Daniel Feichtinger's Homepage
My first — and so far, only — talk on HyperMap was the 2023 Nordic APIs Summit. The conference was for generalist API industry practitioners so I tried to focus on the high-level business value of HyperMap. On reflection the focus of the talk was a little confused between the potential for HyperMap to make APIs a lot more powerful and its ability to speed up integration. Both are true, but the…
HyperMap is a new format for REST APIs I designed over the past couple of years. It’s built around two core ideas. First, it’s entirely self-descriptive, meaning a client can understand and interact with any HyperMap API without custom integration code. Second, it supports running JavaScript or WebAssembly in a secure sandbox on the client side, enabling dynamic functionality that adapts to each…
On April 23, 1963, J.C.R. Licklider wrote a memo addressed to the “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”, widely considered to be the genesis of ARPANET and by extension the modern Internet. Except, the memo describes a lot more than just “internetworking”. Licklider has a very clear vision of an online, collaborative, malleable substrate for computing:
This blog is focussed on personal computing, but the artefacts we sit down and use everyday are impacted by changes elsewhere in the tech ecosystem. I’ve spent the last 5 years working in the blockchain space, and I think it’s maturing to the point where we can start to see its impact on our computing environments. This post expands on a Twitter thread.
Last month saw the news that Microsoft was shifting Edge’s rendering engine from its proprietary one to Chromium. Opinion on Twitter seemed to be split between joy at Microsoft finally embracing an open-source, standards compliant engine, or horror at the thought of browsers becoming an anti-competitive monopoly controlled by Google — a repeat of the dark days of IE6. It was certainly not great…
Many years ago I read The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin which completely upended my notion of computing. It showed a vision of a world of computing which was radically different from the prevailing paradigms. Until then, I hadn’t even realised that it was even possible to question core artefacts like files or applications.
For a long time I’ve held this conviction that hierarchical file systems are a disaster. Over the years, there have been many attempts at building systems which avoided them: the entire hypermedia lineage from Vannevar Bush’s Memex with trails, through Ted Nelson’s work, and on to efforts like HyperCard, along with completely different approaches like the Canon Cat (and related, Archy) and…
I often have this vague sense that the artefacts of computing that we see today are often small, fragmented facets of some deeper “truth”. One area that I keep coming back to is the similarities and overlaps between file systems, objects, and Web resources.
Marc Andreessen of Netscape announced a set of new products that would help transform their browser into what he called an “Internet OS” that would provide the tools and programming interfaces for a new generation of Internet-based applications. The so-called “Internet OS” would still run on top of Windows — being based around Netscape Navigator — but he dismissed desktop operating systems like…
An application program is a computer program designed to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks, or activities for the benefit of the user. — Wikipedia