Saturday April 3, 2021; 9:30 AM EDT
I wear a lot of hats. One of them is as a developer of scripting systems. I did a big one, Frontier, developed mostly in the late 80s and 90s. People seem to refer to it in the past tense, but I use Frontier as do others. it does things no other product can. It works. #- As you may know, Drummer is my new outliner-based scripting system for the web. It's still at least a few months from shipping, maybe more. But I'm making big decisions about how it works right now. #
- The same way Frontier was designed around an object database and the Mac filesystem (and later Windows), Drummer works with public and private files on a server.#
- Frontier is a very broad and deep product, but it wasn't originally designed to be so big. The initial idea was to integrate it with the Finder, add a Scripts menu, and have it do things with the file system, and provide a way to program and connect scriptable apps. That was it. Simple. I offered it to Apple. At the time, the early 90s, I knew all the decision-makers there, but I asked for too much money, they thought they could do it for less. So now I had tipped my hand, showed them my product, I figured to be competitive I'd have to add more stuff, which I did have available to me, since I always try out ideas that don't make it into the final product. The product got deeper, but it also got more complicated.#
- I always wondered if it would have worked better if we had started with the small product. We could have shipped sooner. It would have been more approachable, more immediately useful. I think there is a good chance it would have worked better, but it didn't go that way. #
- This time, I'm trying to keep Drummer small, focus on a few innovations, and make a lot of the parts replaceable. #
- I am creating a product, but as with Radio UserLand, I also want to try to create a new use for our computers. With Radio it was blogging and RSS. This time it's a richer, better connected working environment on the net for power users and devs. #
- PS: Power users is a concept that has fallen into disuse, but they still exist, and you can design for them. Some users are very skilled with the technology.#
- PPS: The key innovation in Drummer is JavaScript without the callbacks.#
- PPPS: I posted something about Drummer on Twitter. #