(2023-11-22) Ink And Switch Dispatch001 On Embark And Lude

Ink and Switch: Dispatch 001: On Embark and Lude. As of today we have three active research tracks: local first software, programmable ink, and malleable software. We’re about a dozen researchers around the world

In this first dispatch, we want to share some of our recent work on Malleable Software with Embark

On the Malleable Software track our goal is to design software environments that people can mold to their unique needs by pushing personal computing beyond the boundaries of siloed apps.

Recently, we’ve been exploring a potential solution to this problem: dynamic documents that let you gradually enrich text with interactive behavior. Last year we shared Potluck, a dynamic document environment for text notes and recipes

but we also found challenges with some aspects of Potluck’s design, and we also wanted to find deeper, more authentic uses for this new kind of document.

This time around, they focused on travel planning as a use case

The result of this exploration is a research prototype called Embark. It lets you write a text outline augmented with three features: mentions of structured data like places and dates, spreadsheet-like formulas to compute weather forecasts and routes, and rich views like maps and calendars.

We invited a few independent researchers to come and join our virtual lab and work on their own projects being a part of our little community.

In the current rotation, we have Mary Rose Cook who has been working on Lude and Alexander Obenauer who is exploring the future of computing with the Itemized OS.

As Mary just presented Lude at LIVE 2023, we wanted to introduce you to her and what she’s been working on.

As a software maker, testing a simple idea can take longer than it should. Mary’s research aims to address these limitations—she’s making tools for building software quickly

Lude is a tool for building video games quickly

Video games are an interesting use case because “building games faster” is basically the hardest version of the problem Mary is tackling—games often require defining complex behavior. So, how does Lude make it quicker to build games?

1—Direct manipulation of live objects in the running game

2—Expressive, fast code generation

Lude is designed to capture the expression of the designer’s intent implied in the prompts. (If you’re curious of how exactly this is achieved, read more in Mary’s research blog.)

Unrelated: The OpenDoc Programmer’s Guide weighs in at roughly 600 pages, but if you’re interested in Malleable Software, there’s a ton of great information in there