They have one of the best articles out there, and now the page is great too. Fun and innovative.
My favorite article, in case you haven't read it already, is local-first [1], or I recently read the embark, dynamic documents for making plans. These always give me so much inspiration.
Wow, embark is very well done! I feel like there is some sort of solution space between notes, whiteboards, jupyter notebooks and Arcan FE that could make knowledge organization much easier, but it's such a huge space to even comprehend in the first place I can only ever hold part of the solution in my head.
I also enjoyed Muse[1], which was made available in the iOS app store, and is now being maintained as "Allume"[2] (an unnamed company bought the Muse name).
Essentially a digital pinboard, it was an interesting experiment in "designed for tablet" UX and was developed far enough to be an app. The gesture based UX, nested board, PDF reader, and transclusion of PDF fragments are all interesting ideas.
It looks cool! But man is it frustrating that nothing is consistent. Some things change when I click. Some things change when I drag. Some things seemingly doesn't do anything at all.
If it is intentionally like that, great. But I just don't find the experience pleasant.
Backstory: when we first set up the sandbox, we offered a handful inputs that devs could optionally use in their letters. You could click and drag directly on the letter, drag a little token on a "Kaoss Pad"-like control surface, scrub a timeline, toggle a big global mode switch, and more. Everyone used a different subset of the these inputs, based on whatever seemed like the best fit for the idea behind their letter. Some people even bypassed all that and implemented their own input handling (like Lilith did for the bullet hell game in C0). But most folks actually didn't add any interactivity at all.
When I curated the letters for our home page, I wanted to strike a balance between a few things. I wanted to encourage playfulness, for instance by having unpredictable things happen depending on what/how you interacted ("output randomness", to borrow a gamedev term). And while I did make some changes to some letters (adding some additional interactivity, simplifying some inputs), I didn't want to go too far and ruin the authorial intent behind the letters.
But, like you and the other commenter here found, there is inconsistency that errs on the side of frustrating. That's something that irked me too — I just ran out of time for polish and had to ship.
In any event, thanks for kicking the tires on it. Even if it didn't quite clear the bar for playful interaction, I hope it was fun to look at.
I don’t really mind the inconsistencies, it is just something fun and playful to discover and I believe the imperfections add to the charme of such things. It reminds me of the little sketches I made with Processing[1] years ago, when programming felt like just another artistic medium I could express myself in.
Just wanted to say that I personally enjoyed the little inconsistencies. It feels satisfying to discover interactions that I didn't expect, disorienting but in a good way.
Their articles are always worth a read, especially their efforts on CRDT are a great inspiration for improving UX. Not sure I’m getting the full experience of this homepage on mobile though, will have to check later.
Ink and Switch's stuff always makes me want to go rebuild something, and the homepage being playable is very on brand for them. Curious how much of it is bespoke versus falling out of their own Automerge tooling.
If you'd like to rebuild a letter, we recently published the editable version of the system (which is also a Patchwork):
https://tenfold.inkandswitch.com/
There’s still currently the need of a server to synchronise data between Allume clients (Mac + iPad + iPhone companion app), but it is completely useable offline on one device. Adam Wulf, the now solo developer of it, mentioned that a local P2P sync is in the pipeline.
I assume that they decided the business model and user experience separately. It's generally harder to build local-only software than stuff that just uses the cloud for all the hard work, but it's a better user experience. I'd be willing to pay more for local-first, but yeah it certainly does feel weird.
This is a subject that will come up more often now that self-hosting becomes more common.
The developers still need to get paid though, but should that be a subscription or a one-time fee?
I honestly don't know, but I feel like a subscription that supports the developer without locking features is a good thing?
If you only pay a one-time fee and no future updates, that is also an option, but that price will be higher because you will need to cover all the features that were developed up to that point.
So what are the options here?
Sounds like they should charge for software updates then, as that is directly related to the ongoing work for people who have already bought the software.
They have one of the best articles out there, and now the page is great too. Fun and innovative. My favorite article, in case you haven't read it already, is local-first [1], or I recently read the embark, dynamic documents for making plans. These always give me so much inspiration.
[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ [2] https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/
Wow, embark is very well done! I feel like there is some sort of solution space between notes, whiteboards, jupyter notebooks and Arcan FE that could make knowledge organization much easier, but it's such a huge space to even comprehend in the first place I can only ever hold part of the solution in my head.
I also enjoyed Muse[1], which was made available in the iOS app store, and is now being maintained as "Allume"[2] (an unnamed company bought the Muse name).
Essentially a digital pinboard, it was an interesting experiment in "designed for tablet" UX and was developed far enough to be an app. The gesture based UX, nested board, PDF reader, and transclusion of PDF fragments are all interesting ideas.
[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse/ [2]: https://allume.com/
I really love this one on dynamic documents as well:
Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/
They are also some of the folks behind the Local-first conference.
Recordings: https://www.youtube.com/@localfirstconf/videos
Recap: https://www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/dispatch-019/
Don't miss our "Lab Day" talks from this year's Local-First Conf, which are posted on our own channel: https://youtube.com/@inkandswitch
Thanks for posting this! Love your team's work.
> Play with it! Click/drag everywhere.
It looks cool! But man is it frustrating that nothing is consistent. Some things change when I click. Some things change when I drag. Some things seemingly doesn't do anything at all.
If it is intentionally like that, great. But I just don't find the experience pleasant.
Yeah, I'll take the blame for that :)
Backstory: when we first set up the sandbox, we offered a handful inputs that devs could optionally use in their letters. You could click and drag directly on the letter, drag a little token on a "Kaoss Pad"-like control surface, scrub a timeline, toggle a big global mode switch, and more. Everyone used a different subset of the these inputs, based on whatever seemed like the best fit for the idea behind their letter. Some people even bypassed all that and implemented their own input handling (like Lilith did for the bullet hell game in C0). But most folks actually didn't add any interactivity at all.
When I curated the letters for our home page, I wanted to strike a balance between a few things. I wanted to encourage playfulness, for instance by having unpredictable things happen depending on what/how you interacted ("output randomness", to borrow a gamedev term). And while I did make some changes to some letters (adding some additional interactivity, simplifying some inputs), I didn't want to go too far and ruin the authorial intent behind the letters.
But, like you and the other commenter here found, there is inconsistency that errs on the side of frustrating. That's something that irked me too — I just ran out of time for polish and had to ship.
In any event, thanks for kicking the tires on it. Even if it didn't quite clear the bar for playful interaction, I hope it was fun to look at.
I don’t really mind the inconsistencies, it is just something fun and playful to discover and I believe the imperfections add to the charme of such things. It reminds me of the little sketches I made with Processing[1] years ago, when programming felt like just another artistic medium I could express myself in.
[1]: https://processing.org
Just wanted to say that I personally enjoyed the little inconsistencies. It feels satisfying to discover interactions that I didn't expect, disorienting but in a good way.
Yea, it went from cool -> annoying pretty quick for me.
Their articles are always worth a read, especially their efforts on CRDT are a great inspiration for improving UX. Not sure I’m getting the full experience of this homepage on mobile though, will have to check later.
Have you played the arcade game in the letter C yet? If not, then you've probably missed other stuff as well.
Ink and Switch's stuff always makes me want to go rebuild something, and the homepage being playable is very on brand for them. Curious how much of it is bespoke versus falling out of their own Automerge tooling.
If you'd like to rebuild a letter, we recently published the editable version of the system (which is also a Patchwork): https://tenfold.inkandswitch.com/
What do you mean by that? To me it seems like every single letter is pretty much hand-written and attributed to one or two team members.
Check their comment history. They don't 'mean' anything, they're an llm
App they have mentioned is indeed looks awesome: https://allume.com/#pricing
But why subscription for local-only software?
There’s still currently the need of a server to synchronise data between Allume clients (Mac + iPad + iPhone companion app), but it is completely useable offline on one device. Adam Wulf, the now solo developer of it, mentioned that a local P2P sync is in the pipeline.
> But why subscription for local-only software?
I assume that they decided the business model and user experience separately. It's generally harder to build local-only software than stuff that just uses the cloud for all the hard work, but it's a better user experience. I'd be willing to pay more for local-first, but yeah it certainly does feel weird.
This is a subject that will come up more often now that self-hosting becomes more common. The developers still need to get paid though, but should that be a subscription or a one-time fee? I honestly don't know, but I feel like a subscription that supports the developer without locking features is a good thing?
If you only pay a one-time fee and no future updates, that is also an option, but that price will be higher because you will need to cover all the features that were developed up to that point. So what are the options here?
Developers deserve to be paid for their work. Adam's work on Allume is ongoing, so he deserves ongoing income.
Sounds like they should charge for software updates then, as that is directly related to the ongoing work for people who have already bought the software.
Seems like a subset of LiquidText
https://www.liquidtext.net is more PDF-focused, but the workspace is cool.
Hint for mouse users, press and drag on them to hear sound and see visual effects. Mouse X/Y coordinates are inputs.
This is amazing I am so grateful to hear about it.
I gave been going in few similar things on my own with localbox
I did not understand why this was cool until i tried holding and dragging it!
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