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What is text? This blog post reminds me of the time 10 years ago when I tried to do away with Linux's desktop environment because it seemed overly complex and hard to wrap my head around. I had a lot of trouble running wifi without the desktop environment, and it left me quite bitter. Linux had seemed like a hacker's OS when I first started out. But it was trying so hard to compete with Windows…
As I start teaching the kids programming, I’ve been thinking about how to motivate it to them. They do a lot of drawing, so that seemed like a potential hook to show how drawing on the computer may make some things easier (erasing, manipulating, repeating) and other things harder (e.g. drawing well). Demo of a little bare-bones fork of Lua Carousel for a computer with a large screen and a mouse.…
An experiment involving scrollbars Keeping scrollbars easy to acquire even in large files. Demo of an idea for a scrollbar with a shadow or "penumbra" which makes it easier to acquire to drag around, even as the conventional and smaller central object continues to be visible to give an accurate sense of file size and our position in it. Thanks Artyom Bologov and Mary , though I ended up taking…
As an experiment, I've machine-translated the help docs in Lua Carousel into 7 languages: Spanish (Peninsular and Latin American) German French Japanese Chinese Portuguese Hopefully it is helpful for someone to no longer have to put up with English. I put each language in a separate download to reduce the amount of data you need to download. Other languages are machine-translated from the English…
I've been moved by a few different recent pieces [Ⅰ][Ⅱ][Ⅲ][Ⅳ] to think anew about what I want, and how it relates with goals a lot of other people seem to have. Here's a map that the rest of this post tours: I'm very dissatisfied with the current state of the world in two regards: 𝐀. Computer owners can't easily understand or modify programs they run. 𝐁.…
I've been reading The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander, and it's inspired me to experiment with this representation to communicate the global structure of the source code of the Game of Snake : The whole program is arranged on a 2D surface within a series of nested boxes. You can hit ‘run’, and it extracts the code from the surface and runs it and you get to play a game of…
Lua Carousel now comes with a comprehensive system of online help you can run on computer or phone: A tutorial for using it tailored towards programmers Exercises for learning programming Lots of example programs you can run right from within it, clone and remix Reference documentation for available capabilities, while carefully exposing the level in the stack that provides them. (I believe this…
Automatically selecting colors with sufficient contrast. Here's a test build of my hypertext browser where every "page load" picks a random background. The foreground and link colors adapt to preserve a minimum contrast (WCAG AAA level). I repeatedly click on links in my app. Each click opens a new page with a random background color but the same spec for foreground colors. Foreground colors…
It started, as it often does, with my kids. They got curious about a chess variant called Monster chess . But none of the websites out there have an implementation of it. So I set out to build one. In Lua Carousel , of course, my cross-platform app for editing and running little Lua scripts on phone, tablet or computer. Now, like all the best chess variants, this one uses all the rules of chess,…
I seem to be alternating between working with html and Lua/LÖVE. In the last few days I've been trying to extract some more timeless tools out of the ad hoc static site I replaced my old Rails website with a couple of years ago. Here's the project. Requires just Lua (any version after 5.1) and nothing else. In particular, it doesn't mess with any Markdown variant, just leaves you to edit raw HTML.…
