alan kay deep dive #4, journal

Author: Steve Krouse

journal.md

@@ -6,6 +6,27 @@ title: Journal
 
 This jornal is stream-of-consciousness style so apologies in advance if it's difficult to read. You should know that I don't have spellcheck and I'm a terrible speller. Most importantly, you should know that I add new entries at the top of the page, so you'll have to scroll to the bottom if you want to start from the beginning.
 
+### September 6, 2017 10:55am
+
+This morning was quite productive! I started research just a 15 minutes late (making my morning coffee and writing in my private journal took longer than expected) so I tacked on some more time to the end of today's research. I got [a decent bit done](https://github.com/stevekrouse/futureofcoding.org/commit/31cb36531e9fa145dfb65832af0cdfb90c39258f), mostly around the STEPS project (which I've decided to only read the final report of unless in reading it I decide to read the progress reports), more specifically the KScript language. 
+I was blown away by the KScript paper! It's so similar in goals and methods to StreamSheets! I think there's a ton I can learn from that paper (and those it references) that I don't yet notice because I am still to early in this project so I'm sure I'll return to it. I also bet there's a lot I can learn from the paper's authors here too!
+
+Thinking about interface design, metaphors, and GUIs, got me thinking about the way in which I use a computer, which I am quite proud of, and inspired me to drone on about it below. Upon re-reading it, I can't help but roll my eyes at my know-it-all tone, yet I don't want to spend the time to re-write it without this tone, so you'll have to make do.
+
+#### Overlapping windows considered too expressive (and other optimal computer use strategies)
+
+As a comptuer user since the age of three, I have had ample opportunity over the last twenty years to develop better computer usage patterns. One of the most effective I've found is to never have any minimized windows, overlapping windows, or windows totally hidden behind other windows. 
+
+Instead, I make liberal user of tabs and split-screen. My default view is two windows, side-by-side, each taking up half of the screen. On a chromebook, this is easy to set up with the alt-[ and alt-] shortcuts built in. 
+
+On the left window, I pin a number of tabs to apps that I want open throughout the day for constant use, Spotify, Inbox, Calendar, and Slack. This "pin" makes it harder for me to accidentally close the tab and makes the tab seem more "fundamental" than a regular tab which is more ephemeral. The left window usually only has one non-pinned tab on it, which represents the main task I'm working on. For example, this tab is currently open to Cloud9, and online IDE, where I am typing this very journal entry. A moment ago, this tab was still on Cloud9, but in the /links.html file so I could take notes on a paper I was reading in the right tab. Similarly, if I am writing software, I will have my code in the left window and the preview output for the code in the right window. If I need to google things to debug my code, that will also be in the right window. In some occasions, I want one window to be full screen, in which case I put all my tabs onto my left window and hit ctl-+.
+
+I try to do things in logical chunks. This means not leaving any task in a "dirty state" such that if you threw my computer into a river I wouldn't be upset at any lost work or effort. One common mistake I see people make is having more than a handful (like 5) tabs open for long periods of time. This is a problem for two reasons 1) if you comptuer or web browser crashes you lose all of those tabs which represent of list of links you want to look at, and 2) it makes your desktop more cluttered which can make your thinking more cluttered, and make it difficult to find what you need, similar to having a mess in your room that you do not clean up. Thus I copy the URLs of the tabs I'm not currently working on to an appropriate list or bookmarks folder and then close that tab. Another common mistake is to not save every logical change directly to a cloud service. Having a chromebook makes making this mistake harder but still possible. This is similar but less true for Dropbox on a Mac or PC because there are so many ways to save things to disk, and so much disk storage. 
+
+Occasially, it can be be helpful to have more than two windows on the screen at the same time. I used to run into this when developing code before cloud9, where you needed a third window for the terminal (in addition to the code editor and code preview). (However, cloud9 combines the terminal and code windows so I can make do with two windows.) However, at no point is it useful to have windows overlapping each other. Given that I can resize the boundaries of windows, and zoom in and out on their contents, I can always get a view of the things I want in a window without obscuring the contents of another window. Side by side is more than enough. Thus not only is overlapping windows not helpful, it is harmful because it allows the user to put their windows in a disorganized fashion (like a messy bedrooom). It also allows the user to not realize that certain windows are still open but not visible, which is draining computing resources and even worse could hold work in an unsaved state which could then be lost. (There is a special case where you'd like to do some proccessing on data in one minimized window while you work on other applications in visible windows. However, I think the "correct" way to handle this case is upload the task to some web service for proccessing, close the window, and then have that service email you a link to the finished product when it's done.)
+
+Given that a goal is to complete tasks in logical chunks, one may inquire how the interface could support such a workflow. The first step could be helping the user to think through the steps and substeps of their current action and organize them (WoofJS Workflow). If the step is stated precisely enough, upon finishing a step the system could check to make sure that it meets the requirements for the step, that all unncecasry windows and data are cleaned up, and the appropriate things are saved to the cloud, etc. In this way, it would become not only possible but easy to travel back in time to any previous semantic state of your computer workflow, and able to see how your project is constructed piece by piece. You can never lose any work or data this way, and your logical path can be elucidated easily. Taking the idea of working in logical chunks to an extreme, the ideal you could shoot for, in theory, is the ability to throw the user herself into a river and feel content that the contents of her project and safely stored on the computer in a organized fashion, so it would be less of a problem if George R R Martin died before completing Game of Thrones, for example.
+
 
 ### September 5, 2017 9:11am