Collection
Post-app computing
Updated 2mo
Imagining computing beyond siloed, rigid apps
Collection
Updated 2mo
Imagining computing beyond siloed, rigid apps
User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons
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What is Malleable Software Now | Bryan Min (02-27-2026)
Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies
On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention
Agents vs Operating Systems : The War That Could Kill Apps
Digital Topology & Economic Power
The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, relocating control toward incumbents at each stage. Enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power.
Stuart K. Card and Thomas P. Moran, "User Technology—From Pointing to Pondering"
As someone interested in providing more agency in our computing environment I am on the lookout for pieces of our current computing environments that can be enriched to provide a more malleable experience. Window management is an area that I keep coming back to given how prevalent the domain is. I will provide a recap of what window management is, how it’s used today, and how modern applications have evolved to deal with current deficiencies. Then I’ll provide a compositional approach for window management to move towards and discuss how I think this could make applications more malleable.
LN 040: The venerable hyperlink
Decades after hyperlinks transformed humanity's information and text into a densely-linked graph, mainstream OSs have yet to afford users their benefits in personal computing.
Loper OS » Why Hypercard Had to Die
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas. The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the wonder. Half a dozen of us were invited back a week later; and then again, and again, for several delicious months.
Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop
UIST 2019 Visions - Michel Beaudouin-Lafon: A World Without Apps
Stanford Seminar - Generative, Malleable, and Personal User Interfaces
Post-appitalism rejects the super-app as a meaningful alternative to todays app-based production of software. An app that becomes so big that it starts sucking in smaller apps perpetuates the same dynamics no matter how well integrated the smaller apps can be.
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post-appitalism post-appitalism.app
some thoughts on atproto as a post-app paradigm
Ecosystem Plugins
notes.wesleyfinck.orgThe foundation of personal computing is the filesystem. The foundation of the internet is a networked filesystem. The foundation of a new social web will likely be a social filesystem. (It remains an ope question if atproto is such a foundation)
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It seems a fork lies ahead, is atproto a portable database for a bunch of apps or a new type of post-app, social filesystem?
Per @paulrony.bsky.social “Documents have information in them; they're passive. They're acted upon by the dominant all-active application. The application has the interaction in it but no information. You have passive data and an active application…”
