Wednesday, March 5, 2014; 8:13:41 PM Eastern
Recalculating graphics
- My brother was in town a few weeks ago. We went to a Brooklyn Nets game on the subway and got lost and had to take a cab to Barclays in the snow and cold. It may not sound like fun but it was. ;-)
- We talked about how various software projects turned out. I had a memory of a product we did that never shipped, it was called Broadway, or Boxes & Arrows, or PowWow, it had a lot of names over the years. The idea was this -- if you wanted to do layout right, presentation-type layout, you have to have graphics that have relationships to each other that persist, even as the objects are moved and resized.
- So I could say that box A and box B are always centered relative to each other. When I move one the other would also move to maintain the relationship.
- This was meant to be a tool people would use to create designs for PowerPoint-like presentations, designs that other people would use, and that would look good even if they had just a little text here and a lot of text there, or the other way around. Designers would set it up so there were rules that made it look great either way.
- It followed the usual formula for software platforms. The authoring tool trades off ease-of-learning for power. The runtime must be trivially simple to use. Ways for people who invest to pack knowledge into their designs, and have it blossom to delight the neophyte.
- (Sounds like something Walt Frazier might say.)
- Whenever I have to do tedious layout of web pages, and find in the end the result is unsatisfactory and fragile I think of how it really should be done, and hope someday we make a popular platform that has these recalculating graphics in all their glory.
- And I think it's also the way we'll ultimately solve the "responsive design" question.
- #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/03/05/pierceRondo.jpg"
- #description "Graphics that have relationships to each other that persist."