Inkstravaganza

Today we’re shining a bright spotlight on recent work from our Programmable Ink research area — visualizable computation, software you can put your hands on, and a grimoire of rune stones and imagination.

Photo of a desk covered with objects relevant to Programmable Ink research: A small pot of black inklets, a bottle of glowing green flux, pins, dice, stones, a ruler, technical pens, chocolate, and a knife all adorn the edge of the photo. At the center, a coffee-stained draft print of the PlayBook user guide, an open notebook showing sketches of propagators and a cat, and a dithered photo of Martin Kleppmann are spread out across a ruled cutting mat.

For the past few years, we’ve been quietly building a holistic, malleable notebook we call PlayBook. The goal is to make something that feels every bit as good as paper & pencil for sketching and writing in your own hand. But unlike paper, PlayBook is imbued with dynamic behaviour, built out of composable pieces that let you reshape the notebook and add your own augmentations. Members of our team have been using PlayBook continuously for over two years, living inside the tool for their daily note taking, brainstorming, music composition, puzzle solving, collaborative whiteboarding, PDF marking, tutoring, and more. In this newsletter, and throughout the coming year, we’ll share more about how PlayBook was designed, how we built it, and what it now enables us to do.

Portemine

First up: Marcel Goethals is in the midst of an exploration. He suspects that propagator networks will be a useful computational substrate for PlayBook. You can use them to implement SAT and constraint solving, foundational pieces of our past Ink research. Propagators lend themselves quite naturally to visual/spatial representation, with execution visualized over time. They’d likely work well as a kind of “assembly language” that other visual programming systems could be built atop. As his experiments progress, Marcel has been publishing a series of small lab notes with motivations, findings, video clips, open questions, and other tidbits. Read more about Portemine, an exploration into propagator networks.

Gestures

Another area of ongoing work in PlayBook is our systems for handling user input. PlayBook is designed to feel like paper. It doesn’t have any on-screen GUI elements that you can accidentally tap with your finger, because paper doesn’t have that. You can comfortably rest your hands anywhere on the screen, or grip the screen with one hand while writing with the other like a clipboard. To switch between tools (such as drawing and selecting), we’ve created a special “firm press” gesture that you perform with the pen. Our focus on designing these gestures, and our desire to rapidly prototype new gestures, has led us to develop our own approach to dispatching and acting on user input events. In a recent lab note, Ivan Reese walked through the technical design of the PlayBook gesture system step by step, with comparisons to other popular approaches.

DrawDeck

Finally, we have DrawDeck. What is DrawDeck? Why is DrawDeck? Very mysterious. Perhaps there are “rune stones” you could pick up and set down, and scraps of paper you could set the stones beside. Perhaps a computational process would unfold in space and time. You could draw a cat. You could perceive the cat, or not. You might instead reach for other stones. Divination. Imagination. Perhaps the scraps of paper remember something. And from the mouth of Marcel Goethals, I directly quote, “Stones can communicate with each other through ‘dreams’.” For the sake of argument, let’s say you read more about DrawDeck, looked at some videos. Good, good. Now you never know.

What’s one more open tab?

That brings us to the end of our special Inkstravaganza newsletter. Stay tuned for next time to hear about the flurry of activity happening in Patchwork, and reach out if you’d like to work more closely together.

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