Ink and Switch wrote a nice blogpost recently talking about "Malleable Software" inkandswitch.com/essay/malleab…
It resonated with me a lot. The idea of building software that has an on-ramp that keeps on-ramping, guiding a user to not only become an expert, but to make the software their own, really resonated with me.
It's felt for a long time that Gnome has gone in the opposite direction. Trying to make something easy and clean, but end users aren't part of that journey.
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable.www.inkandswitch.com
Christine Lemmer-Webber
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • • •I don't just want to focus on the negative: if not Gnome, what *should* we use? Well, I'm not sure anything else is currently ideal. Maybe it's time for something else.
I particularly like the bit about the above essay that talks about how Hypercard helped its users grow to become experts. Topical, and thoughtful.
This is the kind of direction I want to see from software, one where users are part of the story: software that grows with users, users that grow with software.
Jan D
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • • •Christine Lemmer-Webber
in reply to Jan D • • •@simulo I think programs which have come with good defaults and a good initial landing but are extensible do exist. Browsers (well, historically), spreadsheet software, etc are good examples.
Blender is an interesting piece of software that used to be notorious for being hard to use, and is in a categorically challenging software space, but is now considered given its domain relatively comfortable to pick up. But it's incredibly customizable, and many people become developers by using it
Christine Lemmer-Webber
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • • •Parnikkapore
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • • •@simulo Necro, but: I just remembered another example of early end-user development that's largely forgotten nowadays - MS Access forms.
Custom data entry user-tailored to the specific task, extensible with VB if you need more!
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • •@Christine Lemmer-Webber sugar (from the OLPC project) was quite nice, and it's a bit more recent than hypercard, but I'm afraid it's also dead, right?
(also quite targeted towards children rather than general users)
samir, sad, no more meows
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • • •I love this piece. Thanks for sharing it. I'd not heard of Ink & Switch, and I'm going to enjoy browsing their work. Their spreadsheet ideas are really fascinating.
People seem to be pushing LLMs as the saviour to this problem. I think Lisp and Prolog are probably better answers.
Christine Lemmer-Webber reshared this.
Tris
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • • •fosstodon.org/@AdrianVovk/1146…
GNOME force strikes again...
Adrian Vovk (@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org)
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