4 ms·
Jotux, would you please provide us with an example use case?
by solox3 14y ago
Jotux, would you please provide us with an example use case?
- jotux 14y agoThere is a dropdown box called "examples" at the top where you can select an example.
- andrewflnr 14y agoThe dropdown box doesn't really work on iPad. I can bring it down, but when I tap "power level" it just closes the box and focuses the text field.
- jotux 14y agoI made the default example auto-load when the page loads. Hopefully this helps.
- andrewflnr 14y agoYep, thanks.
- solox3 14y agoNo, a "use case" is what we can do with it, not what it does. So far, I am clueless as to where and how I can utilise this technology.
- oscilloscope 14y agoExplaining fixed income investments to new investors.
- jotux 14y agoMy initial idea was to have reactive-text enabled forum posts or chat input. So in, say, a hacker news comment you could embed equations in the markdown formatting that explain a specific calculation. The recent posts about how much you need to save to retire with a decent income would be a good example.
- nmcfarl 14y agoA use case would be a document like this one: http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ or this one: http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ Both by Bret Victor who as far as I can tell invented the idea. At the very least he’s certainly been effective at popularizing it. For completeness here is Victor’s library that helps you create such documents Tangle: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/ http://worrydream.com/Tangle/ , which is used by Fangle.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoWeb-based interactive documents were probably invented by some guy at Netscape doing Javascript (let's call him B. Eich). Bret has popularized a nice interactive presentation style, though is Learnable Programming document used embedded movies instead (I did this for a paper I wrote once, did anyone know PDF can embed quicktime movies?). Interactive visualizations are not that new these days. I have a hard time seeing how text-based visualizations would be very useful though. Pretty much, the interaction occurs in some sort of rendered graphic that can't be easily expressed using markdown.
- jfarmer 14y agoWarning: fanboy gushing ahead. Read at your own risk. Interactive web-based documents are not new, nor are the ideas that Bret Victor is exploring, but a synthesis as sophisticated and holistic as Bret's is. One core idea embedded in all of Bret's work is that learning happens best when students are able to explore multiple representations of a idea or aspects of an environment simultaneously. The more quickly one representation changes in reaction to the other, the stronger the learning feedback loop, and the more quickly the student builds an accurate mental model of how the thing they're interacting with works. So, WRT your point, it's not about the fact that the documents are interactive, but that they're "reactive." The interactive bits are all related to each other, and when one part changes all the other parts change with it, in real-time. There's something in this immediacy that even the slightest delay destroys. That's not a new idea; anyone who has read Mindstorms (1980) or grew up on LOGO has had at least an inkling of it. Lots of research ink as been spilled over this, and many "pedagogical" programming environments (Scratch, etc.) flirt with it. Even Bret would say that, I bet. But, well, he's taken it to a whole 'nother level. He's actively exploring this idea on multiple fronts, from reactive documents to reactive programming environments, and shitting gold all around town. Every time he publishes something it takes months for people to react, absorb, and respond. See, e.g., http://www.lighttable.com/ http://www.lighttable.com/ Even if you don't think what he's doing is particularly special, there's something about the way he does it that causes big waves every time he publishes something.