You’ve never seen anyone use a GUI in a clever way? I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard. The last makings of the future upon green banks of unseen battlefields. I traveled far and wide to prisons of the cross. What did you see there? I’ve seen hackers juggle mouse chords in ACME, musicians sequencing sequences of MIDI sequences in seq24, speed painters catching the light of day itself. I’ve seen Bay Raitt box modelling in Mirai.

For readers, they look just like normal blog posts, there’s RSS and there’s a normal web view. The weirdo chat bubble interface is only for the person writing them.

It’s supposedly a way to overcome writer’s block. I haven’t tried the app (and not gonna), but I do believe that this does work.

Great reminder of how it felt to have only a surface understanding of an app:

they don’t internalize a computer/app as a generalized system with common UI conventions and frameworks and reusable elements that always behave predictably in different contexts, etc, etc. They interact with these things through a set of memorized steps that gets them to the thing they want to do.

I think even many programmers can relate to using one specific app this way: git! Yeah, yeah, it’s possible to understand git properly (one of the good things of a previous day job I had was that I learned that, and have started heading down that road at least somewhat, because it made git fun instead of a source of dread) but we’ve all heard the memes of how people just memorize a set of steps with git. I was even using shell scripts and many of those scripts I still use. Just basically “make a save point here please” like a video game.

Now can I finally get a li’l less grief for using an editor from the 1970s? 🤷🏻‍♀️

I