Workbench

I have finally learnt to do fewer things.

Time feels scarcer, and I was forced to “prioritise”. My idea list continues to grow but I prune it as often as I add to it. It’s slightly lame to be limited to software, but certain projects must be completed before I move on to other things.

Squareplace

I’m calling it a “UI builder”, working off of the idea that most of the apps you see are made up off the same primitives (documents, files, whiteboards), with only marginal layout/styling differences.

The editor I have in mind lets you control the layout first, and then add in each type of object you want to work with. Publishing, collaboration, transclusion, and local editing are first-class features.

Ragged

It’s an RSS reader – okay, more like an RSS browser, with as many features as I can pack into something. The north star is “internet magazines”, with the idea being that anything that is a feed can be combined into shareable “feed-of-feeds”. I might steal ideas from Feeeed and library.json, I might even add a recommendation engine.

A Better Journal

A collaboration with Abhimanyu. Not much to say about this one until it’s ready, except that I think I did a great job on the system design.

I have no deadlines, I just ship as much as I can in order to stave off the unrelenting ennui. This list is for personal reference more than anything else.

Streams v3 – Focused on web editing, and a better API.

Pro Tips – A guest-authored blog.

STACK

Static site builder: index.html | Hugo

JS Framework: Sveltekit | Express.js | Remix

ORM: Drizzle

Hosting: Cloudflare | Digital Ocean | Netlify

DAW: Garageband | Logic Pro

Design: This sketchbook | tldraw

Writing: Bear | Sublime Text | Bike

IDEAS

A new web publishing platform?

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, needs to provide live previews while editing, needs to add things like search, dynamic data, etc.

Maps for the Internet

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

Truly personal timetables

A plan that sync to your actual waking hours. Starts when you wake up, not at arbitary hour marks.

rotime claims to be a version of this. See also: Superlocal

Human-scale maps

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.

Shareholder letters

I came up with the idea of sending friends/close mutuals a monthly life update in the form of an email newsletter. I would like this to be a Thing that more people do, and maybe give them a nice TinyLetter-esque tool to do it with.

I use Buttondown at the moment, which works well enough but doesn't have the nicest editor and is somewhat geared towards "professionals".

A Digital Workbench

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

The Workshop and the Storefront

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

Preserving the Web

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