we have things like, you know, emojis and so and so is typing and things like that and avatars that float around to show you where people are in the document. And so we’re building up the set of practices that will eventually allow people to have higher performances teams. 00:58:10 - Speaker 2: Even an initial negative reaction to why would you even want that. I remember when Google Docs came along, I actually used it when it was right before they were acquired, and that collaborative element, I said, wow, this is great that I can send a document to someone they don’t need to have Microsoft Word installed. We always know there’s the wrong latest version, and I tried to pitch people that I was working with on using it or saying, look, let’s use this tool because it seems so obvious to me this is A good way to do things and very often reaction was like, oh, like I don’t want people to be able to like see me typing or I don’t want other people to be able to edit my stuff, you know, I think maybe Figma relative to sketch actually had some of the same pushback as well. I don’t want people messing with. My designs that kind of a thing, and I think that’s quite natural, which is when you have existed in one paradigm in one set of capabilities, you take for granted that those capabilities or restrictions that that box is exactly the shape box that you want something new coming along offering new capabilities, you might even see those as anti-features. 00:59:16 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, I think that there’s there’s so much just push back and discovery we still need to do about people’s expectations in collaborative environments, and I think that there’s a delicate balance to be had to where