(2024-02-28) Ink And Switch Os Of The Future And Universal Version Control

InkAndSwitch: OS of the future and universal version control. In this dispatch, we wanted to spotlight the work of Alexander Obenauer who’s been a Researcher-in-Residence with us since last year and introduce our new research project

You might remember Alexander from the Embark project, where he joined the malleable software team to address the limitations of modern siloed apps

In his independent research, Alexander is questioning today’s operating systems and exploring the OS of the future.

Alexander has been exploring the concept of an “itemized” OS, one that allows users to construct their own environment. In such an OS all of your digital things — emails, todos, notes, reminders, webpages, podcast episodes, and so forth — are “items” that sit in one, local graph.

He recently published an essay in which he discusses designing, building, and living in OLLOS for several years, with details on how the design and concept evolved

OLLOS, one of Alexander’s recent experiments, is an interface that uses time as an organizing principle

Workbench, his next project, allows anyone to build personal interfaces on top of the item store that powered OLLOS.

Universion version control

Different disciplines use different tools to explore variations, for example:

• Coders use Git to work in branches and see diffs
• Writers use Track Changes in Ms Word to suggest and review edits
• Designers duplicate artboards in Figma to see variations side-by-side Last year, we took inspiration from these versioning systems and built an experimental text editor for writers. We think the core concepts in Upwelling are promising and transferable to other creative domains.

So now, we’re continuing this line of work with version control for writing and beyond. We believe that simple, powerful, universal version control tools could help creative people in many fields work and collaborate more effectively

Geoffrey Litt, Paul Sonnetag, Max Schoening, Peter van Hardenberg, and Adam Wiggins have started building prototypes to test this idea in our new research project, codenamed Patchwork. Follow the work-in-progress posts in the Patchwork lab notebook.

also...

Geoffrey Litt gave a talk on Tiny Essay Editor, a collaborative markdown editor built on Automerge. We’ve been using it around the lab for all sorts of writing including this dispatch.