A series of concrete examples of how I think around text, ranging from smaller interaction ideas such as iMessage Audio to Text, to a new infrastructure for published documents:
- Infrastructure for Robust metadata for published documents for rich interactions, as implemented as Visual-Meta
- Concept Map & Writing integration as implemented in Author
- Copy & Paste Citing as implemented in Reader
- Interactive text in any application as implemented in Liquid
- Advanced Navigation as implemented in Reader enabled by Visual-Meta, including arrows for sections
- Binding documents on the fly
- Reading in VR experiments and experiences
- I built an interactive 3d globe called Interatlas (previously Live Globe) for iPad, which only showed natural landscapes until tapped, which would then reveal border for the area tapped and names. An example of hiding text until called forth being more useful than a text first interaction. This app is no longer available.
archives (dating back to the late 1990s)
There is a record of this work on the Internet Archive when the site was liquid.info and liquid.org. The articles are currently on liquidinformation.org and liquid.info is frozen, with a blog which was used for many years and then hacked (another reason I prefer document based systems, not server).
I have long advocated the Importance of Better Text Tools. The articles below go into specifics:
- Automatic Hypertext, which would become ‘Hyperwords and finally ‘Liquid’
- Better Overview & Transparency for icons to aid usability, in conjunction with text. Icons are definitively useful, even in a text environment, as highlighted in the critique on the Mac’s Aqua Interface: Death of An Icon
- Calendar using more spatial display
- Systems for determining how messages should be dealt with.
- Thoughts on Linking being ‘Direction‘
- No Open/Save dialog using just a change of cursor. Bruce Horn later told me they had to build the Open/Save dialog because of resource issues, so it might never have been invented. Further thoughts are also on the Open/Save dialog
- Liquid Mail. Server based email service from 1997 which featured a dynamic Inbox, newsgroup integration and Views instead of static folders. Email suggestions for standard systems were also designed
- System Wide Scratch Area which has been implemented as Cuttings in Author and which relates to Apple’s ‘Freeform’ app
- Find in Folders years before similarly implemented in macOS. Other suggestions which were later realised in macOS included a simple Safari Share option
A few hardware ideas, such as removable laptop screen and a desktop display which folds all the way down to be a tablet, or a laptop which folds around, have been implemented in various guises. A more ambitious notion of a M.A.P. was also designed.
For macOS specific issues and suggestions, I hosted appleblunders.com for a number of years.I was not fond of a lot of aspects of OS 8, that’s for sure.
For Doug Engelbart I made his ‘Purple Numbers‘ interactive on the web. That was quite a time…
At the end of the day, Ownership is what we need in order to improve how we think and work which matters when the computer system acts as a Mirror to our minds.
