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Malleable software

computing environments where anyone can mold their tools to their own unique needs.That definition is by [[Geoffrey Litt]], who wrote [[Malleable software ...

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. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

Geoffrey Litt

Welcome! I work on malleable software: computing environments where anyone can adapt their software to meet their needs with minimal friction. To see what that means to me, read this essay or listen to this interview.

psf (@psf@oldbytes.space)

In their article ["Malleable Software"](https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software), Ink & Switch list various ways that modern software applications fail to serve the user: - Software is too rigid: users can’t tailor it to suit their workflow, except by entering the role of programmers. - Software applications are overspecialized "avocado slicers", not general tools like "knives", so their lack of tailorability is keenly felt. - Software doesn’t provide a reasonable learning curve from beginner to expert; in other words, time spent learning an application doesn’t unlock tailorability, instead the end user must learn an unrelated skill like a markup/scripting language or even the tool’s implementation language. - Software applications are increasingly siloed, so sharing data between apps, let alone orchestrating cross-app workflows, is overly difficult. These are real problems. From what I can tell, Ink & Switch are software researchers, and view the problems from a highly technical perspective, focusing on novel infrastructure that enables end-user programmability. They pose questions such as "how do we ease users into programming?" and "instead of shipping a dead, static binary, can we ship a living image containing programming tools allowing it to be modified in arbitrary ways while still running?" These ideas are technologically exquisite, but they fail to provide a gentle learning curve. (cont'd) 🧵

“Our programs are fun to use.” – Unsung

A blog about software craft and quality

Software You Can Love

celebrate the art of creating software for humans

Someone behind the software

I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work.

Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...

Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...

Building personal tools by programming

Where Did Software Go Wrong? | Jesse Li

Software is broken, but it's not because of NPM, startups, AI, or venture capitalists. A deep dive into how we think about and produce code, and how our software systems reflect the manic state of the modern world.