title

Screenplay

dated

Q3 2025

author

Marcel Goethals

2 sept

• Screenplay is a study on how to do composable dynamic behaviour in Playbook.
• I’m saying composable dynamic behaviour rather than programming on purpose.
• The idea is to take the context of a static notebook and nudge it slightly towards making it more dynamic. As opposed to taking some programming system and sticking onto a notebook, which is what a lot of our other experiments feel like.
  • I’m not interested in general purpose programming. I think it’s preferable to have a limited and constrained system. So by dynamic behaviour I mean a limited set of things that make sense within the context of pen & paper notebooks.
  • I’m also not interested in some kind of “everything is an X” approach. By composable I simply mean “made by combining parts”. Those parts will be relatively chunky, coarse grained, and closed off. The question: “How do we build these things in userspace?” is out of scope.

4 sept

A great example of ‘non-programmery’ signal processing can be found in music software: The effects chain. An effects chain takes an audio signal, and passes it, one by one, through a series of effects, transforming the output. You can contrast it with a more open-ended system where modules can be wired to each other in arbitrary ways, like a modular synthesizer. I really like the effects chain as a good middleground. By limiting what you can do it radically simplifies the mental model, UI and affordances.

A fully modular synth is perhaps more general, but really, an effects chain is good enough for the vast majority of cases.

Some observations:

• An effects chain simplifies things by distinguishing between ‘signal’ and ‘parameters’. Signal gets passed from left-to-right, parameters are tweaked by knobs.
• You can easily add/remove and re-order effects by simply moving them around in the row, there’s no need to ‘re-wire’ anything.

5 sept

Trying to apply the idea of an effects chain to ink properties.

What if, rather than setting the style of an ink stroke dynamcially, you apply some effect to it?

You apply color effects by placing little cards in a row. Transform the color by shifting it’s hue, or desaturating it. You can also directly override the color by using a color card (which you could think of as an effect which just ignores its inputs.)

The second row applies the effects only for ink inside the rectangle. The effect gets applied on top of the already applied effects:

8 sept

I’m looking for something that doesn’t feel like programming. But what does that mean? I’m not sure. It’s less about what you’re able to achieve, and more about how it feels. Somebody should be able to use it without realising that what they’re doing could be considered programming. The word technical also comes to mind. Technical is an aesthetic. I don’t want it to feel technical. Or rather, it shouldn’t be the default.