Kartik Agaram
In the early to mid-1990’s, I was composing a document and needed to find and insert some information from another program. To do this, I had to leave my text editor, search for and launch another application, browse for the information I was looking for, format it appropriately for my source needs, and then switch back to where I was in my original text editor. All of this took minutes, and more importantly, took me out of the flow of what I was writing. There had to be a better way, I thought.
As a result, I devised what I called “The Invisible Interface”. The idea was to use the computer’s clipboard as an interpretable information bus for retrieving information I wanted without ever having to leave the application, or even the very text line, I was working on. As an example, I would type something like, “Please send the package to my sister’s address”. I would then select and copy to the clipboard the phrase “my sister’s address”, hit a function key to request processing, and I would instantly hear an audio cue: “bing” if successful, “bong” if the system was not able to resolve the phrase to more specific information. If I heard a “bing”, I would hit the paste command in my editor, and it would replace the selected text “my sister’s address” with “Sara Cheyer, 123 Main St. Town, State, 91101”. I connected a myriad of databases and information sources, and could instantly and painlessly retrieve all sorts of information by a concise, direct phrase inserted in-line in the context of what I was doing: “population of South America’s largest country”, “email for my boss”, “free time on Thursday”, “flower in French”, etc.
-- Adam Cheyer, "Interpretable and Executable text", in The Future of Text (https://futuretextpublishing.com/future-of-text-2020-download)
Myles Haynes
10/09/2022, 4:04 PMjamii
10/09/2022, 5:41 PMChris Knott
10/09/2022, 6:46 PMKartik Agaram
Myles Haynes
10/09/2022, 7:31 PMThis approach has been speaking more to me since I declared bankruptcy on the Unix terminal and wrote off all my accumulated expertise there as a sunk cost.Do tell
Kartik Agaram
Andrew F
10/09/2022, 9:08 PMKartik Agaram
After trying to restrict myself to text mode to minimize dependencies, I find immense relief in compromising some of my "principles" and adopting a portable graphical platform (https://love2d.org) with a relatively accessible build process. With Teliva in particular, I found myself following a similar thought process to Wordpress, and it's a relief to jettison 50 years of restrictions in terminal land.-- July 20 on a different forum https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C03RR0W5DGC/p1663493561498049?thread_ts=1662264559.165209&cid=C03RR0W5DGC
izuchukwu
10/10/2022, 2:04 AMKartik Agaram
izuchukwu
10/10/2022, 2:13 AM