The next few months will be a blur in the run-up to Local-First Conf and the Lab Day we’re hosting. All our teams are busy prepping the work they’d like to show, polishing features, planning demos. Yet despite the race to hit these milestones, we’ve also published a fresh round of lab notes. In this edition of the Dispatch, we have a handful of notes from the Patchwork team, plus a note about the technical & social design behind Tenfold.
Patchwork is our collaborative, version-controlled, local-first, malleable software system. Over the past two years, it’s become the home for the majority of our team’s documents and prototypes. We live and work inside Patchwork every day. It weaves together many long-running threads of research from across the history of the lab. Since March, the Patchwork team have been writing a new slate of lab notes about their efforts and experiments. These notes are written in the personal voice of each author, reflecting their distinct approaches to the work.
Firstly, grjte prototyped two flavors of “history” within the system, exploring how to find your way back to things without having to organize them up front. She lands on the idea of reliving history, like scrolling back through past sessions to see documents as they were at the moment you opened them.
Orion Reed prototyped Breadboard and Space-frame, the former giving a visual zoom-out reveal for the various tools that comprise the Patchwork GUI, and the latter letting you compose tools that transform each other’s data merely by placing them side-by-side.
Alex Warth has long been exploring the question: what does it mean to collaborate on computation itself? To that end, he is designing a framework for distributing computational tasks across users in local-first software. The goals of this project are outlined in his introductory lab note, and a follow-up dives into the architecture.
chee rabbits built a space for making software by merely hanging out with your friends. First, you join a group video call inside a spatial drawing canvas. You talk and doodle about software that ought to exist, and an AI turns each of your ideas into Patchwork tools, right in the moment. This is, chee suggests, a new kind of high-level software development, as the act of creation lives entirely within the chitter chatter.
Finally, John Mumm, in addition to working on Keyhive, is an accomplished songwriter who just can’t stop making little sequencers and musical tools inside Patchwork. Most recently, he realized that Patchwork allows him to combine these tools — and others — to make something greater than the sum of their parts, even though the tools weren’t designed to be combined.
Last month we celebrated the lab’s tenth anniversary with Tenfold, an expression of creative code and beautiful design. Ivy Reese wrote about the various forms of design that went into Tenfold. She focuses in particular on the interplay between technical and social dynamics in the Tenfold Playground live coding environment. Here’s an excerpt.
After people realized “hey, you’re not blocking access to window” they thought “maybe you’re not blocking the DOM? Or anything?” — and a wave of wilder experimentation kicked off. Lilith made a game engine that used the keyboard for input, and then built a little bullet hell game inside a letter. Several folks (myself included) reached for OffscreenCanvas to do some speedy rendering off to the side, blitting the result back into the main Tenfold canvas. Orion went further, cranking out a handful of wacky simulations using WebGL and WebGPU, some of which flagrantly violated the aesthetic guidelines of Tenfold by using color and pixel-scale noise, or waiting for the next microtask so that these simulations could react to the rendered content of all the other letters. These “violations” of our guidelines were exactly what we’d hoped people would do. And everyone felt like such a little stinker when they came up with some new way to exploit the system. This is what I mean when I talk about the “social design” of the project — we made a space where people felt like they were able to get one over on us by expressing themselves more playfully than we’d intended.
Read the full post here.
- Ink & Switch founder Adam Wiggins recently returned to the lab for a research residency. With Firehose, he’s created a personal algorithm that organizes the stream of email and other messages flowing into his life, learning and adapting to his preferences. Adam published two notes, the first outlining his desires, the prior art, and anticipated challenges, and the second sharing how he built email triage with an embedding-based classifier.
- This may be your last chance to snag tickets to Local-First Conf. We’ll be there sharing the latest work from every corner of the lab, and we’d love to hear what related things you’ve been up to. July 12–14, Berlin, see you there!
If you’d like to collaborate or share your thoughts, you can find us here. Until we meet again!
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