There's a long tradition of editors doubling as programming environments. The first editor I used, on Unix, was built around that idea. When I was working on outliners on the PC and Mac in the 80s, we had a side project called Betty, which was a scripting language and outliner in one. After selling the company, I started UserLand to fully develop that idea. The result was Frontier, a scripting language built around an outliner.

That was in the 90s. Fargo shipped earlier this year, and last week it got the ability to script itself. This time I didn't have to write a scripting language, because we just use JavaScript. Makes my job that much easier because I don't have to sell you on a new language. These days JavaScript is very acceptable.

Here's how it works. There's a special outline called menubar.opml. When you edit it, you're editing a set of menus that go at the end of the Fargo menu bar. Each of the menu commands contains a script that runs when you choose the command from the menu. The menu is "live," so as you make changes to the outline, the menu rebuilds to reflect the changes.

I wrote a tutorial on it, called Introduction to Fargo Scripting. It's a sweet idea, but not new. Frontier started with this idea, and it developed into a protocol called menu sharing, which allowed users to edit menus in all apps that were compatible. It was very broadly supported in the Mac market in the early web days. Even Netscape and Microsoft supported menu sharing in their browsers. We even found a way to hack it into the Finder (thanks to Steve Zellers).

Today's new thing is the ability to post from Fargo to WordPress by script. This should help open up the use of Fargo as a WordPress blog editor. Currently you're limited to a single blog. But the ability to write custom scripts should blow by this limit.

BTW, one of the cool things about the post is how the source code is displayed. It's taken a few years of experimenting to get that down, and I think it's finally there.

I don't at this time have any docs on the verb set, but you can see the whole list in this JS file.

We've got the pump primed now, and a nice little community.

I wonder if you can all see how this is developing as a really interesting runtime and editing environment, with the web all around you, and esp with Dropbox doing the synchronization, and a content management system hooked in, it's really a whole new layer on what we used to think of as the net.

Mind bombs everywhere you look.

PS: Here's a quick video demo...

8/1/2013; 6:59:10 PM

Every tech company, large or small, seems to be playing for world domination. That's okay I guess, if they have any hope of achieving it. But even the biggest most monster-like companies fall down when that's their goal, so what hope do you have? And what kind of adolescent dream is it that you would be the last man standing? What's wrong with playing nice with others?

I mention it because it's one month after RSS was set free by the entity that did actually achieve world domination (only to realize they didn't want it), and I don't see any evidence that any of the vendors are doing anything but thinking about what they can do to better hold on to their users, and perhaps capture the other guys' users. Maybe this is the right thing to do in a stagnant market with no growth possible, but a much better approach, imho, for RSS in 2013, would be to put our heads together and figure out how, quickly, we could make RSS more competitive with its competition -- Twitter and Facebook. Grow the market, as quickly as possible. Strike while the iron is hot. Make hay while the sun shines. Etc.

When you've chosen to be independent, not part of a big world-domination-bound entity, the Amazons, Apples, Googles, Intels, etc. then you have, it seems to me, bet your company on interop. You can't do it all. Your users will want to use your product with other peoples' products. They will appreciate it, if it's well-communicated, that you acted in the interest of their power and freedom, rather than in the interest of owning them.

People have minds. They read the news, they're aware of how tech is letting them down, aligning with the government, using their love of technology to undermine their freedom. Maybe not everyone believes this, but I think if you're seriously paying attention, you do.

So I choose to invest in user freedom. This leads me to interop and independence, not world domination. I want to have fun building hugely powerful communication systems, by working with others.

8/1/2013; 11:23:15 AM