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Maybe UX complexity is a problem, too. Tools for thought have to become like prosthetics, an extension of your body. For this it has to have really low frictio
by anotheryou 7y ago
Maybe UX complexity is a problem, too.
Tools for thought have to become like prosthetics, an extension of your body. For this it has to have really low friction.
Here we have two problems:
1. the ideal power user UX has some learning curve for newcomers which hinders adaption a lot;
2. I prefer typing, but it's hard to beat a piece of paper in ease of input and flexibility of arrangement, type of input (graphics, text, plots, mindmaps, tables all there without any toolbar to click).
The 2nd point makes me think that a general interface is just really hard and specific ones can be done really well already.
Examples of tools for thinking I like:
- org mode: suffers a lot from (1.) and is not that generalized (more is possible, but little effortlessly).
- Deepl Desktop App: real AI collaboration for translation. The UI could be more streamlined, but is fine for now: hit ctrl+c+c, check if the translation is ok, click "insert" and your sentence is translated within your document. It translates 90% as good as I do, I catch the other 10%.
- Soulver/Opalcalc/NaSC: a bit like excel but all calculations always visible (trade offs: not working for tabular data, not as flexible as programing)
- wikis: amazing for long term and collaborative storage, problems with scaling, relevance, discovery and organization
- paper: great input flexibility, hard to refactor, no computer assist (calculations, data etc)
- jupyter notebooks: finally mixing documentation and programming, sadly problems with structure and state
- grafical programming languages (touch designer, pure data, bitwig grid etc.): predominant in the art-world, I think because you can tweak values and connections best.
- classified 7y ago> paper: ... no computer assist ... the greatest drawbacks being that you can‘t show relevant ads, personalize the UX, or gain deep insights into your users‘ needs.
- sansnomme 7y agoOrg mode doesn't suffer from 1), Emacs does. Org-style editors like Workflowy, Notion, and now Roam are all high growth apps with a large user base.
- anotheryou 7y agoBut org-mode lives in emacs. But yes, part of it can be done in a "user friendly" way and other tools do so :). Most notably outliners and task to agenda aggregation.
- tincholio 7y agoOrg is a lot more than just outlining, etc. Do any of those tools have literate programming, tons of export backends, GTD, Agenda management, etc?
- anotheryou 7y agoI usually use paper when I do math or logic and can build a crutch from geometry. You just can't draw well with a mouse.
- infinite8s 7y agoDoes it really need low friction? You know what's another tool for thought? Literacy. It's something humans aren't able to do easily without a lot of effort to scale the initial complexity, but once they so it opens up vast new vistas of thinking that were previously inaccessible.
- infinite8s 7y agoI think the flaw in all these approaches to human computer interaction (in particular for cognitive augmentation) is the idea that it should be easy and intuitive.
- buzzkillington 7y ago>- jupyter notebooks: finally mixing documentation and programming, sadly problems with structure and state Solved amazingly well by orgmode babel/tangle.
- anotheryou 7y agoDoes it force the whole file to be executed? I mean jupyter notebooks for machine learning e.g. also profit from state, because to work fast you often really don't want to recalculate something that took half an hour. (If it takes hours I guess you should store it to a file anyways...)
- buzzkillington 7y agoNo, you can execute one cell at a time. In different languages.