What would be possible if hand-drawn sketches were programmable like spreadsheets?
Ink & Switch malleable software essay
When I program, I personally prefer to be controlled by the tools I use. They were build for a reason, for a specific workflow. I want my program to typecheck. I dont want to have the freedom to write untyped programs. I don’t want git to also have the ability to crop images. At this specific moment, I want to perform a specific task and I want the tools to help me do it, nothing more complex , or annoying , that could allow me to shoot myself to the foot. Control is bliss. Control is bliss as ...
ARIA Safeguarded AI Programme, new faces, and a splattering of ink lab notes
Peter, our lab director, will announce a major new initiative. You’ll hear about two researchers who have recently joined our staff. Finally, we’ve got a collection of lab notes about Programmable Ink.
Ink
Handwriting and drawing directly between paragraphs using a digital pen, stylus, or Apple pencil.
PlayBook: A Programmable Paper Notebook
CloudPebble
Write apps without dealing with Linux, virtual machines, compilers, or Python.
supernote-cli: pen, paper, and a pipe
A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.
Open-sourcing Keyhive, filtering Ambsheets, and Sketchpad explorations
Some updates from our ongoing work on local-first auth, a new post from our Ambsheets project about filtering scenarios in a spreadsheet, and some explorations of the historic Sketchpad project for constraint-based drawing.
Building a spreadsheet from the ground up | Prabhanshu Gupta
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
This draft was released March 15, 2006. Please email comments to bretworrydream.com. You can also download the PDF.
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
This draft was released March 15, 2006. Please email comments to bretworrydream.com. You can also download the PDF.
Malleable Software
Software that gives users extreme agency over the interface, such as JIT interfaces.
extensible web apps
GPT-6 and Intelligent UI for everyone
Web Tiles (by paperpilot.dev) — Semble
Introducing Patchwork-26