Maybe someone here can help me remember. I had a PalmOS app that I loved, back in the day, and I can't remember what it was called. It was a shareware clock app, with hand-drawn time that animated from one numeral to the next. I used to use it as an alarm clock, in my Sony Clie dock, by my bed. Would love to see it again.
Seems a natural fit for a notebook UI. If a PRQL cell doesn't start with "from," just continue adding filters to the pipeline above. Would let you progressively build pipelines by adding filters and derivations, while previewing the data each step along the way. Split a cell to debug a pipeline at any point.
This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today to simulate that appearance.
The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.
I only had Notepad (the default Windows text editor). I longed for Microsoft Frontpage and HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver. Looking back, I'm glad gained experience on the native experience rather than through the editor abstractions because it forced me to learn.
Hotdog Pro was everything to me. Going from Notepad to Hotdog opened my eyes to the future of the Internet. It set me down a path where I would eventually get my first paid tech gig working at my local newspaper in high school maintaining the photo departments daily web presence.
I think the comparison to outside art is very apt, although I think the boundary between professional and amateur was porous. Professionals wrote the tools amateurs used, they wrote the books and references at least some of those amateurs consulted, and I imagine they originally wrote at least some of the snippets that got copy and pasted endlessly. In theory, a return of the old web (aesthetically and socially) could involve people copying snippets like these. As you mention, the current web's complexity makes that unlikely, unfortunately.
Could have packaged up the Amiga chipset on an ISA card, an all-in-one video/audio/io gizmo. Sell that to 386 owners and give the OS away. Bonus points for a ROM socket to insta-boot AmigaOS with no disk.
By the time they would've decided to do this, the Amiga chipset was looking pretty dated. 386's with SuperVGA and SoundBlaster cards were becoming common place in the early 90's. Once the 486 came out (1989), the price of 386 hardware dropped fast. Commodore seemed more interested in going the other direction: putting an x86 (BridgeBoard) into an Amiga.
I was an Amiga fan from roughly 1988 through 1994, started with an A500, expanded it, then moved on to an A3000. The platform was incredible. I learned a ton from it and taught myself C on that system. But by 1994, I wanted a Linux system, so a 486 it was...
They did just that in 1989, with the Macintosh Portrait Display [1]. It was designed to fit snugly on the Mac II. Like other CRTs with fixed resolution and refresh rate, the phosphor persistence was perfectly tuned for comfortable, fatigue-free document viewing.
Curiously, tho, I don't think it was a perfect 72dpi like the 9" CRT in compact Macs, so it's not precisely scaled with printed output.
Forget satellites: launch water, rocket fuel, 3D printing material!
Relativity Space is building 3D printers large enough to construct orbital-class rockets in one piece. Others will follow. If they can make printers work in vacuum at 0g, that's how we build our next-next generation of space stations. SpinLaunch wants to launch around the clock, multiple times per day. Just keep flinging materials and consumables to the construction robots building our future habs.
Yeah, the capacitive touch screen feels really tetchy and imprecise. Frustrating to use, even for simple card games with large touch targets (ex. Dicey Dungeons).
But I've found the dual thumb pads to be surprisingly good for mouse input. And with the inbuilt controller mapping software (WASD etc), I don't even need mouse all that much. I've been playing a little bit of Guild Wars 2, which doesn't even support controller input in the options. With a community-made control mapping provided in Steam, it works surprisingly well for casual adventuring (probably not for PvP).
My experience is similar. I’ve been playing through the original Deus Ex on my Steam Deck using the touch pads. Of course the game has no controller input and the input scheme is generally pretty dated, but it works well enough on the Steam Deck to be enjoyable.
