Hacker News: spiralganglion

New comment by spiralganglion in "PlayBook: A Programmable Paper Notebook [video]"

spiralganglion — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:45:11 +0000

Glad you dug it!

But wait — which live demo are you referring to? There's no live demo of PlayBook.

Also, the demos featured in the talk are gathered from several different prototypes created over the past two years. PlayBook is, in some sense, a loose series of prototypes exploring this idea space, not a single "product"-like piece of software.

New comment by spiralganglion in "Ink and Switch interactive homepage"

spiralganglion — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:56:30 +0000

Developers deserve to be paid for their work. Adam's work on Allume is ongoing, so he deserves ongoing income.

New comment by spiralganglion in "Ink and Switch interactive homepage"

spiralganglion — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:53:15 +0000

Yeah, I'll take the blame for that :)

Backstory: when we first set up the sandbox, we offered a handful inputs that devs could optionally use in their letters. You could click and drag directly on the letter, drag a little token on a "Kaoss Pad"-like control surface, scrub a timeline, toggle a big global mode switch, and more. Everyone used a different subset of the these inputs, based on whatever seemed like the best fit for the idea behind their letter. Some people even bypassed all that and implemented their own input handling (like Lilith did for the bullet hell game in C0). But most folks actually didn't add any interactivity at all.

When I curated the letters for our home page, I wanted to strike a balance between a few things. I wanted to encourage playfulness, for instance by having unpredictable things happen depending on what/how you interacted ("output randomness", to borrow a gamedev term). And while I did make some changes to some letters (adding some additional interactivity, simplifying some inputs), I didn't want to go too far and ruin the authorial intent behind the letters.

But, like you and the other commenter here found, there is inconsistency that errs on the side of frustrating. That's something that irked me too — I just ran out of time for polish and had to ship.

In any event, thanks for kicking the tires on it. Even if it didn't quite clear the bar for playful interaction, I hope it was fun to look at.

New comment by spiralganglion in "Ink and Switch interactive homepage"

spiralganglion — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:29:20 +0000

Don't miss our "Lab Day" talks from this year's Local-First Conf, which are posted on our own channel: https://youtube.com/@inkandswitch

Ink & Switch: Introducing Patchwork-26 [video]

spiralganglion — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:04:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxGijnuXEs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49515406

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by spiralganglion in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

spiralganglion — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:41:16 +0000

Credit to Roman Komarov who came up with the approach [1], and Todd Matthews [2] who made the art assets.

1: https://kizu.dev/svg-linked-parameters-workaround/ 2: https://www.seaofclouds.com

Tenfold: Ten Years of Ink & Switch

spiralganglion — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:34:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.inkandswitch.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884463

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Alan Kay – 75 Years of Graphical User Interfaces [video]

spiralganglion — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:14:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS20Z0RXr28

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439850

Points: 15

# Comments: 0

New comment by spiralganglion in "Ruby website redesigned"

spiralganglion — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:27:10 +0000

This page doesn't need JS. It doesn't need a loading indicator for said JS. It could just be html and css, otherwise unchanged.

Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously

spiralganglion — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:31:16 +0000

Article URL: https://feelingof.com/episodes/078/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45398695

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Automerge 3.0

spiralganglion — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 07:21:49 +0000

Article URL: https://automerge.org/blog/automerge-3/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568778

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by spiralganglion in "Cloth"

spiralganglion — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 16:39:41 +0000

Splinter Cell, from 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20220207182149/https://gfycat.co...

New comment by spiralganglion in "Ink and Switch Constraint System (2023)"

spiralganglion — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 06:00:35 +0000

https://ivanish.ca/never/

New comment by spiralganglion in "Ink and Switch Constraint System (2023)"

spiralganglion — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 05:39:01 +0000

Automerge started as a research prototype and is now a widely-used substrate for building local-first apps: https://automerge.org/

Our GitHub has a boatload of experiments: https://github.com/orgs/inkandswitch/repositories

This is a fun afternoon just waiting for you: http://feelingisreality.com

Muse started as a research project and turned into an app: https://museapp.com/

Some of our essays have embedded versions of our prototypes you can play with:

* Crosscut: https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/

* Potluck: https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/

Alex Warth is currently working on a remake of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad: https://github.com/alexwarth/sutherland

There's probably a bunch more I'm forgetting.

Ghost House – software for automatic inbetweens

spiralganglion — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 20:16:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tedwiggin.com/MIMT.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176782

Points: 113

# Comments: 3

New comment by spiralganglion in "Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios"

spiralganglion — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 02:46:36 +0000

We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future.

[1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling

[2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper

New comment by spiralganglion in "Building Bauble"

spiralganglion — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:29:57 +0000

Worked on my iPhone.

Droste’s Lair

spiralganglion — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 20:32:34 +0000

Article URL: https://vezwork.github.io/drostes-lair-post/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435099

Points: 169

# Comments: 7

New comment by spiralganglion in "Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths"

spiralganglion — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 07:23:12 +0000

I've felt since I was young that I'd like to choose when and how I will die. I'm perfectly comfortable with the thought. I'm in my 30s and have a lovely life and family. I'm in no rush to end things. But when I'm old and the scales tip, I'd like to be the one to decide that it's time. I might not ever get there, but I want the option.

Itch.io Taken Down by Funko

spiralganglion — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:19:19 +0000

Article URL: https://bsky.app/profile/itch.io/post/3lcu6h465bs2n

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42363727

Points: 1197

# Comments: 463