Workbench

From aidan: “wish we had a creative commons equivalent for privacy policies, instead of a wall of text it says this is a PC-3PAds-Arbitration site”

I like this idea because anybody can start doing this today. Make up a privacy license and add it to your site/product. If it’s a good one, other people might see it and borrow the name and terms.

This very page is a step towards what I want it to be, but it’s missing a bunch of stuff.

It felt like people were offering us display cabinets when we were looking for a sturdy workbench.

Christoph Labacher, Building a Design System Workbench

This makes more sense in AR, but I would like one in 2D too. Let me arrange folders on a canvas, with icons that open the folder in Finder when clicked on. Let me place things over or under other things, let me stack trash in a corner.

See also: The Workshop and the Storefront

I see a future where DialogDB enables cheap, sync-able and flexible personal databases. What will be needed then is a way to browse + edit records in those databases in a pleasant way. It will need the simplicity of Finder and the seriousness of Alfred, and native apps across every platform (including mobile).

See also: Datasette

We need a WordPress competitor that’s made for static sites.

Think about formats. Think about “posts”, and “collections”, and “updates”. Think about creative freedom and power alongside simplicity.

Needs to sync to a Git repo (or does it??), needs to provide live previews while editing, needs to add things like search, dynamic data, etc.

I’ve written about why I want one, and this is the exact design (and accompanying features) I have in mind:

First step, run continuous backups of the browser history (since Chrome only stores 90 days worth). Then, do fun things like data viz, link re-surfacing, LLM-enabled recommendations, and whatever else you can think of.

I’m sure there are many reasons that this is a bad idea, but I want a service with the vibes of Tinyletter and pricing that isn’t a monthly subscription.

A real scenario: you want to move your newsletter off of Substack. It has a few hundred subscribers but you don’t want to pay $9/month for emails you only send out 4 times a year (sorry, we both know it’s true).

Gather the best reading lists, warning posts, useful snippets, field reports, etc. that currently live in the dark forest of Github’s gists pages.

Then organise them by niche and host them on a microsite.

Most developer tools have immense amounts of customisability; mostly because their user base are willing to go make their own tools if they find configuration options on existing ones to be inadequate. My editor of choice (Zed) has the ability to remove sidebars and toolbars from the app by editing a simple JSON file. Arc Boosts made it similarly easy to just “zap” parts of a webpage out of sight.

To me, this feels like the bare minimum of user-editable-ness, why shouldn’t every app allow users to hide or show UI elements (from panels to individual buttons) as desired?

Use accelerometers and motion sensors to get highly accurate positional data, and use it to record the paths a person has taken.

The hard part will probably be combining this with GPS to place it on an actual map.

Device/app that records a person humming a tune as input and transcribes it to any other instrument (eg piano, trumpet, 808) as a MIDI track. Should make sure to capture velocity + attack + release as accurately as possible from the hummed notes.

• App Bloat leaderboard – A database of popular (pro/con)sumer apps and how high their memory usage and bundle size are.
• Where Should I Host? – A comparison of compute and storage providers for the rest of us.
• App reviews – Would be cool to make high-quality reviews of apps and games, that aren’t just some Techcrunch article.
• List of %s of populations – From Visa: “i know ~10% of people are left-handed, what other things are 10% of the population? maybe redheadedness? nope, that’s something like 2% genpop. 17% of ppl have blue eyes”

Most apps involve dealing with sortable and filterable lists of data. Sometimes these lists need to be publicly shareable, and are made available by the application on public web pages (e.g. a Twitter thread), or through an API (e.g. are.na’s API) for the more technically inclined.

I recommend making sure that these lists are also available as RSS feeds. For one, it’s an interesting design challenge to convert structured data into a prose entry. But more importantly, it makes them very easy to follow using existing tools.

I want a podcast which is just an entire conversation between smart people around “what does your model of [X] look like” for various values of X

Rohit Krishnan

Preserving the web is still an unsolved problem. You can’t trust the Internet Archive. Most pages are not Designed to Last.

Every application should have a “shelf” (name inspired by Ink and Switch) where users can dump text, images, and maybe even data specific to the app. Garageband is an example of an app that has a basic version of this: a simple plaintext notepad per song.

Universal solutions like clipboard history or Dropover are insufficient because they:

• Feel messy, since they’re forced to hold everything
• Don’t have a sense of permanence to them

No other description, either you see the vision or you don’t.

You know what AI agent I would actually use?

Look through my bookmarks → navigate 1–2 layers through thread and links → embed everything for me to search

Minh Nhat Nguyen, tweeting

This is one place embeddings search might actually be useful because tweet-sized posts mean chunking is already done for you, and the dataset is not large enough to create too many confabulations.

A site where I can input a URL, and it uses the linked site’s sitemap.xml to draw an explorable map (like this one) of all its pages. Bonus points if you can separate it into “regions” based on topic, time, URL structure, etc.

This is not a complicated idea, but it has lots of fun design avenues to explore. Here’s one very simple example.

While I won’t be a user, I would rather people try new ideas than try to make another version of the same old thing.

• See other people’s screenshots [credit]
• Are.na as dating site