Podcasts about opendoc

Original text by Greg Maletic who is now at Panic, one of the few companies still making beautiful native non-Electron, non-Flutter Mac desktop applications–an endangered species. A technical walkthrough of OpenDoc from co-architect Kurt Piersol. Best comment: “… it's telling just how much talking is happening in this presentation and how little ‘actually showing OpenDoc working' there is.” Kurt still works at Apple! Apple's Macromedia Director slideshow that attempts to explain OpenDoc. The phrase “show, don't tell” once again springs to mind. Marketing fluff and download for WAV, the OpenDoc word processor component–one of the few components that made it to market, or more skeptically, one of the few OpenDoc components fullstop.

Moltz has a birthday, Guy discusses OpenDoc and Dan remembers CyberDog.A review of the TinyPod.Louie Mantia doesn't think much of Apple's new AI ads.We reminisce about OpenDoc.Our thanks to Notion, a perfect place to organize your tasks, track your habits, write beautiful docs, and collaborate with your team. Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, so you'll be in great company. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/therebound.If you want to help out the show and get some great bonus content, consider becoming a Rebound Prime member! Just go to prime.reboundcast.com to check it out!You can now also support the show by buying shirts, iPhone cases, hats and more items featuring our catchphrase, "TECHNOLOGY" and now shirts and hats featuring our stylish logo!

QuickDraw GX, meet unfinished developer tool prototype. Original text by Cameron Esfahani who is still at Apple today, ~30 years later. Chris Espinosa replied to the original: “Cam, with this thread you got maybe 500 people interested in SK8, which is a lot more than Jim Spohrer and I ever did.” Someone resurrected the SK8 section of www.research.apple.com as it stood in 1997. Download SK8, the source code, look at a screenshot of it, or read the user guide. In addressing QuickDraw's deficiencies by completely uprooting it, QuickDraw GX was naturally a bit of a compatibility nightmare. Like virtual memory and A/UX, you heard about it somewhat frequently through shareware README files, usually followed by “disable it” and/or “you're out of luck”. Like many things at Apple in the '90s, it also shipped years behind schedule: “QuickDraw GX will start shipping as an optional part of System 7.5 installs starting in September 1994“. Note that while three developers personally confronted Steve Jobs about OpenDoc at his famous WWDC 1997 Q&A session, nobody even mentioned QuickDraw GX in passing. Macworld readers respond to QuickDraw GX. A Quick Look At QuickDraw GX and another quick look.

How cool would it be to go up to a microphone and ask Steve Jobs a question directly? Well, that's what happened at World Wide Developers Conference 1997, where Steve Jobs answers questions about Apple's future, including: the death of OpenDoc, the Newton, Rhapsody, how to write apps 5 times faster, and more.Subscribe today so you don't miss a new episode! New episodes come out every other Monday morning (6:00 AM CT) so your Monday can be a funday!Special thanks to our friends at Linode for making this podcast possible! If you need cloud computing solutions, then you need Linode. Grab your $100 in free credit at https://linode.com/computerclan - If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode!5:34 - What About OpenDoc?9:40 - What Can Apple Do To Get Back…?13:58 - High-Speed Networking and Connectivity21:19 - Turnaround Times and Marketing25:02 - Competition and Licensing31:42 - Advertisements32:46 - The "Insult" Question35:38 - What About the Newton?37:42 - The Final Question38:20 - ConclusionSteve Jobs Biography (Affiliate Link): https://amzn.to/3sMHcpdOpenDoc CD Demo: https://youtu.be/oFJdjk2rq4EWhat Were Macintosh Clones? (Part 1): https://youtu.be/lwMzYFEGoagWWDC 1997 Steve Jobs Q&A: https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8Purchases via our sponsor and affiliate links help support the Computer Clan YouTube channel and this podcast. Thank you.Episode Transcription: https://thecomputerclan.com/transcriptions/AppleKeynoteChronicles-003.pdf

James and John discuss eBay finds: OpenDoc watch, Mac Office poster, and OS8 boxers. They revisit September 1990 in Macworld magazine, and news includes an iMac/Raspberry Pi project and the upcoming Apple Event. To see all of the show notes and join our website, join our Facebook page and visit us at RetroMacCast.

Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. OpenDoc. watchOS 7. Are you getting it? These are not three separate episodes ... this is one episode, and we're calling it "Another Italian Interjected."

Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. OpenDoc. watchOS 7. Are you getting it? These are not three separate episodes ... this is one episode, and we're calling it "Another Italian Interjected."

Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. OpenDoc. watchOS 7. Are you getting it? These are not three separate episodes ... this is one episode, and we're calling it "Another Italian Interjected."

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! Todays episode is going to be just a little bit unique. Or not unique as the case may be. Bill Gates sent a very important memo on May 26th, 1995. It's so important because of how well it foreshadows what was about to happen with this weird thing called the Internet. So we're going to simply provide the unaltered transcript and if you dig it, read a book or two of his. He is a surprisingly good writer. To: Executive Staff and direct reports From: Bill Gates Date: May 26, 1995 The Internet Tidal Wave Our vision for the last 20 years can be summarized in a succinct way. We saw that exponential improvements in computer capabilities would make great software quite valuable. Our response was to build an organization to deliver the best software products. In the next 20 years the improvement in computer power will be outpaced by the exponential improvements in communications networks. The combination of these elements will have a fundamental impact on work, learning and play. Great software products will be crucial to delivering the benefits of these advances. Both the variety and volume of the software will increase. Most users of communications have not yet seen the price of communications come down significantly. Cable and phone networks are still depreciating networks built with old technology. Universal service monopolies and other government involvement around the world have kept communications costs high. Private networks and the Internet which are built using state of the art equipment have been the primary beneficiaries of the improved communications technology. The PC is just now starting to create additional demand that will drive a new wave of investment. A combination of expanded access to the Internet, ISDN, new broadband networks justified by video based applications and interconnections between each of these will bring low cost communication to most businesses and homes within the next decade. The Internet is at the forefront of all of this and developments on the Internet over the next several years will set the course of our industry for a long time to come. Perhaps you have already seen memos from me or others here about the importance of the Internet. I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI). The PC analogy is apt for many reasons. The PC wasn't perfect. Aspects of the PC were arbitrary or even poor. However a phenomena grew up around the IBM PC that made it a key element of everything that would happen for the next 15 years. Companies that tried to fight the PC standard often had good reasons for doing so but they failed because the phenomena overcame any weaknesses that resisters identified. The Internet Today The Internet's unique position arises from a number of elements. TCP/IP protocols that define its transport level support distributed computing and scale incredibly well. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined an evolutionary path that will avoid running into future problems even as eventually everyone on the planet connects up. The HTTP protocols that define HTML Web browsing are extremely simple and have allowed servers to handle incredible traffic reasonably well. All of the predictions about hypertext - made decades ago by pioneers like Ted Nelson - are coming true on the Web. Although other protocols on the Internet will continue to be used (FTP, Gopher, IRC, Telnet, SMTP, NNTP). HTML with extensions will be the standard that defines how information will be presented. Various extensions to HTML, including content enhancements like tables, and functionality enhancements like secure transactions, will be widely adopted in the near future. There will also be enhanced 3D presentations providing for virtual reality type shopping and socialization. Another unique aspect of the Internet is that because it buys communications lines on a commodity bid basis and because it is growing so fast, it is the only "public" network whose economics reflect the latest advances in communications technology. The price paid for corporations to connect to the Internet is determined by the size of your "on-ramp" to the Internet and not by how much you actually use your connection. Usage isn't even metered. It doesn't matter if you connect nearby or half way around the globe. This makes the marginal cost of extra usage essentially zero encouraging heavy usage. Most important is that the Internet has bootstrapped itself as a place to publish content. It has enough users that it is benefiting from the positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets. I encourage everyone on the executive staff and their direct reports to use the Internet. I've attached an appendix, which Brian Flemming helped me pull together that shows some hot sites to try out. You can do this by either using the .HTM enclosure with any Internet browser or, if you have Word set up properly, you can navigate right from within this document. Of particular interest are the sites such as "YAHOO" which provide subject catalogs and searching. Also of interest are the ways our competitors are using their Websites to present their products. I think SUN, Netscape and Lotus do some things very well. Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network. This inversion where a public network solves a problem better than a private network is quite stunning. This inversion points out an opportunity for us in the corporate market. An important goal for the Office and Systems products is to focus on how our customers can create and publish information on their LANs. All work we do here can be leveraged into the HTTP/Web world. The strength of the Office and Windows businesses today gives us a chance to superset the Web. One critical issue is runtime/browser size and performance. Only when our Office - Windows solution has comparable performance to the Web will our extensions be worthwhile. I view this as the most important element of Office 96 and the next major release of Windows. One technical challenge facing the Internet is how to handle "real-time" content - specifically audio and video. The underlying technology of the Internet is a packet network which does not guarantee that data will move from one point to another at a guaranteed rate. The congestion on the network determines how quickly packets are sent. Audio can be delivered on the Internet today using several approaches. The classic approach is to simply transmit the audio file in its entirety before it is played. A second approach is to send enough of it to be fairly sure that you can keeping playing without having to pause. This is the approach Progressive Networks Real Audio (Rob Glaser's new company) uses. Three companies (Internet Voice Chat, Vocaltec, and Netphone) allow phone conversations across the Internet but the quality is worse than a normal phone call. For video, a protocol called CU-SeeMe from Cornell allows for video conferencing. It simply delivers as many frames per second as it sees the current network congestion can handle, so even at low resolution it is quite jerky. All of these "hacks" to provide video and audio will improve because the Internet will get faster and also because the software will improve. At some point in the next three years, protocol enhancements taking advantage of the ATM backbone being used for most of the Internet will provide "quality of service guarantees". This is a guarantee by every switch between you and your destination that enough bandwidth had been reserved to make sure you get your data as fast as you need it. Extensions to IP have already been proposed. This might be an opportunity for us to take the lead working with UUNET and others. Only with this improvement and an incredible amount of additional bandwidth and local connections will the Internet infrastructure deliver all of the promises of the full blown Information Highway. However, it is in the process of happening and all we can do is get involved and take advantage. I think that virtually every PC will be used to connect to the Internet and that the Internet will help keep PC purchasing very healthy for many years to come. PCs will connect to the Internet a variety of ways. A normal phone call using a 14.4k or 28.8k baud modem will be the most popular in the near future. An ISDN connection at 128kb will be very attractive as the connection costs from the RBOCs and the modem costs come down. I expect an explosion in ISDN usage for both Internet connection and point-to-point connections. Point-to-point allows for low latency which is very helpful for interactive games. ISDN point-to-point allows for simultaneous voice data which is a very attractive feature for sharing information. Example scenarios include planning a trip, discussing a contract, discussing a financial transaction like a bill or a purchase or taxes or getting support questions about your PC answered. Eventually you will be able to find the name of someone or a service you want to connect to on the Internet and rerouting your call to temporarily be a point-to-point connection will happen automatically. For example when you are browsing travel possibilities if you want to talk to someone with expertise on the area you are considering, you simply click on a button and the request will be sent to a server that keeps a list of available agents who can be working anywhere they like as long as they have a PC with ISDN. You will be reconnected and the agent will get all of the context of what you are looking at and your previous history of travel if the agency has a database. The reconnection approach will not be necessary once the network has quality of service guarantees. Another way to connect a PC will be to use a cable-modem that uses the coaxial cable normally used for analog TV transmission. Early cable systems will essentially turn the coax into an Ethernet so that everyone in the same neighborhood will share a LAN. The most difficult problem for cable systems is sending data from the PC back up the cable system (the "back channel"). Some cable companies will promote an approach where the cable is used to send data to the PC (the "forward channel") and a phone connection is used for the back channel. The data rate of the forward channel on a cable system should be better than ISDN. Eventually the cable operators will have to do a full upgrade to an ATM-based system using either all fiber or a combination of fiber and Coax - however, when the cable or phone companies will make this huge investment is completely unclear at this point. If these buildouts happen soon, then there will be a loose relationship between the Internet and these broadband systems. If they don't happen for some time, then these broadband systems could be an extension of the Internet with very few new standards to be set. I think the second scenario is very likely. Three of the biggest developments in the last five years have been the growth in CD titles, the growth in On-line usage, and the growth in the Internet. Each of these had to establish critical mass on their own. Now we see that these three are strongly related to each other and as they come together they will accelerate in popularity. The On-line services business and the Internet have merged. What I mean by this is that every On-line service has to simply be a place on the Internet with extra value added. MSN is not competing with the Internet although we will have to explain to content publishers and users why they should use MSN instead of just setting up their own Web server. We don't have a clear enough answer to this question today. For users who connect to the Internet some way other than paying us for the connection we will have to make MSN very, very inexpensive - perhaps free. The amount of free information available today on the Internet is quite amazing. Although there is room to use brand names and quality to differentiate from free content, this will not be easy and it puts a lot of pressure to figure out how to get advertiser funding. Even the CD-ROM business will be dramatically affected by the Internet. Encyclopedia Brittanica is offering their content on a subscription basis. Cinemania type information for all the latest movies is available for free on the Web including theater information and Quicktime movie trailers. Competition Our traditional competitors are just getting involved with the Internet. Novell is surprisingly absent given the importance of networking to their position however Frankenberg recognizes its importance and is driving them in that direction. Novell has recognized that a key missing element of the Internet is a good directory service. They are working with AT&T and other phone companies to use the Netware Directory Service to fill this role. This represents a major threat to us. Lotus is already shipping the Internotes Web Publisher which replicates Notes databases into HTML. Notes V4 includes secure Internet browsing in its server and client. IBM includes Internet connection through its network in OS/2 and promotes that as a key feature. Some competitors have a much deeper involvement in the Internet than Microsoft. All UNIX vendors are benefiting from the Internet since the default server is still a UNIX box and not Windows NT, particularly for high end demands, SUN has exploited this quite effectively. Many Web sites, including Paul Allen's ESPNET, put a SUN logo and link at the bottom of their home page in return for low cost hardware. Several universities have "Sunsites" named because they use donated SUN hardware. SUN's Java project involves turning an Internet client into a programmable framework. SUN is very involved in evolving the Internet to stay away from Microsoft. On the SUN Homepage you can find an interview of Scott McNealy by John Gage where Scott explains that if customers decide to give one product a high market share (Windows) that is not capitalism. SUN is promoting Sun Screen and HotJava with aggressive business ads promising that they will help companies make money. SGI has also been advertising their leadership on the Internet including servers and authoring tools. Their ads are very business focused. They are backing the 3D image standard, VRML, which will allow the Internet to support virtual reality type shopping, gaming, and socializing. Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats. After 10 hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format. I did see a great number of Quicktime files. All of the movie studios use them to offer film trailers. Apple benefited by having TCP support before we did and is working hard to build a browser built from OpenDoc components. Apple will push for OpenDoc protocols to be used on the Internet, and is already offering good server configurations. Apple's strength in education gives them a much stronger presence on the Internet than their general market share would suggest. Another popular file format on the Internet is PDF, the short name for Adobe Acrobat files. Even the IRS offers tax forms in PDF format. The limitations of HTML make it impossible to create forms or other documents with rich layout and PDF has become the standard alternative. For now, Acrobat files are really only useful if you print them out, but Adobe is investing heavily in this technology and we may see this change soon. Acrobat and Quicktime are popular on the network because they are cross platform and the readers are free. Once a format gets established it is extremely difficult for another format to come along and even become equally popular. A new competitor "born" on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating system. They have attracted a number of public network operators to use their platform to offer information and directory services. We have to match and beat their offerings including working with MCI, newspapers, and other who are considering their products. One scary possibility being discussed by Internet fans is whether they should get together and create something far less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for Web browsing. This new platform would optimize for the datatypes on the Web. Gordon Bell and others approached Intel on this and decided Intel didn't care about a low cost device so they started suggesting that General Magic or another operating system with a non-Intel chip is the best solution. Next Steps In highlighting the importance of the Internet to our future I don't want to suggest that I am alone in seeing this. There is excellent work going on in many product groups. Over the last year, a number of people have championed embracing TCP/IP, hyperlinking, HTML, and building client, tools and servers that compete on the Internet. However, we still have a lot to do. I want every product plan to try and go overboard on Internet features. One element that will be crucial is coordinating our various activities. The challenge/opportunity of the Internet is a key reason behind the recent organization. Paul Maritz will lead the Platform group to define an integrated strategy that makes it clear that Windows machines are the best choice for the Internet. This will protect and grow our Windows asset. Nathan and Pete will lead the Applications and Content group to figure out how to make money providing applications and content for the Internet. This will protect our Office asset and grow our Office, Consumer, and MSN businesses. The work that was done in the Advanced Technology group will be extremely important as it is integrated in with our products. We must also invest in the Microsoft home page, so it will be clear how to find out about our various products. Today it's quite random what is on the home page and the quality of information is very low. If you look up speeches by me all you find are a few speeches over a year old. I believe the Internet will become our most important promotional vehicle and paying people to include links to our home pages will be a worthwhile way to spend advertising dollars. First we need to make sure that great information is available. One example is the demonstration files (Screencam format) that Lotus includes on all of their products organized by feature. I think a measurable part of our ad budget should focus on the Internet. Any information we create - white papers, data sheets, etc., should all be done on our Internet server. ITG needs to take a hard look at whether we should drop our leasing arrangements for data lines to some countries and simply rely on the Internet. The actions required for the Windows platform are quite broad. Pual Maritz is having an Internet retreat in June which will focus on coordinating these activities. Some critical steps are the following: 1. Server. BSD is working on offering the best Internet server as an integrated package. We need to understand how to make NT boxes the highest performance HTTP servers. Perhaps we should have a project with Compaq or someone else to focus on this. Our initial server will have good performance because it uses kernel level code to blast out a file. We need a clear story on whether a high volume Web site can use NT or not becaues SUN is viewed as the primary choice. Our plans for security need to be strengthened. Other Backoffice pieces like SMS and SQL server also need to stay out in front in working with the Internet. We need to figure out how OFS can help perhaps by allowing pages to be stored as objects and having properties added. Perhaps OFS can help with the challenge of maintaining Web structures. We need to establish distributed OLE as the protocol for Internet programming. Our server offerings need to beat what Netscape is doing including billing and security support. There will be substantial demand for high performance transaction servers. We need to make the media server work across the Internet as soon as we can as new protocols are established. A major opportunity/challenge is directory. If the features required for Internet directory are not in Cairo or easily addable without a major release we will miss the window to become the world standard in directory with serious consequences. Lotus, Novell, and AT&T will be working together to try and establish the Internet directory. Actually getting the content for our directory and popularizing it could be done in the MSN group. 2. Client. First we need to offer a decent client (O'Hare) that exploits Windows 95 shortcuts. However this alone won't get people to switch away from Netscape. We need to figure out how to integrate Blackbird, and help browsing into our Internet client. We have made the decision to provide Blackbird capabilities openly rather than tie them to MSN. However, the process of getting the size, speed, and integration good enough for the market needs works and coordination. We need to figure out additional features that will allows us to get ahead with Windows customers. We need to move all of our Internet value added from the Plus pack into Windows 95 itself as soon as we possible can with a major goal to get OEMs shipping our browser preinstalled. This follows directly from the plan to integrate the MSN and Internet clients. Another place for integration is to eliminate today's Help and replace it with the format our browser accepts including exploiting our unique extensions so there is another reason to use our browser. We need to determine how many browsers we promote. Today we have O'Hare, Blackbird, SPAM MediaView, Word, PowerPoint, Symettry, Help and many others. Without unification we will lose to Netscape/HotJava. Over time the shell and the browser will converge and support hierarchical/list/query viewing as well as document with links viewing. The former is the structured approach and the later allows for richer presentation. We need to establish OLE protocols as the way rich documents are shared on the Internet. I am sure the OpenDoc consortium will try and block this. 3. File sharing/Window sharing/Multi-user. We need to give away client code that encourages Windows specific protocols to be used across the Internet. It should be very easy to set up a server for file sharing across the Internet. Our PictureTel screen sharing client allowing Window sharing should work easily across the Internet. We should also consider whether to do something with the Citrix code that allows you to become a Windows NT user across the Network. It is different from the PictureTel approach because it isn't peer to peer. Instead it allows you to be a remote user on a shared NT system. By giving away the client code to support all of these scenarios, we can start to show that a Windows machine on the Internet is more valuable than an artitrary machine on the net. We have immense leverage because our Client and Server API story is very strong. Using VB or VC to write Internet applications which have their UI remoted is a very powerful advantage for NT servers. 4. Forms/Languages. We need to make it very easy to design a form that presents itself as an HTML page. Today the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is used on Web servers to give forms 'behavior' but its quite difficult to work with. BSD is defining a somewhat better approach they call BGI. However we need to integrate all of this with our Forms3 strategy and our languages. If we make it easy to associate controls with fields then we get leverage out of all of the work we are doing on data binding controls. Efforts like Frontier software's work and SUN's Java are a major challenge to us. We need to figure out when it makes sense to download control code to the client including a security approach to avoid this being a virus hole. 5. Search engines. This is related to the client/server strategies. Verity has done good work with Notes, Netscape, AT&T and many others to get them to adopt their scalable technology that can deal with large text databases with very large numbers of queries against them. We need to come up with a strategy to bring together Office, Mediaview, Help, Cairo, and MSN. Access and Fox do not support text indexing as part of their queries today which is a major hole. Only when we have an integrated strategy will we be able to determine if our in-house efforts are adequate or to what degree we need to work with outside companies like Verity. 6. Formats. We need to make sure we output information from all of our products in both vanilla HTML form and in the extended forms that we promote. For example, any database reports should be navigable as hypertext documents. We need to decide how we are going to compete with Acrobat and Quicktime since right now we aren't challenging them. It may be worth investing in optimizing our file formats for these scenarios. What is our competitor to Acrobat? It was supposed to be a coordination of extended metafiles and Word but these plans are inadequate. The format issue spans the Platform and Applications groups. 7. Tools. Our disparate tools efforts need to be brought together. Everything needs to focus on a single integrated development environment that is extensible in a object oriented fashion. Tools should be architected as extensions to this framework. This means one common approach to repository/projects/source control. It means one approach to forms design. The environment has to support sophisticated viewing options like timelines and the advanced features SoftImage requires. Our work has been separated by independent focus on on-line versus CD-ROM and structured display versus animated displays. There are difficult technical issues to resolve. If we start by looking at the runtime piece (browser) I think this will guide us towards the right solution with the tools. The actions required for the Applications and Content group are also quite broad. Some critical steps are the following: 1. Office. Allowing for collaboration across the Internet and allowing people to publish in our file formats for both Mac and Windows with free readers is very important. This won't happen without specific evangelization. DAD has written some good documents about Internet features. Word could lose out to focused Internet tools if it doesn't become faster and more WYSIWYG for HTML. There is a critical strategy issue of whether Word as a container is strict superset of our DataDoc containers allowing our Forms strategy to embrace Word fully. 2. MSN. The merger of the On-line business and Internet business creates a major challenge for MSN. It can't just be the place to find Microsoft information on the Internet. It has to have scale and reputation that it is the best way to take advantage of the Internet because of the value added. A lot of the content we have been attracting to MSN will be available in equal or better form on the Internet so we need to consider focusing on areas where we can provide something that will go beyond what the Internet will offer over the next few years. Our plan to promote Blackbird broadly takes away one element that would have been unique to MSN. We need to strengthen the relationship between MSN and Exchange/Cairo for mail, security and directory. We need to determine a set of services that MSN leads in - money transfer, directory, and search engines. Our high-end server offerings may require a specific relationship with MSN. 3. Consumer. Consumer has done a lot of thinking about the use of on-line for its various titles. On-line is great for annuity revenue and eliminating the problems of limited shelf-space. However, it also lowers the barriers to entry and allows for an immense amount of free information. Unfortunately today an MSN user has to download a huge browser for every CD title making it more of a demo capability than something a lot of people will adopt. The Internet will assure a large audience for a broad range of titles. However the challenge of becoming a leader in any subject area in terms of quality, depth, and price will be far more brutal than today's CD market. For each category we are in we will have to decide if we can be #1 or #2 in that category or get out. A number of competitors will have natural advantages because of their non-electronic activities. 4. Broadband media applications. With the significant time before widescale iTV deployment we need to look hard at which applications can be delivered in an ISDN/Internet environment or in a Satellite PC environment. We need a strategy for big areas like directory, news, and shopping. We need to decide how to persue local information. The Cityscape project has a lot of promise but only with the right partners. 5. Electronic commerce. Key elements of electronic commerce including security and billing need to be integrated into our platform strategy. On-line allows us to take a new approach that should allow us to compete with Intuit and others. We need to think creatively about how to use the Internet/on-line world to enhance Money. Perhaps our Automatic teller machine project should be revived. Perhaps it makes sense to do a tax business that only operates on on-line. Perhaps we can establish the lowest cost way for people to do electronic bill paying. Perhaps we can team up with Quickbook competitors to provide integrated on-line offerings. Intuit has made a lot of progress in overseas markets during the last six months. All the financial institutions will find it very easy to buy the best Internet technology tools from us and others and get into this world without much technical expertise. The Future We enter this new era with some considerable strengths. Among them are our people and the broad acceptance of Windows and Office. I believe the work that has been done in Consumer, Cairo, Advanced Technology, MSN, and Research position us very well to lead. Our opportunity to take advantage of these investments is coming faster than I would have predicted. The electronic world requires all of the directory, security, linguistic and other technologies we have worked on. It requires us to do even more in these ares than we planning to. There will be a lot of uncertainty as we first embrace the Internet and then extend it. Since the Internet is changing so rapidly we will have to revise our strategies from time to time and have better inter-group communication than ever before. Our products will not be the only things changing. The way we distribute information and software as well as the way we communicate with and support customers will be changing. We have an opportunity to do a lot more with our resources. Information will be disseminated efficiently between us and our customers with less chance that the press miscommunicates our plans. Customers will come to our "home page" in unbelievable numbers and find out everything we want them to know. The next few years are going to be very exciting as we tackle these challenges are opportunities. The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge I am looking forward to your input on how we can improve our strategy to continue our track record of incredible success. HyperLink Appendix Related reading, double click to open them On-line! (Microsoft LAN only, Internet Assistant is not required for this part): * "Gordon Bell on the Internet" email by Gordon Bell * "Affordable Computing: advertising subsidized hardware" by Nicholas Negroponie * "Brief Lecture Notes on VRML & Hot Java" email by William Barr * "Notes from a Lecture by Mark Andresson (Netscape)" email by William Barr * "Application Strategies for the World Wide Web" by Peter Pathe (Contains many more links!) Below is a hotlist of Internet Web sites you might find interesting. I've included it as an embedded .HTM file which should be readable by most Web Browsers. Double click it if you're using a Web Browser like O'Hare or Netscape. HotList.htm A second copy of these links is below as Word HTML links. To use these links, you must be running the World Internet Assistant, and be connected to the Web. Cool, Cool, Cool.. The Lycos Home Page Yahoo RealAudio Homepage HotWired - New Thinking for a New Medium Competitors Microsoft Corporation World-Wide-Web Server Welcome To Oracle Lotus on the Web Novell Inc. World Wide Web Home Page Symantec Corporation Home Page Borland Online Disney/Buena Vista Paramount Pictures Adobe Systems Incorporated Home Page MCI Sony Online Sports ESPNET SportsZone The Gate Cybersports Page The Sports Server Las Vegas Sports Page News CRAYON Mercury Center Home Page Travel/Entertainment ADDICTED TO NOISE CDnow The Internet Music Store Travel & Entertainment Network home page Virtual Tourist World Map C(?) Net Auto Dealernet Popular Mechanics

This week, Federico spends a quarter of the show saying "Shortcuts", Fraser invents a morse code Shortcut and OpenDoc is referenced in the passing.

Fredrik chats with Craig Muth, creator of the more than slightly mind-bending Xiki about the past, present and future of this weird and wonderful evolution of the command line. Seeing Xiki in action is probably the best way to begin to grasp it, and Craig has created several great videos and screencasts. We go all the way from Xiki’s beginnings as a framework inside of Emacs to its current state as a standalone companion to your normal command line, and its just launched Kickstarter to take the next step and become social by making it super simple to share and find commands. We also look further into the future, entering completely free-form speculation about where things could go both for command lines and user-extendable interfaces. (Yes, Hyper card and Opendoc both come up.) Don’t assume things you want will happen - back things you want to succeed! Cheer up the autumn: on October 3rd Suse is sponsoring a live pod and after work in Stockholm! We’ll occupy Hobo at Brunkebergstorg 4. Doors open at 17, the pod commences somewhere around 18, and then we talk code, life, the universe, and everything and have some nice drinks for as long as we like. We hope to see you there, and that you bring along a friend or two! The number of seats are limited, so send an email as soon as possible to livepodd@gmail.com with your name, company and if you’re bringing anyone along. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! Links Craig on Github Xiki The 2014 Xiki Kickstarter The current (2017) Kickstarter - includes the videos we talk about The older screencasts Quicksilver Xikihub Riverdance The talks are also on the screencasts page Emacs Elisp - Emacs Lisp Bash Z shell The Medium post - Xiki: one developer's quest to turbocharge the command line interface Made to stick React native EJB CORBA JSON CSON YAML AWS - Amazon web services Xpath Fish shell Oh my zsh Hyper D3 Ward Cunningham Smallest federated wiki The Xiki tutorial Roads and bridges: the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure - the paper Fredrik read Hypercard Mac LC computers Opendoc Steve Jobs explaining why he’s shutting down Opendoc Titles The command line is awesome when you know exactly what to type All right, now I get it Lost, but in a really exciting way Make the command line work like a search engine A missing piece in the command line Making all the search results myself It doesn’t take that many people Riverdance with the horse and the banana Now I get the one thing, but I don’t care An idea whose time has come Hey, that’s like a command line Way back in Ohio The power you get when you do remember the commands The germ of Xiki I’ve never been able to stop working on it Users are so key I could add something here! Hey, this doesn’t exist yet! In Ohio working at boring banks This better work! My friend Keith thinks I should move to San Francisco Feeling comfortable in my skin for the first time Escape gets you into more trouble! People will fill in the gaps Do for commands what Github did for code Utterly freeform This neat open thing

Fredrik chats with Craig Muth, creator of the more than slightly mind-bending Xiki about the past, present and future of this weird and wonderful evolution of the command line. Seeing Xiki in action is probably the best way to begin to grasp it, and Craig has created several great videos and screencasts. We go all the way from Xiki’s beginnings as a framework inside of Emacs to its current state as a standalone companion to your normal command line, and its just launched Kickstarter to take the next step and become social by making it super simple to share and find commands. We also look further into the future, entering completely free-form speculation about where things could go both for command lines and user-extendable interfaces. (Yes, Hyper card and Opendoc both come up.) Don’t assume things you want will happen - back things you want to succeed! Cheer up the autumn: on October 3rd Suse is sponsoring a live pod and after work in Stockholm! We’ll occupy Hobo at Brunkebergstorg 4. Doors open at 17, the pod commences somewhere around 18, and then we talk code, life, the universe, and everything and have some nice drinks for as long as we like. We hope to see you there, and that you bring along a friend or two! The number of seats are limited, so send an email as soon as possible to livepodd@gmail.com with your name, company and if you’re bringing anyone along. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @iskrig and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! Links Craig on Github Xiki The 2014 Xiki Kickstarter The current (2017) Kickstarter - includes the videos we talk about The older screencasts Quicksilver Xikihub Riverdance The talks are also on the screencasts page Emacs Elisp - Emacs Lisp Bash Z shell The Medium post - Xiki: one developer’s quest to turbocharge the command line interface Made to stick React native EJB CORBA JSON CSON YAML AWS - Amazon web services Xpath Fish shell Oh my zsh Hyper D3 Ward Cunningham Smallest federated wiki The Xiki tutorial Roads and bridges: the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure - the paper Fredrik read Hypercard Mac LC computers Opendoc Steve Jobs explaining why he’s shutting down Opendoc Titles The command line is awesome when you know exactly what to type All right, now I get it Lost, but in a really exciting way Make the command line work like a search engine A missing piece in the command line Making all the search results myself It doesn’t take that many people Riverdance with the horse and the banana Now I get the one thing, but I don’t care An idea whose time has come Hey, that’s like a command line Way back in Ohio The power you get when you do remember the commands The germ of Xiki I’ve never been able to stop working on it Users are so key I could add something here! Hey, this doesn’t exist yet! In Ohio working at boring banks This better work! My friend Keith thinks I should move to San Francisco Feeling comfortable in my skin for the first time Escape gets you into more trouble! People will fill in the gaps Do for commands what Github did for code Utterly freeform This neat open thing

James and John discuss eBay finds: Mac 128k, Apple banner, and Woz-signed miniature IIgs. They discuss the history of OpenDoc, and news includes The Computer Show, 7.5.5 on iPad, and The History of Personal Computing podcast.   To see all of the show notes and join our website, visit us at RetroMacCast

James and John discuss eBay finds: Macintosh II, Apple 2 playing cards, and OpenDoc jacket. They play some Deja Vu andEnchanted Scepters, and news includes Apple Campus 2 video, Apple car, Pencil and Newton, test patterns, and USB retro mice.   To see all of the show notes and join our website, visit us at RetroMacCast

This week we follow up on the Swift adoption discussion started last week. We discuss the "All you eat" software models. We discuss the role of Product Manager in development. Tim Cook sends an email and saves stock market. Picks Crossy Road (Pacman edition), PAC-MAN 256 and iSwift. NB The 360|iDev 2015 videos should be ready around Aug 28, 2015 Episode 54 Show Notes: Josh Micheals 360|iDev Keynote John Wilker Mastering Auto Layout - Justin Williams Dave Wiskus - 'All You Can App' Amazon’s new games and apps store: Free for users, 12¢ an hour for devs Amazon Underground Features An Android App Store Focused On “Actually Free” Apps Gus Mueller Daniel Jalkut The Last Job - Kyle Richter Uber Strategic Coach - Business Coaching Steve Jobs Movie Steam Defence of the Ancients Tetris 2048 Apple Stock Reacts After Tim Cook Email Praises China Sales Jim Kramer iSight Camera Replacement for iPhone 6 Plus Episode 17 – Why Did the Chicken Crossy the Road? OpenDoc Greg Heo - Switching your brain to Swift Bringing Swift to your Objective-C Projects - René Cacheaux Developing iOS 8 Apps With Swift Episode 55 Picks: Crossy Road - Endless Arcade Hopper (Pac-Man update) PAC-MAN 256 - Endless Arcade Maze iSwift Special Guest: Fuad Kumal.

This episode was recorded 6 May 2014 live and in person at Brent's office in lovely, sunny Ballard. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) Chris has worked at Adobe and as a founder of Rogue Sheep, which won an Apple Design Award for Postage. Chris's new company is Aged & Distilled with Guy English — which shipped Napkin, a Mac app for visual collaboration. Chris is also the co-host of The Record. He lives on Bainbridge Island, a quick ferry ride from Seattle. This episode is sponsored by Tagcaster. Tagcaster is not just another podcast client — it solves the age-old problem of linking to specific parts of a podcast. You can make clips — short audio excerpts — and share them and link to them. After all these years, that problem is finally solved. This episode is also sponsored by Igloo. Igloo is an intranet you'll actually like, with shared calendars, microblogs, file-sharing, social networking, and more. It's free for up 10 users — give it a try for your company or your team today. This episode is also sponsored by Hover. Hover makes domain name management easy. And it's a snap to transfer domains from other registrars using their valet service. Get 10% off your first purchase with the promotional code PANIC. As in “Don't Panic! Use Hover.” Take a look. Things we mention, more or less in order of appearance: Oklahoma Wikipedia The shopping cart Rust Homestead Act Pong Atari 2600 President Carter Pinochle Republicans Democrats Apple II Apple II Reference Manual Floppy Disks Odyssey: The Compleat Adventure Marco Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer Parallel port BASIC Apple II graphics modes LiteBrite Apple II Star Wars game Assembler Text adventure games Paper app Graph paper Merlin assembler Pascal compiler for Apple II Locksmith for Apple II Apple II copy protection Radio Shack ROM chips Tin foil Alligator clips The Complete Graphics System The Incomparable Mike Lee on The Record SATs University of Oklahoma LaserWriter Linotronic image setter The Clampetts The Joads Seattle Las Vegas Belltown Capitol Hill Everett Queen Anne Magnolia Adobe Microsoft Windows X-Wing video game 8086 Assembly language Microsoft DOS Sierra On-Line PowerBook Duo Apple IIGS Think C Sega CD-ROMs Postscript Pagemaker Quark Aldus Pioneer Square 1995 Java Natural Intelligence Roaster IDE Illustrator QA Partner Test-Driven Development InDesign COM Matt Joss Version control 2001 SourceSafe Visual Studio C++ OpenDoc Resource Compiler Sharepoint Azure FrameMaker Rogue Sheep CMYK separation Optical character alignment University of Washington HITLab Gel Electrophoresis Jeff Argast PowerPoint Western blots The Guardian Bush Administration Postage Twitterrific Brad Ellis Lehman Brothers Jake Carter Cocoa Quartz Composer Motion After Effects Kyle Richter Ian Baird IAP Rickenbacker's The House of Shields John Gruber Dave Wiskus Napkin Guy English Thomas Unterberger C4 United Lemur World Cup Brazil WWDC San Francisco NetNewsWire 1999 Eddy awards

This episode was recorded 16 May 2013 live and in person at Omni's lovely offices overlooking Lake Union in Seattle. (Check out the OmniFocus 2 public beta!) You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) John Chaffee is a co-founder of BusyMac which makes the awesome BusyCal. John talks about being a Mac developer in the '90s, what it was like at Now Software, and how he got tired of mobile and came back to the Mac. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Easily create beautiful websites via drag-and-drop. Get help any time from their 24/7 technical support. Create responsive websites — ready for phones and tablets — without any extra effort: Squarespace's designers have already handled it for you. Get 10% off by going to http://squarespace.com/therecord. And, if you want to get under the hood, check out their APIs at developers.squarespace.com. This episode is also sponsored by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services is a great way to provide backend services — syncing and other things — for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. If you've been to the website already, you've seen the tutorials where you input code into a browser window. And that's an easy way to get started. But don't be fooled: Mobile Services is deep. You can write in JavaScript in your favorite text editor and deploy via Git. Good stuff. Things we mention, in order of appearance (roughly): BusyMac BusyCal Now Software Extensis Farallon SplashData PhoneNet connectors AppleTalk Berkeley Mac Users Group (BMUG) Berkeley, CA QA A/UX Desktop publishing Mac iici SCSI Santa Barbara Mac Store Pagemaker Mac 512 VIP Technologies Atari ST Apple IIgs Lotus 1-2-3 Taxes Mac SE/30 Portland Bay Area San Jose System 7 1991 Now Utilities Dave Riggle Claris MacWrite Filemaker Pro Bento 1990 Macworld Expo Floppy disks iCal Now Up-to-Date Macworld Expo Boston Compuserve Windows Altura Mac2Win Qualcomm Osborne Effect Dotcom Bubble Aldus Fetch Quark MacMall OnOne Software 1999 Adobe InDesign OpenDoc Mac OS X Carbon AppKit NetNewsWire Office Space Getty Images PhotoDisx 2001 Palm PDA Handspring Visor PalmGear Handango SplashPhoto SplashMoney SplashID SplashShopper SplashWallet Windows Mobile Symbian Android SplashBlog Instagram 2006 SixApart Movable Type 2007 Mac App Store BusyCal, LLC Google WWDC RSS Safari/RSS Google (Partly) Shuts Down CalDAV MobileMe SyncServices iCloud Sandboxing JCPenney's Apple Pulls out of Macworld Twitter AirPlay Apple TV Type A Personality Domain Name System BusySync HotSync iCloud Core Data Syncing iCloud Key/Value Storage ActiveSync ExchangeWebService Blackberry

This episode was recorded 16 May 2013 live and in person at Omni's offices overlooking Lake Union in Seattle. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) Greg Robbins is Graphing Calculator co-author (a story you should already know about, that we don't go over again) and has done such diverse things as bringing translucency to the Mac OS Drag Manager (way back in the '90s), and writing an open source Objective-C library for Google Data APIs. You can follow Greg on Twitter. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Easily create beautiful websites via drag-and-drop. Get help any time from their 24/7 technical support. Create responsive websites — ready for phones and tablets — without any extra effort: Squarespace's designers have already handled it for you. Get 10% off by going to http://squarespace.com/therecord. And, if you want to get under the hood, check out their APIs at developers.squarespace.com. This episode is also sponsored by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services is a great way to provide backend services — syncing and other things — for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. If you've been to the website already, you've seen the tutorials where you input code into a browser window. And that's an easy way to get started. But don't be fooled: Mobile Services is deep. You can write in your favorite text editor and deploy via Git. Regular-old Git, not Git#++. Git. Things we mention, in order of appearance (pretty much): Real Networks Graphing Calculator Google Ira Glass on Graphing Calculator Drag Manager Translucency Mac OS 7.5.3 Drag Manager Alpha channels Quartz CopyBits Black and white displays 68K computers PowerPC Blitting Desktop Pictures 1995 NeXT Omni Assembly language DTS Newton Teletypes Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science Apple II 1979 Mainframe Concentration Busboy Nolo Press ComputerLand Beagle Bros. Integer BASIC 80-column cards Apple II Plus Apple II Technical Manual Homebrew computers RF Interference Apple II GS Non-Apple Machines 6502 Assembly Missile Command 1992 NASA Neural networks Robert Hecht-Nielsen 1980s Voice recognition Earth Observing System Goddard Space Flight Center comp.sys.mac Pascal C Macintosh Progammers Workshop (MPW) Lightspeed C / THINK C Lightspeed Pascal CodeWarrior PowerPC transition Toolbox Inside Mac Macintosh Programmers Toolbox Assistant QuickView Hypercard How to Write Macintosh software by Scott Knaster 1990s eMate Apple QuickTake Secret About Box Easter eggs Breakout in 7.5 Herman the Iguana Pointers Ron Avitzur Airplay Front Row Windows Vista Microsoft Office Adobe Photoshop Seattle RealPlayer 1998 Rob Glaser Macworld Conference Marching extensions Casady & Greene's Conflict Catcher Carbon Cocoa 2002 WinAmp Appearance Manager Kaleidoscope Copland InternetWorld 1997 OpenDoc Dave Winer Quickdraw GX Apple Open Collaborative Environment (AOCE) iCloud LLVM Instruments Microsoft Visual Studio ARC C# Xcode Eclipse QuickTime Project Builder Google Desktop Spotlight Google Maps for iOS 2005 Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) RSS Google Reader Google Keep Self-driving cars Google Glass Big data Google Data APIs for Objective-C XML OAuth

This episode was recorded 22 May 2013 live and in person at Adobe's offices in Fremont in Seattle. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) John Nack is Principal Product Manager, Adobe Digital Video. He has a blog (definitely worth reading, especially if you use Photoshop) and is @jnack on Twitter. This episode is sponsored by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. One of the cooler features recently added is the ability to create custom APIs. Originally you were limited to standard operations on your database tables — but now you can design any API you want. This allows you to create a full REST/JSON API that's tailored to your app, that works as efficiently as possible. (And it's all in JavaScript. Mobile Services runs Node.js. Write your apps in your favorite text editor on your Mac.) Things we mention, in order of appearance (pretty much): Adobe LiveMotion Photoshop John's Blog Kurt Vonnegut Granfalloons despair.com Cocoa 64-bit Carbon 64-bit Unfrozen Cave Man Olive Garden South Bend, Indiana Tiramisu St. Sebastian Breadsticks Monkeys 2005 Movable Type DeBabelizer GifBuilder Anarchie 1984 Mac 2001 Algonquin Hotel Apple II PCjr ASCII Art Clip Art Googly Eyes Bill Atkinson MacPaint Rorschach Test Apple II GS Great Books Quadra 840AV Quadra Ad Director SuperCard Søren Kierkegaard Immanuel Kant Notre Dame Football Windows NT HTML New York City 1998 Flash Macromedia Illustrator Navy ROTC San Francisco GoLive NetNewsWire After Effects Thomas Knoll Camera Raw Photoshop Touch Germany Philistinism Perfectionism Volkswagen Carbon-dating Web Standards SVG CSS Gus Mueller Acorn Neven Mrgan Khoi Vinh Croatia Portland JDI Healing Brush Buck Rogers Creative Cloud Facebook Smugmug WWDC Jetta Ketchup Death-march Comic Book Guy John Gruber “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” Microsoft Surface Metro UI Rahm Emmanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The Mythical Man-Month Content-Aware Fill Shawshank InDesign Adobe Magazine Nike PageMaker Postscript SLR Lightroom Black & Decker Dr. Evil Loren Brichter Instagram Kickstarter NGO Tumblr Acquisition Troy Gaul Blurb The Onion: Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others Data T-1000 Syria MacApp Resource Manager John Knoll Industrial Light & Magic QuickTime OpenDoc Corba OLE SnapSeed Mac System 6 Apple events AppleScript Audio Bus 1992 “The only time you should start worrying about a soldier is when they stop bitchin'” Alan Kay: “The Mac is the first computer good enough to be criticized.” TapBots Tweetbot 2 Android Kai's Power Tools Kai Krause Fremont RUN DMC Porsche Boxster Flavawagon Google Glass Robert Scoble

Tantek Çelik joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for another episode in The Web Behind series. They talk about OpenDoc, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, doctype switching, semantic data formats, and much more.

iTunes 5.0 problems, Google Wireless & VPN, Massachusettes goes with OpenDoc standard, PCs are relics, Difficult Computer Jargon, Entertainment round-up

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant. How do you have your creator tools give people the knowledge of how to be able to address such complexity? 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, David Hong of Webflow. 00:00:38 - Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for having me. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: Now something that we talk about quite a bit in the Muse world, maybe we take inspiration from physical workspaces, physical studios, but I understand you are creating your own physical studio screen free these days. 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s one of the pandemic projects, if you will. We’ve been working in our garage and trying to create a more creative space that just really fosters movement and I think the inspiration just came from Back pain, you know, and just sitting in front of your desk all the time and just being on Zoom, which is a lot of my day these days. And I was watching Brett Victor seeing faces again and just really got a lot of inspiration of like How do you leverage like physical spaces to create stuff? So my girlfriend’s an interior designer and I used to do a lot of art. I went to school for art, which ties a lot into a lot of the work I’m interested in these days and really just wanted to create a space for us to be like, let’s just work all analog and really Just to feel something, right? Just create something really physical, just to really deviate away from what feels like a 100% digital world right now. 00:01:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, doing things with your hands, the texture of paper or certainly craft materials. I like to go to just art stores, craft stores, and yeah, I like highlighters and I like chunky markers and I like butcher paper, and I like all that sort of thing, and I have less as the digital tools get better and better and in fact. Superior, particularly in their shareability, which is really important on your kind of distributed teams, those things become more of a curiosity maybe or something I keep around, but every once in a while I get them out for a similar reason to that. But yeah, maybe that means I should really just take up like wood block carving or something like that. 00:02:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing that’s interesting about that too is I think in many ways, our tools are processing way faster than we can think about our ideas. And the thing I love about working on paper and those chunky markers like you said, is it gives you time to really kind of flush through the idea and work on it because the problem today is not the level of computation you have access to, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. It’s like you can process and build anything, but it’s just like how do you Hash out the ideas and I’ve really kind of found this return to working on paper recently and that’s whether it’s drawing up a user flow or creating low fidelity wireframes. It’s been really helpful to work in that material that almost intentionally slows down and gives you time to think a little bit deeper. 00:03:24 - Speaker 2: And I’d love to hear a bit about your backstory, days before web flow, and then what you’ve been doing now that you’re there. 00:03:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, right before I joined Webflow, I was the head of product design at a health tech startup called One Medical and was there for about 4 years. I led design and research there. 00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Quick personal note, I was a customer there while I lived in San Francisco. This was kind of A doctor’s office, but reimagined a bit in terms of being more user experience centric. Is that a right way to describe it? 00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s accurate. I hope you had a good experience with it too. 00:03:57 - Speaker 2: I did. I’m missing that there is no such thing in Berlin as far as I know. User experience is not a key feature of doctors I visited here, sad to say. 00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Healthcare experience is something where I think we need more designers and more technology, like thinking about that end user experience. Yeah. So when I was at one medical, one of the first features I started working on was our video visits platform. So it was being able to do a one on one virtual call which You and your doctor, and I built that prototype using Quartz composer and kind of started that from the initial prototype of like how we could even wire the AV and really test these cases. So a lot of what I’ve been interested in is design prototyping in a lot of ways. And prior to one medical, I was director of mobile design at a company called Black Pixel that was really focused on Like iOS and Mac apps doing our own products, but then also doing a lot of client services as well. And what brought me to web flow was after I left one Medical, I think. It’s really great when you leave a place that you feel like you could be there for another 4 years, and that’s kind of how I felt at one medical and was just looking for something a little bit different. So I took a mini sabbatical, probably about 2 months off trying to figure out what’s next. And my original idea was considering to do a startup around like prototyping on the iPad, because I think that was the year when Swift UI came out and I thought to myself, it’d be really cool to Build tools for people to build, and really build layout, and whether it was like a full-on developer tool or prototyping tool. That’s what I was exploring, but I think for me, I know how hard startups are and the life expectancy of those. So, you know, it’s something that I was continuing to explore lately, but then got connected with web flow. And for those who don’t know, web flows a visual development platform and it’s really focused on websites, blogs, and more dynamic web experiences. And I think the thing that got me really interested in that is this bridge between design and engineering. And it wasn’t just prototyping, but the stuff you build goes straight into production right away. So you can build your site, publish it, and you know, wire up a domain and you’re done. And I was just like, wow, you know, I think this is a really interesting space to be able to take the things that I was really excited about, which is like visual programming. And that is naturally just a part of it too. And I was like, OK, this is a company I have to join. Like I think at that time, they were growing and still growing, and I figured, you know what, instead of doing my own thing, I’d love to join forces with a company that’s already doing a good thing. 00:07:02 - Speaker 2: And thinking about the product positioning there. Is the target user or I’m sure you have a lot of diversity of customers now, but when you’re doing this design work, do you think of it as someone who’s coming from maybe a simpler tool, I don’t know, Squarespace comes to mind, and they want to upgrade and do something that’s more powerful and gives them more control over the CSS more capabilities, or is it actually the other way around, which is someone who’s been hand coding their HTML and they go, you know, this is a little bit tedious, and I’d like a visual tool that augments my ability to do that. 00:07:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, oh man, that’s such a good question, and I think it’s something we’re talking about a lot. And the thing that I know for sure is, you know, our end user and who we’re targeting are designers, and not to get into this existential crisis, but it’s like, what is a designer, right? There’s so many different flavors of what a designer can do. I would say this predates my time at web flow, but I would say like when the early product was being developed. I think it was really focused on the web designer and the web designer that really knew, really familiar with HTML and CSS, you know, that material of code to create and build these sites, but I think as Our customer base has grown, you are kind of seeing people who maybe their mental models are more from the Squarespace or using a tool like FigMA or Adobe XD to really understand design, so they’re kind of bringing those mental models in. So I think the thing that I think about a lot is What are the different types of personas of designers that we’re looking to serve, and that could be many different levels, you know, could be designers who know code really well or they want to use no code tools so they don’t have to know code. 00:08:52 - Speaker 2: If I can make a comparison to Hiokku, this was a similar, I think dilemma we had, you might say in our user base, and of course a good product can be used by different types of people and it works to try to understand the different segments you’re trying to support. Yeah, Hiroku both had developers who were people that maybe would have struggled a bit to get like a production deployment of. on rails and a SQL database and so on, and we made that much more possible for them to do, but it also had the other way around, which was professional developers that completely knew how to buy a server, install Linux on it, put it in a co-location facility or set up a VPS or whatever, do all that server and operation stuff. They said, I don’t want to bother with that. I would rather outsource. To you, it’s undifferentiated work. I just want to build my app, but we have people that are sort of coming from two very different skill directions that land on kind of needing the same solution, but as you said, like their mental models of how everything works is going to be wildly different in that, hence the huge design challenge to make a single product that works for both of them. 00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s such a tough challenge because what I ask myself is, who do you serve in that instance? And for me, the answer should be both approachable software for these sort of tools. is you want to be able to abstract away the complexity, but you also want to be able to pop the hood open, if you will, right? So if someone wants to use code and make things more extensible, there’s a lot of challenges if we cap that from people and they don’t have access to it and to what you mentioned with Hiroku it’s like. Do people go with a different solution, or do you find ways where it can be a little bit more flexible for what people’s needs are? And I think that’s the sweet spot you want to hit and it’s really hard to find, which kind of makes me really excited about this space because it’s not only like a diverse persona, but it’s also the different use cases and how people learn too. So really trying to figure out how you find that place where it meets both of those ends of the spectrum is really challenging. 00:10:57 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good moment to introduce our topic which is designing for creative tools. Now creative tools can include a pretty big gamut from word processors and video editing. Here we’re talking about maybe the fairly far end of the spectrum on complexity, which is dynamic modeling tools, web design, development, but if you think of that spectrum as being on one far end as the pure consumer, very everyday apps, something like a kitchen timer. Whether maybe things that are in the middle but still closer to that consumer side might be social media, for example, not to say there isn’t a ton of complexity in that, but compared to what you can do with creative tools or what the user can do with creative tools, there’s the variety of possible states essentially that a user can put their document into with anything on this end of the spectrum is vastly greater than some of those everyday apps. And that creates some pretty big challenges, but also for the right kind of person, and I would count, I think the three of us in that category, those challenges can be very fun and interesting. 00:12:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it keeps you on your feet, for sure, and I think the word I keep attributing to this is just dynamic, right? It’s that it’s always changing, it’s always evolving. And I think what’s most interesting for me in this space is you build a set of capabilities for people and you see what they do with it, right? And that’s different for what you alluded to is that, you know, a lot of my background before was consumer apps or networks and e-commerce and they’re more rigid in the user experience, so it’s more predictable with what people will do. Like, of course, there’s flows you want to Optimized for, but I think there have been times where I imagine a lot of spaces of people working in creator tools see this a lot, where end users just subvert and find new ways to use your tool and you’re always so surprised by it and I think Rather being worried about what happened to you, embrace that and see where it goes, and I think that’s really interesting. It’s just kind of like, uh, you know, this whole notion of like, I think Microsoft uses the term citizen developer or you know, end users creating stuff. Now it creates such a unknown journey map for a lot of these users, which I think is personally really cool. 00:13:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that rigid design you mentioned in, for example, e-commerce, that’s actually by design, you want a checkout form, for example, the number of forks in that path should be pretty minimal, right? The data is different, where I’m shipping to is different, maybe there’s a few options in there, but you don’t want to choose your own adventure on a checkout form and perhaps the work you did in the medical space was similar that you want something pretty structured, pretty rigid. Everyone kind of does it more or less the same way with some essentially minor variation is really the complete opposite of a great creative tool. I think almost by definition is one that your users will use it to make things that you never expected. They like you said, that subversive element. 00:14:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that’s why at Webflow, we tend to call things capabilities versus features, and we want to focus on that lens where it’s like, what are we equipping end users being able to do versus like, here’s this feature that will do X or do Y but it’s more like, here’s this capability, here’s this offering. Let’s see what you do with it. 00:14:32 - Speaker 2: I’d be curious to hear if there’s any cases you’ve seen so far of web flows, users and customers doing something interesting, unexpected, even even subversive. 00:14:43 - Speaker 1: Oh man. 00:14:43 - Speaker 3: Have you had any bitcoin miners like we did on Hookku? 00:14:46 - Speaker 1: Not yet, not yet. We’ll see, there’s still time for that. I’d love to hear the Hiroka use case. There’s two that come to mind for me, and one is a weblow community member created, I think it’s called The Big Bed, and it’s a children’s story that he illustrated. I can’t remember if it was directly about his daughter, but it was this narrative that they created. So he created an interactive site with web flow that had audio and just this really great immersive experience. And then there’s another use case where someone in the blood flow community created a game that I used to love playing is he actually recreated some of the intro and functionality of the game Civilization in web flow, and I’m just like, oh my goodness, there’s so many events, so many interactions built this, and you could tell like the people who built this is just, it’s pure passion for learning and just love of creating stuff and like. When I saw those two things, especially, I’m just like, oh my goodness, like this isn’t just for building like the websites built on Twitter bootstrap where they all kind of look the same. It’s kind of returning this sort of expressive form of the web, which got me really excited because I think in my iOS days, I think at that time the web was becoming a little bit stagnant and less expressive, but kind of seeing these sort of tools come back for people to be expressive on the web, I think it’s really awesome. 00:16:18 - Speaker 2: I think we talked with Wei Weixu a bit about kind of personalization in our online spaces, and I think I expressed my love of personal websites and the web and HTML remains and has only gotten better with years, even if there’s fewer sort of GeoCity style places for people that easily have their own spaces, what you can express through a personal site is greater than ever before, but that’s balanced out or maybe just drowned out would be the way to put it by. Yeah, maybe social media profiles or even just sites that are designed to be a profile for you, and it’s nice cause you upload a picture and you type in a bio and you click on three things you like and it gives you a nice looking page, but yeah, it lacks that personality, that expressiveness, and certainly that handmade element, but that’s still live on the web in terms of what you can do with HTML. You have to get away a little bit from the template driven world of say a Squarespace and a little bit closer to the metal if we want to call it that, and I think you know hand coded HTML is a great way to go, but not to drop in too many metause references here, but we also talked with Maggie Appleton about visual programming, which I think David discussing that episode is part of how you and I got talking and Talks about, well, look, we don’t want to replace code, but maybe we want to layer new kinds of visualization tools on top of it. I think the web is really, really perfect potentially for that, and you see a small version of that and say the developer tools, the Chrome slash fire bug derived developer tools, but there’s so much more we could do with that, I think. 00:17:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me, the word I keep coming back to is expression, right? And the expression of how you create, and I think. I don’t like using like web 12 and 3 just because I think it’s just like a continuous evolution, but for the sake, let’s say web 2’s a lot of social media, a lot of feeds, and that’s where conversation happened, right? And I think for me, I grew up in the earlier days of the internet having a Geo City site using Dreamweaver to build my personal websites. I use this analogy of like visiting people’s homes and you would go to people’s home pages to be able to see that expression and now things are in social graphs, right? And there’s still a lot of where web 3 might move and I still think it’s. Really early, but through all this, I think there’s a lot of this interest to kind of bring personal expression back and bring back personal websites, blogs. RSS is a technology that I continue to use and love today, and I think there’s like a resurgence to this because people want expression in the content, you know, whether it’s personal expression or that of the people they interact with. 00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely hitting on some recurrent themes from the podcast here, just kind of give another angle on it. This idea of a personalized space is so important for professionals because almost by definition, you’re spending all of your waking, working time in it. And if you have no agency over how it works and how it looks and how it feels, that’s very demoralizing and discouraging. So for that reason alone, it’s very important. There’s other angle of like being able to do things that the creator of the tool didn’t specifically envision. In some ways, that’s the very definition of a creative professional, as someone who’s doing something novel, who’s doing these. Combinations because if there was no novelty for it, it’d be more like turning a crank and why pay really high professional labor rates for doing that, right? And so the tool has to facilitate it. You have to make this leap of, we’re going to provide these primitives and building blocks and people are going to reassemble them into games or whatever, you know, civilization, who knows, right? You have to be able to support that. 00:19:56 - Speaker 2: So going a layer deeper on what it means to design creative tools and design for creators, including designers and developers. One of the big topics in design is always mental models, and I’d be really curious to hear about the mental models you’re using for web flow, David, maybe Mark, you could talk to Muse a little bit or maybe we have some other examples from our collective experience, but maybe to start, Mark, could you define mental model just to make sure we’re all on the same page? 00:20:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so a mental model is sort of the platonic forms you’re dealing with in the domain. It’s the nouns and the verbs and how they interact, you know, what is the way that you think about the space? What are the primitives, how do you build on top of them? How do you combine them? So, for example, with a desktop OS you have things like files, folders, windows, things like that, mouse, and so forth. 00:20:51 - Speaker 2: One trick I’ve always liked for coming to grips with the mental model of some system that I’m designing is to write a glossary, essentially a list of all your vocabulary, and these are things that you’re surfacing to your user. So for example, I think I might have first tried this for the Hiroku add-on system. And in writing that glossary, I realized first of all we had way too many things. There was like 20 different things in there we were expecting people to keep track of, many of which were like kind of a relatively new concepts and certainly pretty abstract ones. So we’re looking for ways to kind of reduce those. Second, I found that sometimes we would use two words to mean basically the same thing, and that’s confusing. But then third, it kind of forces me at least to ask, does each one of these serve a really good purpose? Is a person going to have a clear understanding of what this item is? They know this term refers to that, and they can either connect it to something else they already knew before they started kind of using the product or reading your documentation or whatever, or for the very few you want to offer as new, is it worth your while to introduce this new term, this new concept. And of course one of the tricks, I think you Kind of illustrated pretty well there, Mark, is to take physical world metaphors. So your desktop is on your computer as a literal metaphor to your top of your desk. Files and folders are also metaphors, although even there you see where it’s an imperfect. fit. My mom actually has commented on this a number of times, which is she’s worked with paper files and folders for a long time and from her perspective, a file folder is one kind of thing and it’s one of those folding manila envelopes that you can put pieces of paper and documents into. So she thinks that you should call files documents and you should call folders files, and now of course, we’re set now, but it’s a good example of where users have preexisting expectations, you’re trying to borrow these metaphors, but they don’t necessarily map perfectly, but you get some leverage there because you’re not asking someone to learn a whole bunch of new words that don’t map to anything they know from any other domain. 00:22:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and my experience has been that the product architecture, which is the phrase we sometimes give to coming up with and naming these mental models, is incredibly important. If you get this even a little bit wrong, it’s gonna make everything much harder down the road, and in particular for some people to be able to span the full range of use cases from very simple to very complex, and to be able to do unanticipated recombinations, they have to be really solid. 00:23:24 - Speaker 2: So what kind of mental models do you make use of in web flow, David? 00:23:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a challenge in a lot of creator tools is to decide how opinionated you should be. And what I mean by that is when you become opinionated, there’s kind of a trade-off with that, right? You can kind of really help guide people in how they build certain concepts, or do you be more open ended and you give people the flexibility to explore that. And I think the thing that’s tricky with that is The question I ask myself is what mental models do people come in with using web flow, so someone who is a front end developer, the way they approach using web flow is going to be dramatically different than someone who may use FIMA. And I think the thing that’s hard is In design, there’s a lot of these things that are very similar, but not necessarily identical, right? So, for example, in Xcode, the auto layout engine is a lot different than auto layout in Figma, but yet, these are things that people associate with how to approach using it. So I think When we’re thinking about the mental models of web flow, I think a lot of things that we’re asking ourselves is like, what do people come in expecting, right? So, someone who’s coming in and using layout may not think of things as divs, right? And also think about things like nesting and parent-child relationships. They may be thinking of it as an infinite canvas that they drag and move freeform. And unless you kind of set position to absolute, there’s really no way of doing that in a way that produces good code and That can be frustrating for users if you’re coming in not knowing box model and some of these web design practices. So I think a lot of things we’re thinking about like, how do we become more opinionated in our own product without like biasing them on what to build, right? So for example, a lot of this can come from onboarding new users and teaching them like, hey, these are the core aspects of web design that’s going to be really important for you. To know, you already know this, great, you can skip it, right? But if you don’t know, it’s going to be really helpful for people to really understand those mental models, because I think for me, really being true to the material and the material in this case being like HTML and CSS I think. I personally wouldn’t want to abstract it so far away where you’re creating some like proprietary markup or something, right? You really want to make sure that you can get as close to the native output as much as possible, but abstracting how people build with. That I think is key. 00:26:08 - Speaker 2: It also occurs to me that some of the mental models are things about what do my users come in expecting a front end developer versus a designer, for example, but also, as you said, the material, you just inherit a bunch of things that are just true whether or not you want them to be, and certainly the web and HTML and CSS are full of plenty of quirks and history and that sort of thing, and so something about how the grid system works or something about how Flexbox works or what have you, you’re just gonna inherit that. Some of that may be good because there’s good mental models, some of it may be more like baggage or gets in your way, and so presumably, maybe I’m realizing now I’m just kind of resting what she said, but just for my own understanding, you’re trying to figure out which things are abstractions you really want to surface to your users because they’re useful, they’re powerful, they’re compre. Sensible, they fit well with the visual tool you’re creating and which are weird quirks of the web that don’t really help you to know and I don’t need to know about, I don’t know what JavaScript mification, it’s just we do that quietly behind the scenes and kind of tuck it away and you don’t need to really like have a concept for that in your mind to get value from the tool. 00:27:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this is why I like the jobs to be done framework where you’re kind of focusing on that outcome that a customer wants, right? And I think for us, when we think about it. There’s like multiple ways to build a layout, right? But if we’re kind of looking at some of the best practices of like, here are the things that people typically try to build and it solves like 80% of those use cases, like how do we surface more of that because the likelihood of what people want to build with that is higher, right? And there’s always going to be this option B, C, D, and E that people can explore. But when you give them A through E all at once. It’s this paradox of choice, right? So if I drop a div and then you’re asking like, OK, you can use display, flex box or grid, someone who doesn’t know what the difference is three are, they probably just pick one, right? And then really just trial by error with that. But if we can be more opinionated about some of these things, I think it helps reduce the cognitive load of decisions that people have to make. So can we streamline people to what we think is the best decision while giving them that option to subvert it or explore other paths to, as opposed to give them all the divergent paths at once. 00:28:38 - Speaker 2: Now here we’ve spoken a little bit about sort of things within the page ad, a flex box, and that sort of thing, but actually the web has a huge number of abstractions or that mental model glossary for the web would include pages, include URLs, would include links. I think all of those are pretty well understood even by non-creators, which is actually pretty great and so you can just rely on using those things, I assume, even something like a website, what actually is a website. Where are the edges of it that may or may not be fully understood by the average person, they may not fully grasp when they sort of leave Facebook and go to another site, but certainly I think for your target audience, those things are probably really well understood and you can totally lean on that, is that right to guess. 00:29:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the beauty of building for the web is there’s such a rich taxonomy and a lot of like standards already set on that, that even if people aren’t familiar with it, it’s not like they’re learning just web flows mental model, right? They’re learning the mental models of like building a website and links, buttons, and even in layout, you know, thinking about sections and Some other elements that are offered to people. So I think that’s the thing that’s been helpful for us is that it’s like, as you’re learning web flow, you’re learning the web mental model as well. 00:30:01 - Speaker 2: Can you give us an example of something, you know, we’ve talked about this kind of visualization element, which in many cases I think a visualization tool is something that doesn’t really add a new mental model, it just helps you better, well, literally see what it is that, yeah, understand, for example, margins and padding. It sort of shows you how those layout. Is there some major new abstraction that web flow gives you that’s sort of a new capability that’s added to your user’s tool kit, but it is not something that comes from the web, but is something you created as part of your universe of mental models. 00:30:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s not something we originally created, but maybe I’ll throw this example out here because we just had our no code conference. We announced a capability that we call logic. And now when you have the UI side of things, and you have logic, and you have data with our CMS offering, it’s essentially a 1 to 1 connection to model view controller, right? And I think as we start exploring this is like, The question I’m asking is, do we teach everyone the fundamentals of model view controller and ask them to build it the exact same way? Are there ways to leverage those ways of doing things in new ways? And I think for us, there’s a lot to be able to explore there, even with our CMS, right? It’s like we’re letting people buying data to layout and building collections with them not necessarily knowing. What a collection is and how you would build that in code, right? So I think it’s not necessarily like inventing new definitions of things, but maybe new ways of manipulating and using it. And I think for us now that we have data, UI and logic, being able to manipulate, layout or data based on events, there’s a lot for us to really explore on how end users interact with that. 00:32:00 - Speaker 3: This brings us to another interesting aspect of designing for creative tools, which is the social aspect. So increasingly designing tools and then using the design tools takes place across many people, and there’s interesting social dynamics there. So especially if you look at a domain like the web, which is very multidimensional, like you can use absolute positioning or box model or grid or whatever, you have to come to some common language and understanding as a team, and sometimes you just gotta kind of pick one or be on the same page or at least call things the same thing. So an important job of design tools I think is helping teams reach that agreement. I can give you two examples. One is Hiroku, where there’s basically a lot of ways you can design and deploy an app, and Hirokoku picked one, and there were good reasons why Hiokku picked that way, and we said basically you should do this, like you should use Git and you should not write to the local file system and so on and so forth, you should use environment variables and Yes, those were good choices to make in of themselves, but they also basically forced everyone onto the same path, which was itself another example that’s maybe more analogous to web flow is Ruby on Rails, where basically it need people to pick a way to do NBC like, put this here, put this here, call this that, use this convention for converting between lower case and uppercase, and just do it, it’ll be fine. And there’s actually a huge service and just picking these defaults and having these guard rails in place. 00:33:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s really interesting you bring that up, Mark, because I think one of the things we’re really thinking about and that’s really top of my mind is how does collaboration work in web design and in a tool like web flow, and I can give some examples of that is one, let’s say you have an end user creating their site, but perhaps they find inspiration from our showcase and they pick a template to use, right? But that template is built Flexbox only. And let’s say they use CSS grid or something else for their site, they drop it in and just boom, the whole layout just collapses, right? So I think for us, that’s something to really think about. It’s just like, again, just how do users understand like how the material’s created, right? And I don’t know if it’s something where we’re like, want everyone to use flash. Xbox only and get rid of the other stuff because there’s implications with that. But how do we kind of nullify and make sure that when people are using other resources that people build, like in a community aspect, that there’s clarity, there’s good documentation, and there’s some good best practices around that. And I think the other thing. That you touched on, Mark, that I think is really interesting is, how do you think about like design architecture as a team, right? And if you have multiple designers working in web flow on a larger team, it’s like, how do you make these agreements and how do you declare these things that’s like, hey, as we’re working, this is our approach to Naming our CSS architecture or this is kind of how we want to approach building pages and having that. I think a lot of that lives off platform right now today. Some of the things that we’re thinking about is just like how do we enable teams to work better in web flow, and I think we’re still doing a lot of research on it and trying to figure out like what that best case is. 00:35:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems inevitable that all design tools are going to become collaborative and social, at least have the capability to do things as a group, and it’s interesting that we’re sort of working our way up. So the first thing was like Google Docs, which is text, and then you add the whole office suite, and now we’re working on complex tools like Figma and web flow, and I think eventually we’ll get to video that’s probably the hardest one to do collaboratively because of bandwidth, but we’re gonna get there. It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out. 00:35:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m starting to see a lot of startups working on collaborative video too, so I think definitely a really gnarly problem, but I think it’s a sign, like you said, it’s inevitable that everyone’s shifting to collaboration in as real time as possible too. 00:35:55 - Speaker 2: A bit of a tangent, but it’s certainly a reminder of something I feel like comes up on Twitter from time to time, which is, it does seem odd that you basically have all of these startups that are reimplementing collaboration, typically inspired by Google Docs or some combination of Google Docs and GitHub. And in fact, given that we want every single tool to be collaborative, couldn’t you imagine that as an element of the operating system or the file system? And instead, every single startup that does this has their own big engineering team and like needs to build it all, but one can’t help but to envision that future operating system where by default that is part of anything you build. 00:36:36 - Speaker 1: I think about that a lot about annotations too. Couldn’t annotations and commenting be more native across the operating system based on the objects that you’re working with, but like you said, a lot of these tools, it’s part of this walled garden, right? And everyone’s building their own version of it and there’s got to be a way where How do you take that a layer deeper, like either in the operating system or being more open source about it, but it is interesting, like everyone’s kind of building these same like set of features, and I always think about annotations and commenting as ones that I would love something like that on the OS level. 00:37:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I actually had the aspiration for such a thing existing. I think it could be an OS service or a web service sort of like S3, and I repeatedly hear people ask for this, and I think there are two big hurdles. One is there’s an expertise hurdle, which I think is not obvious until you try to do it, but it’s very, very hard to build such a system, and I think it’s basically impossible to do without having a motivating example product. So I think it’s most likely this gets extracted out from either a company or someone who has experience with the domain of trying to build such a system. And I think there’s an important path dependence thing where yes, everyone wants the operating system to support this, but, you know, it’d be very convenient if the operating system was the one that already ran, you know, my program, right? I don’t want to have to rewrite all my stuff or change my business or lose my business for such an operating system. So there’s a first mover problem. So, basically, I’m looking for the bookstore that wants to get into the business of web services in this space, and I think they’re out there somewhere. If you are, remember, we’re looking for such people, so contact us please. 00:38:16 - Speaker 2: David, what you mentioned earlier about the dropping a Flexbox component into a grid layout also makes me think of another thread here, which is the kind of componentization elements of things. Yeah, I think a product with a good mental model, a good set of abstractions, the elements of it can be combined together in a lot of different ways, again, ways the creator didn’t originally expect, but you take that even a step further, which is not just that I, the person using the tool within my document, can Do interesting and different things, but then you can go from there to, as you said, the collaboration, we’re on a team and we’re working together on something like a website or a document, but then the furthest step is to go from there to, you have these components that you can plug together where maybe the I don’t even know the person that made this calendar widget that I’m plugging in. But I feel like this has been a dream for a long time, and maybe one that there’s been many attempts, I think OpenDoc is kind of a famous one there, maybe ActiveX kind of Microsoft had a couple of different iterations of object embedding and yeah, I’m curious if you have a take on that path of computing history attempts. 00:39:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I can speak about the promise of OpenDoc cause candidly speaking, I never really had a chance to play around with it and. Implemented, but I think this idea of component software that is reusable and adds value for people immediately, I think it’s still a lot of ways the dream, right? And when we think about community plug in the ecosystems, it’s an aspiration I want to continue to pushing now, there’s a lot of trade-offs in practice because I think for me. Someone who used like cocoa pods a lot, right? There was something around like how open are these plug-in ecosystems, and I think that’s a tough tradeoff for any platform that’s being built, but I think for me with OpenDoc, I kind of felt like web objects was a lot of this too, in this world where you now have people who can build components. That serve other people and really being able to open up like how work is done, right, whether within your company or externally, but I think OpenDoc is just one of those still kind of waiting for that promise to be fulfilled and then I think that vision is so inspiring. 00:40:40 - Speaker 3: I think this is a super interesting frontier as well, and I think it’s like understudied and under theorized. I think people don’t appreciate how complex it is, especially when these plug-ins are turned complete and they have access to compute and data, you know, that is your compute and your data, they can do wild stuff and there’s sort of a this problem in the engineering world of libraries. And I think we’re still in the very early days of how we think about libraries, which is basically we download a bunch of random code from the internet and run at our computers and who knows, you know, a lot of it’s probably like mining Bitcoin or, you know, stealing my keys. It’s a complete mess. And I think it requires a very serious design and engineering effort. As well as again this respect of the path dependence problem where you need a way to bootstrap the ecosystem and to incentivize the ecosystem. So I’m so optimistic. I just think it’s a very hard problem. 00:41:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, you’re right, it’s still so early in the way that we’re doing it. And I think one of the things, like let’s take no code, for example, and use this open doc analogies. I’ve always described as no code being like the 3D printer for building on the web. So what it does is really creates repetition and reusability in a great way, right? Now, no code tools, there’s always going to be this threshold where if you’re doing something sophisticated, you might need to code it, right? So it’s never this like one or the other, but I think it kind of evolves into that and I see that with component software too, in the sense that it’s like, I think about this all the time. If I’m building an app, I’m like, why do I always have to build the same authentication flows, right? Or kind of build these things that people predict. It’s a very rigid solution intentionally, like, you know, e-commerce and check out some of these things like why do these things have to be constantly unique, right? There’s clear interactions of what people expect in those. And how do you do those things at scale. So then the things that need to be unique for your business or your product, you can really focus on that. And I think that’s where, again, I think this whole concept of like component software, I still very much believe in it. It’s a very ambitious vision and I think in a lot of ways still pretty early. 00:42:54 - Speaker 2: By the way, it probably is worth defining no code briefly for the audience. Again, we suspect a lot of folks may have at a minimum part of it, but given that you put on a conference with that name, it seems like you might be an authority to speak to what you think that word means, you know, what the category is, what the movement is, etc. 00:43:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. With like what it’s not, right, which is not the absence of code or any existence of that. And it’s really more of like the primitive that you build with. So instead of building, using code in a command line interface or a text editor, it’s through like visual abstractions. So there’s no code and low code. But yeah, it is something funny where It’s not even in my opinion, combating with code, right? It’s just kind of the existence of these two approaches in a lot of ways. And I think the companies that are going to excel at this is they’re probably going to use a combination of both, right, depending on some of the different use cases, but yeah, no code is kind of starting with not needing to learn how to code and you’re kind of focused on like the visual abstractions of creating with code. 00:44:05 - Speaker 2: My sense is that it’s often non-programmers doing automation and particularly connecting services together, so I think of the if this, then that and Zapier as being kind of a starting place, very simple, just, I don’t know, we use a Zapier integration for someone tweets about X, then put it in the Slack channel, for example, or you get an email with a PDF, stick it in this Dropbox. Those kinds of basic automations and that certainly I’m sure professional software engineers sometimes use such service just because it’s easier, less work to maintain or whatever than using their full on development stack, but I think very often it’s a business person or a designer or some other person that the writing a, I don’t know what a shell script to do the same thing would probably be out of reach for them. 00:44:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes me think about and name any use case, right, where before you’d have to like ask an engineer to run a rake task to be able to get all these things done. Now you’re empowering people, like you said, maybe they’re on the business side of things or not on the engineering and product side to be able to create their own automations in that way. And the question I always ask myself is like, this is the stuff you want to democratize even within your own company, right? It may not be the stuff like an engineer even wants to work on. So it’s like, again, it’s not contrary to how you do it, it’s just kind of really thinking about some of these use cases. I don’t know, do you all remember Yahoo pipes? That was another one that I think about with the automations too. 00:45:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I had to do some serious digging around in the web archives to find a screenshot of that because I wanted to reference it for the inco switch end user programming article that we did. But yeah, I think of that as one of the original put together flow-based programming with, I guess the emerging idea of web services or the fact that URL over here as a web report and another API over here is where I can feed in my travel plans and maybe I can connect all those together with well pipes. And maybe it was before its time, I’m not sure, but the concept there was so simple and maybe coming back to our mental models point, you know, you even look at a screenshot, you instantly understand what this is doing and what it might be capable of. Now another thing that I think about when thinking of a tool like what you’re making with web flow, I think Kokku had some of this as well, and I think any kind of creative tool always has this, you know, you talk about your ideal is the low floor, high ceiling, that’s the idea, it’s relatively easy to get started with, but you don’t get constrained later on. There’s also these powerful cases, but I do think there are cases where you do want to say, OK, you’re asking for something that actually is more kind of off the edge of what we actually want to offer with the tool. Certainly when we ran this Hiroku, someone would come in. I want to tune all these kernel parameters, whatever, we’d say, well, look, this actually isn’t the right platform for you because that level of control and customization is exactly what we’re trying to save you from. We’ve just made good choices there that will work pretty well for most people, and you can just remove thinking about all that kind of stuff from your head. And an example, you know, that I like to cite a lot for end user programming is Flash, which I think did a really great job of bringing animators and maybe what we would now call motion designers into something that was essentially kind of a programming environment, but it’s been speculated on some of these uh flash dyed postmortems that came along a couple of years ago that one of the Issues that it faced was in those early days, it was so accessible to animators, then people started making games, those games would get pretty complicated, they would need all these things that just professional software engineers need, want, expect in terms of data layer, caching. Complexity of the language, all that kind of stuff, ability to add libraries and dependencies, and eventually it became such a powerful programming tool that it actually lost that ease and that accessibility. Essentially the floor kind of crept up as they pushed up the ceiling. So I also think in designing a particular tool, it’s very reasonable to decide our spectrum of use. cases, you know, there’s some that’s going to be too trivial or too, you know, we don’t want to make things so easy, you know, we push you out to some more beginner tool, but there’s also a ceiling somewhere where we say, look, you actually reached the limit of what this tool is for. We’re not designing it for you. You should go use this over here that’s more powerful but also has, you know, other trade-offs. 00:48:38 - Speaker 3: Furthermore, I think there are different ways to do this. So I think the ideal way, again, if you have the right mental model and product architecture is to have basically a nested mental model, a nested architecture where you can peel back layers and get at the granular abstractions within. There’s all kinds of examples on Hooku. I think we did do a pretty good job with this. If you get push an app to compile and deploy it, it just basically picks how I think it should compile based on what the app looks like. But if you want, you can swap in your own compilation step and say, here’s the script that I want to compile this app, but critically, both the Hiokku default and that. use the same interface. They’re totally interchangeable. It’s like basically peeling off that one layer and saying I want to insert something different into this interface. It’s not saying, oh well, you know, Her only deploys Ruby. I gotta go do my whole own thing on AWS from scratch, right? You get to granually pick apart pieces and there are all kinds of examples of that. In contrast, sometimes I see these programming tools that are like code generators where there’s a super complicated problem and you invoke the code generator and it spits out 100 files. And as long as you don’t need to do anything different, you’re fine, but as soon as you need to do something different, you’re completely out of luck. It’s like you’re often hand editing these 100 different files. So I think the extent that you can create a system where you can peel back these individual abstractions while still enjoying the stack overall, that’s great. 00:49:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it makes me think about, I’ll give a small example. So there’s this note taking tool I love called Obsidian, and the thing I love about Obsidian is you use your local markdown files, right? So. If Obsidian ever gets to a point where it’s not scaling for me, which I think it serves my use case, well, you still kind of have the native markdown files and you’re not kind of stuck in that application layer, right? And I think great applications will figure out ways to be more of a facilitator than controller on that, you know, and I think for some like web flow, we think about, OK, we no longer are meeting the threshold of what like a certain customer wants, they can still export their code. But are there other things we can kind of build to make that interoperability a little bit easier too. So I think that’s the trick is like being in an application that can be great at facilitating some of these things. So if such things do evolve too, that you’re not kind of locked into that, but I think what you said, Mark is spot on. 00:50:57 - Speaker 2: Yes, I guess in the ideal world you design your tools so that. You start with a basic set of primitives, abstractions, mental model glossary that hopefully someone can understand and do something useful with when they need a little more power in some particular areas, that’s where they, as you said, mark, peel it back or I think David you put it as kind of popping the hood, and you can go down one layer at least for that spot, but you’re not completely off in some new world, you’re still within the kind of universe of abstractions that all fits together. And then there’s a final step, which might be what you referenced there David, which is where you actually do get to the end of what the tool can do for you, but hopefully now it’s not, now I’m really screwed and I have to just kind of recreate everything from scratch in some new environment, but rather you can, I think it’s React Native uses this term. Eject, where you essentially can say I want to take my project out of the React Native world to just make it a standard X code or Android Studio project, and there’s no going back once you eject or no easy going back, but that’s your out, right? 00:52:05 - Speaker 1: Interesting choice of words for React Native. 00:52:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s actually the kind of project that I was thinking of in my previous example where if you have to eject in that case, I think it’s pretty bad. I mean, you can still run. Another example of ejection would actually be with deploying apps with Hiokku. If you have a standard app, you can deploy to Hiroku, but you can also take that standard, like Ruby on Rails app, for example, and deploy it somewhere else, sort of an injection in a sense. Hm. This is a very important concept, by the way. Another way I think about this would be as an efficient frontier where the axes are difficulty slash complexity and the other axis is power, and what you want is you want a smooth trade off on those where you can always add a little bit more complexity to get a little bit more power. If you need it. And so if you need a little bit more power, you never have to undergo a huge complexity jump, like migrating your app to a whole different platform. For example, there’s little changes you can make along the way. And furthermore, you want that frontier pushed out as far as possible, so that the minimal amount of complexity is needed for the given amount of power. 00:53:01 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap too, because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant, so then complexity becomes a sort of like villainous thing, right? And I think there are times where we do need to embrace complexity, but how do you make it approachable, right? And I think that is the thing to solve, right, is to figure out like when there is a time where complexity is called for, how do you have your creative tools give people the knowledge of how, like again, to peel that layer back or pop the hood open to be able to address such complexity as opposed to avoiding it entirely. 00:53:45 - Speaker 3: And again, I keep coming back to this idea of mental models, often with complexity, you’re dealing with a fundamental reality of the underlying world, and if you ignore it or try to cover it up for long enough, you just make it worse, you have to address it. But on the other hand, you don’t want to make that problem any worse than it is by, for example, combining two problems and giving yourself three problems. 00:54:06 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of the Einstein quote, Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler, which is, yeah, the world is complex, it can be messy. You’re creating a tool for someone to model something about the world or create their own little mini made up world, and they are just going to need to deal with that complexity. In the web world, that’s something like all the different browsers and all the different devices that someone might browse from and different screen sizes and the difference between interaction on touch versus mouse versus trackpad versus stylus. Those things all exist and you need to deal with them when you’re creating something and attempt to totally abstract all that away because it sounds too complicated. It may impair the ability of the creator to make something that’s really good. 00:54:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, because abstractions still derived from the original thing, right? And I love the idea of really focusing on where you address complexity as opposed to neglecting it or putting it everywhere, right? So when you have these complex things to solve, what’s the optimal place to solve it? 00:55:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I do think we’re in kind of a golden age or the beginning of a golden age for creative tools that includes being more interesting, maybe place for designers to go work on tools for thought and things like that, that the the stodgy old kind of vanilla styles of the office suites of the past and so forth are giving way to more stylish and interesting and opinionated tools for thought and developer tools and designer tools. I’d be curious to hear from both of you looking forward to kind of the future, you know, if we could fast forward that trend 3 or 5 years, how does creative tools look different in the near future? 00:55:50 - Speaker 1: I think you’re gonna see a lot more participation in it, and it’s almost like. The consumerization of creator tools, which I think is exciting. And the reason I’m excited about it is I believe some of the people with the best ideas and things that can be life changing and can really change the world, probably don’t know how to code. They might not know how to design. So being able to give a platform for people to explore and express, kind of gives the continuation of such idea to manifest in other ways. Now, it may not be that person who ends up creating it, but maybe it sparks an idea somewhere else. So I’m always like a big fan of participation in anything because I think for me, honestly, if it wasn’t for visual programming tools like Hypercard and Quartz Composer, I may not have gotten into an interest in Building software and if I went the conventional route, I probably would have failed. So I think for me, that’s what I’m excited about is that like, this whole notion of like end user programming and it being more accessible, just for people to play and explore is pretty exciting for me. 00:57:03 - Speaker 2: It’s funny, I’m obviously a huge proponent of end user programming and more people learning how to grasp the power of the dynamic medium that is computers, not just as users, but as creators of software. But when you use the word consumerization, Then that actually almost gives me a little bit of an opposite reaction and intellectually, I think I agree with you that more participation, more accessibility is better, but I guess as a crafts person and I love my niche and sometimes kind of complicated powerful tools, then what consumerization brings to mind for me, I don’t know, Instagram stories, or for example, you’ve seen this in some of Apple’s creator products like they have for audio editing, you’ve got. Logic Audio, but then you’ve also got GarageBand, which is installed in a reac. It’s pretty simple and easy to use, which is nice, but then in some ways they brought some of that design aesthetic to logic, maybe taken away some of the things that the longtime pro users of that could be described as like a dumbing down. So it’s interesting to reflect on that reaction of myself. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I don’t think I’m proud of it, but I just had that twinge when you said that word. 00:58:12 - Speaker 3: Oh Adam, I got a different phrase for you. What if we called it end user creating as a sort of generalization of end user programming, and this is a road we’re already part of the way down. So it used to be that even end users couldn’t do something like word processing that was kind of a professional activity you had a typist or whatever. And we’ve since brought the Office suite to end users, and now I think we’re in the process of doing that for richer media, so audio, video, web pages. Of course, those are things that are kind of on the cusp right now of even a few years ago, it was quite hard for someone to casually do audio editing or video editing, but now you go look on YouTube and there’s these like super, super niche, random people doing super random stuff, but the video quality is like insane because everyone can do video editing now. And I think that kind of progress is going to continue. 00:58:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think Adam, even when I said that word, I had a similar reaction too and it just makes me wonder, like, has the term consumer transformed in a way that, you know, needs to evolve a little bit, but I’ll give you an example. There’s an awesome. iOS app called Universe, which lets you build websites like on your phone. And I think for that, that to me is like the consumerization of a creator tool, right? You’re kind of taking the mental models of what people are used to on their. Smartphone dragging and dropping these swipe gestures, but instead of consuming content, maybe it’s more the consumers are becoming creators, right? So it’s kind of normalizing creators in that way and I think the universe is a great example of that. But just wanted to say when I said that word too, I had a certain mental model that came to mind and I think it’s, yeah, kind of like, maybe it’s more turning consumers and the creators rather with the mental models that they know. 00:59:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that, and certainly I have my own career to thank for that in a way. As a kid, I loved video games, I was a consumer of video games, and that led me to think I want to be able to create these for myself, h