Add Ink & Switch's "Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software" to catalog

[jryans]

https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/

Today, personal computing is organized around apps: large prefabricated units of software developed by professionals for the masses, with few opportunities for customization. How might we reorient computing so that people can deeply tailor software to meet their unique needs?

We think a promising workflow is gradual enrichment from docs to apps: starting with regular text documents and incrementally evolving them into interactive software. In this essay, we present a research prototype called Potluck that supports this workflow. Users can create live searches that extract structured information from freeform text, write formulas that compute with that information, and then display the results as dynamic annotations in the original document.

One problem with apps is that they have predefined feature sets that the creators deemed appropriate for the goal. It’s impossible to make a small tweak, or even remove an unwanted feature, unless the creator of the app has explicitly allowed for the change. Each app has a (often narrow) domain that it considers in scope, requiring us to learn to use many independent apps that don’t compose together well. In short, apps enact rigid boundaries between tasks, and define rigid solutions within those boundaries.

There’s another important dimension of inflexibility: apps create rigid data schemas that define the kinds of information we can record within them. We can fill out the available form fields, but we can’t add new fields or scribble in the margins. Structured data inputs struggle with ambiguity—when faced with a list of radio buttons, there’s no way we can select two options, like we might have done on a paper form.

Imagine an operating system with the principles of Potluck deeply woven in. People could start by just organically recording information however they want. As they come across places where the computer could help them, they would gradually add structure to their data, but only as much structure as is needed for the task at hand. They would then add bits of computational behavior, borrowed from others or created from scratch, to complete the task.

The resulting tools might resemble “apps”, but in fact would be precisely tailored to one’s own needs. The tool fits the workflow, rather than the workflow fitting the tool.

Suggester: me