A 20-minute video on my lived experience with Free...
# share-your-work
k
A 20-minute video on my lived experience with Freewheeling Apps

https://youtu.be/aD6vmbmzdBo

e
you cool with folks sharing this?
k
Yes, thanks for asking.
g
100% agree on making things simpler. The spatial aspect, being new, might benefit from an affordance for transitioning. e.g. a list or search of names which highlights or jumps to the box where it lives. It also makes me wonder what a diff would look like, for comparisons. Could be very cool. Thanks for sharing!
k
Thanks! There is in fact a way to look up names that filters the list as you type. I showed it at one point, but it goes by quickly. I should have dwelt on it more rather than grope to find specific nodes. Diff is something I hadn't at all considered so far!
One question I have is about the audio quality. Does it seem ok to people? I'm famously terrible at discerning noise, etc.
e
yeah! I think the audio quality is really good — during a lot of this sort of demo I find that folks speak a bit faster than is easy to follow along with the on-screen portion. I thought you did a really rock-solid job of keeping things well timed
g
No trouble with the audio quality here.
g
There is no apparent problem with your audio, but, if you want A quickie way to tweak spoken-word audio, I found these settings useful https://publish.obsidian.md/programmingsimplicity/descript+audio/2023-07-08-Descript+Audio
Paraphrasing, to see if I understand: an “app” is a Composition of boxes. Some boxes contain previously-written code, some boxes contain newly-written code. New apps can be copy/pasted (“forked”) from previous apps. Correct? FTR: You might wish to try a different UI - a hierarchy instead of an infinite canvas. Say, no more than 7+-2 boxes on any one diagram. Purple boxes are code, black boxes are containers. Purple boxes contain Lua (or whatever). Black boxes can contain purple boxes or more black boxes. You can drill down into black boxes to show their contents - if you want to, but you are not forced to do so. In my opinion, the UI problem with an infinite canvas is apparent at, say, 15:11. The editor shows a bunch of generic code on the left which, IMO, should simply be elided into a single black box. [“Black” boxes are something visually appealing and not distracting (maybe empty boxes with a faded, coloured border???) ]. My brain wants to ignore the boxes on the left, since I trust that that code already works and isn’t being tweaked for this particular fork. But, I can’t - visually - ignore the left side, since I am forced to look at it. I -can- pan to the right side thereby eliding the left side, but, at first it’s not obvious that I want to do that. I have to understand what’s there before I know what I want to look at and what I want to elide. The designer of a new app simply wants to copy/paste (“fork”) a previously working/tested app and to treat the previous code as a black box.