Omar Rizwan
@rsnous
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"i am determined to move beyond this way of interacting with systems"
scheming (New York, NY)
Joined December 2010
⭐️ I'm releasing Screenotate 2.0, my Mac/Windows screenshot+OCR+context app: When you take a screenshot, it recognizes text inside + the originating URL, then saves it as a self-contained HTML file for later search
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inventing a new lossless compression algorithm for screenshots that identifies all fonts and GUI elements in the screenshot, checks that it can now reproduce the screenshot in a pixel-perfect way, then just stores that semantic data.
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"A number of readers of the K&R C 2nd edition book believed that pointers and arrays are the same, due to the non-optimal pagination."
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i want 'programmers looking down on spreadsheets' discourse but like the opposite, like spreadsheet people looking down on programmers. 'how can programmers stand not seeing the concrete data they're operating on' 'how can programmers tolerate not being able to live edit code'.
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website-making class where you have to recapitulate the history of the web -- week 1 you can only use the very first HTML tags from HTML 1.0 or whatever, then over time you get to use <img>, then CSS, JavaScript 1.0, XMLHttpRequest, etc.
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making software that is intentionally hard to use because you want to create a distinct user subculture.
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i always assumed the Bézier of Bézier curves was some 19th-century French mathematician, but it turns out he was a CAD and automotive engineer in the 60s
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WTF: "one of the civil engineering profs wrote soil simulations in postscript"
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there's something Edward Tufte or Magic Ink-adjacent about this -- the thesis that information design on computers/phones has gone too far in the direction of interactivity, hiding too much, & there should be a return to a more information-dense print design ethos.
I wish digital maps had a setting to increase label density by a factor of 10+, for a perspective like the road atlases of yore. We manufacture these amazing high-resolution displays but then render maps in crayon.
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@saramagenheimer I like the idea that your square gets bigger the less you talk, so eventually the screen is dominated by huge silent faces.
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"The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise…"
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"… we realized that we had to rethink what we meant by 'serving a function.'".
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Chat app where you need to be physically facing in someone's direction to send them a message (Mecca etc).
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this is a good example of why strict hierarchy and encapsulation is bad for making a GUI.
How have I never noticed that macOS' menu bar "shares" space between menu items for the hover state? I don't think I've ever seen this before. Normally I'd expect each item to have its own reserved space for the hover state.
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🌟 Announcing Screenotate 3 for Mac! New version of my OCR app, which steps in every time you take a screenshot & recognizes and saves the text (plus the original URL, window title, …). Now you can also copy the recognized text straight to clipboard:
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i fear and resent scrolling (e.g. scrolling way up to see chat history) b/c i know application developers don't take it seriously as app state. like I'll click on another chat, then back to the chat where I'd scrolled way up, and the app'll have thrown away my scroll position.
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"I was giving some thought to the general evolution (I use the term loosely, here) of Unix since its inception at Bell Labs, and I think it could be described as follows."
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there should be negative port numbers so website can have an evil version at port -80 / -443.
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we need software to be uglier so that ppl feel more comfortable making their own software.
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y i k e s: "changing the size (in bytes) of an unused environment variable, can dramatically (frequently by about 33% and once by almost 300%) change the performance of our program."
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thinking about how the Apple Lisa let you have multiple files with the same name in the same folder. because why not? you can distinguish them by putting them in different spots in the folder!.
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always surprised at how much I learn by just physically retyping/transliterating code someone else wrote.
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sufficiently good design is indistinguishable from all your users being smarter.
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"Sometimes tracing `open()` is a quicker way to find where config and log files exist than to read through the product documentation.".
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So much of what people like about terminals isn't really about plain text!. - low latency.- information density.- ability to automate (even copy and paste, not just scripting).
@creachadair Yes! Plus the absurdly high input-to-output latency compared to rxvt. I sometimes think it's not terminals I like, it's just information density, which by all rights should be much higher on graphical displays. Sigh.
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They should have "Subway Mode" (in addition to "Airplane Mode") that defers network requests and visibly queues them up in the corner of your screen until you enter an internet-connected zone again.
If you want people to use your app when they’re bored and your target market lives in nyc, you need to make sure it works offline (or at least can deal with network reconnects really easily) so they can use it on long subway rides.
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the arrogance of ImageMagick to be like, yeah, we're gonna call our command `convert`.
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feel like [local web server from this folder] now needs to be built into computer in the same way that unzipping files has been built into computer.
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good example of the potential if you can take even a well-known existing visual representation (I've liked for a long time) and turn it into a 'mini-IDE' by adding liveness and provenance / brushing and linking.
Finished REDE, a Regex IDE which visualizes the structure and evaluation of Regex/NFAs for my submission to @handmade_net visibility jam
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i think there is real power in the fact that PDFs are essentially uneditable by normal software. exporting a PDF is like ritually sealing your document.
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"Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." "Every 20 years, caretakers completely tear down [Japan's Ise Grand Shrine] and build it anew."
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📝 I've written about Geokit, my mapping system @Dynamicland1: It's a pretty detailed explanation of both 'what it does' and 'how it's made' which might help illustrate what's so unique about Dynamicland.
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i think phone number verification is sort of a betrayal of the whole dream of the internet.
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if i wanted to write software to last as far into the future as possible, i would probably write it as an NES or Game Boy ROM.
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'they must make so many mistakes, i can't believe whole Fortune 500 companies rely on programming to operate'.
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Always have an extra word in your startup's name so you can drop it when you get big.
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I want to talk about some projects in here that I worked on, many of which haven't been documented publicly before:.
★ Dynamicland's new website documents ten years of progress toward a humane dynamic medium.
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notifications from actual human beings (your friend sent you a message!) and notifications from computers (this app has an update!) are not the same thing and should not be treated the same way, imo.
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I'm less interested in learn-to-program tutorial & playground apps and more interested in how people can organically pick up computing in response to an existing need: doing their finances in Excel, customizing their Tumblr, whatever.
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i like the idea of making a 'toy' instead of a 'game' or 'app' because it sets a high standard of, like, this thing should be fun to interact with on a very basic mechanical level, even when there's no bigger story or incentive structure.
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they put a fence around your computer, then expect you to be grateful when they make playgrounds and APIs so you can crawl in and use a bit of it.
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Plan 9 and Dynamicland both dramatically simplify application code by providing _common ways to list and act on objects_. a ton of code is just about enumerating things for the user, then letting the user pick from them -- list views, buttons, drag & drop, checkboxes, commands.
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Who decided to call it Airbnb and not apt-get.
Thinking of renting a new apartment. Might try apt-get this time.
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nice thing about dialup Internet that you have to explicitly enter into a space of being 'online', it's a sort of ritual that takes a minute, you get greeted by what's new 'since last time'.
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a programmer on the team whose job is exclusively to delete code.
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'continuity' of urban fabric: can I walk from point A to point B and be interested the whole time? . Yes in Tokyo, Manhattan, central Paris. or is the city a bunch of islands, each interesting but surrounded by dead zone of single-family homes (or worse, parking or highways).
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why are rmdir and rm different programs?. because it used to be that _you had to be root_ to create and remove directories using system calls, so you needed rmdir(1) to be setuid root 😬😬.
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feel like there is 'monk debugging' where you stare at the code and think really hard and try to spot things and there is 'shark debugging' where you're constantly swimming around and throwing random stuff at the program to see what happens (and if you stop swimming, you die).
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feel like 'multiple files with same name' takes the GUI seriously in a way that unique filenames don't. it takes the idea seriously that you move things around on-screen and conceptualize/access them that way, instead of sorting lists by some attribute or typing names in.
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IDE where the font size of particularly slow statements/expressions in your code gets bigger.
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it feels like we keep orbiting this: a programming system where when you have a value, say `4`, it always comes with a provenance?. (did it come from evaluating `2+2`, did you prompt the user and they typed in `4`, etc: these are all different flavored `4`s).
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Unix processes should maybe all run 'Web servers' and you can send your browser to like ' http://Chromium.localhost' or ' http://clang.localhost' and see various live internal data structures and computations of that program.
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I just learned that "Show Clipboard" is a thing in the Finder menu ???
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i got one!
Material Alert ‼️ I have an absurd amount of these huge chunks of aerogel aka “frozen smoke” aka “the world’s lightest solid” left over from a project. They’re too delicate to ship, but too special to toss 🥲 If you’re in SF and want a piece hmu!! 🤓
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the VB6 GUI builder was also wild because it produced programs that perfectly matched the appearance of normal Windows programs. so you didn't feel like an outsider, or like you were using a toy.
1. Visual basic 6's GUI builder was revolutionary, and it's a travesty nothing has succeeded it. VB6 could have democratized programming to the same degree spreadsheets did.
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idea: when you come of age, you have to construct your own font, and everything you type from then on is in that font.
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like whenever I've put a lot of work in to scroll somewhere, I feel like I've climbed a mountain that is liable to collapse at any time.
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Idea: video game where you write a commit message every time you save your game.
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transition from 'word processing software' to 'notes software' reflects the transition from 'want to make a nice print document for work' to the work always being inside the computer the entire time.
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Programming language where it's easier to work with image literals than with string literals.
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assigning sounds or frequencies to different pieces of data on your computer so (if you listen closely) you can hear the texture of what your computer is crunching on at any given moment.
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chart like this (, but for perceptions of cost of method names like "get", "find", "compute", "generate", "check", "lookup", etc
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the basic problem with both programmers and economists is not simply that their models are wrong or unfair (although they often are). instead, it's that they have /power/ to force people to conform to those models.
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i feel like if you have to log in to see a page, that page is no longer really on "the Web".
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Creative coding with shaders is interesting to me because of how the "grain" of that programming system shapes what people make in it -- you see totally different stuff made with shaders than with Processing/canvas-style drawing APIs.
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looking at what things you can undo/redo tells you what things the software developer saw as 'meaningful actions'. you can't usually undo moving a window around, because that's thought of as 'a superficial UI change'
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a nice thing about PDFs is that you can't embed videos into them.
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i still believe that it's possible to have GUI that reveals rather than hides the real structure of the computer.
Compare this imagined future to the actual future: most of our wonder devices are veritable black boxes to most of us, and have grown more so (think of what the rise to dominance of GUIs has meant for how we interact with our computers and what we know about their structure).
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I feel like a _lot_ of people now learn how to write if statements or for loops at some point in college, but relatively few are 'programmers' or part of 'programming culture' which also is about Unix, the terminal, the filesystem, package management, servers, etc.
We teach kids how to write if statements before we teach them how to install programs or manage files. it’s like teaching them how to parallel park before they’ve learned to steer.
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