“So why are all of these strange references on the Nostromo’s emergency destruct keyboard? Well, according to the Alien Explorations blog, designer Simon Deering needed some complex-sounding labels for the keyboard at short notice. He was reading The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky, a Russian philosopher and occultist, at the time of filming. Blavatsky’s book attempts to explain the origin and evolution of the universe in terms derived from the Hindu concept of cyclical development. Deering found his inspiration in its pages, and the Nostromo’s odd keyboard was born.”
While building rules.io we found ourselves connecting to lots of APIs. We also found ourselves building user interfaces that we knew would eventually connect to an API of our users’ choosing – but we wouldn’t know which API until runtime. Working with APIs in this very dynamic way led us to build some interesting technology, and gave us some fresh perspectives on how best to use API-based services from web and mobile applications.
Behind every value lies a computation struggling to get out. That’s the idea behind what I call the explodable user interface. (Forget wearable. Explodable.) By “explodable” what I have in mind is the ability to pick any part of an application’s GUI that you happen to be interested in and interactively “unpack” it into a story that explains how it was computed. It should be as though code lurks behind everything you can see, all the way back to the data sources your application works with. In Lisp you can explode an atom into its constituent characters, but the relationship between a Lisp atom and its characters has no computational content to speak of. In a typical application, the relationship between a value and its parts is non-trivial. If it were otherwise, you wouldn’t call it an “application”: you’d call it “a bunch of data”. Whenever this non-trivial structure is present, you should be able to browse into it in order to understand it or change it.
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.
