HN user
Website: https://ryanlucas.org
I see a lot of folks here asking about what happened to the original Yahoo Pipes.
We had the same question, so we went and talked with a lot of the original team and wrote up the story[0]. We also made a fun mini-site that contains a lot of easter eggs (e.g. if you click on the "Memory Pipes" folder on the desktop, you'll see a bunch of candid photos of the original team circa 2007)
(Hi, Retool employee here who worked on this piece.)
This is the second installment[1] in what we hope will be a regular series telling the stories of novel programming environments that had a lot of influence on developers.
Creating these is a labor of love—we get to talk to the original teams who built products that were formational for us. We have an incredible in-house creative team that finds a way to sneak these fun mini-sites in amongst their other work.
For me, the most exciting part of working on a product like Retool is that it's an evolution of lot of ideas from the past. We're always looking at prior art to spark ideas and challenge our assumptions as we're building. There are many great ideas in old computing papers and products that were either before their time, or lost when there were major shifts in the industry. Pipes was a touchpoint for us as we built out one of our newer products[2].
We have lots of ideas for future installments in this series, but if you have any programming environments that were near and dear to you heart, let me know!
[1] Our first deep-dive was on Visual Basic. I'm very biased (I wrote it!), but if you like Glenn's Pipes piece, you'll probably enjoy this one too. :) https://retool.com/visual-basic
[2] Retool Workflows: https://retool.com/workflows
I wrote a long form history of Visual Basic[0] awhile back that covers the origin of the product and how it ended up being married to BASIC at Microsoft.
tl;dr: VB started out as a project called "Tripod" (later "Ruby"), written by Alan Cooper (of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" fame) and a small team of developers. It was originally a Windows shell construction set, but Alan sold it to Microsoft where it languished on the shelf for awhile.
Bill Gates eventually decided that he wanted to marry the visual UI building aspect with BASIC and handed the project off to Scott Ferguson and the Business Languages Group, who were maintaining Microsoft's QuickBASIC IDE, the BASIC compiler, and developing a new language engine (dubbed Embedded Basic) for inclusion in a relational database product codenamed Omega (which would go on to become Microsoft Access).
I actually wrote a long article on this [1]—and had a chance to interview some of the team that built the original version of VB that was sold to Microsoft. (Alan Cooper and Michael Geary; Michael actually frequents HN pretty regularly!)
My opinion is that it was a confluence of a few factors:
- Microsoft was very worried about the threat of Java/Sun, and rotated hard into .NET and the common language runtime as a response.
- The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case). Couple with the shift to .NET, Microsoft listened to them: VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm. That left the silent majority high and dry.
- The web emerged. Working with the Win32 API was suddenly less relevant, and younger devs adopted PHP en masse, rather than adopting VB. (And existing VB6 devs upset about the change also migrated over when they could build for the web instead of Windows) Unforced error on Microsoft's part, since IE had 96% browser marketshare in 2001.
https://statecharts.dev/ is a good place to start for an overview of how the statechart formalization works.
If you want to go straight to the source, David Harel's "Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems" published in 1987 is the original paper: https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/seoc/2005_2006/res...
One of the developers here. Sketch.systems is about 5 years old and we haven't actively worked on since its release––but it's still used fairly regularly by folks and does the job it set out to do! If anything ever seems broken, reach out (our Twitter accounts are in the website footer) and we'll definitely take a look.
Hey Stephen, I wrote the original article. Had no idea that MS actually tried to port the Ruby forms engine to the CLR—what a fun twist. Did it end up being too difficult technically, or were there other factors that killed it?
Thanks, Michael! Finding your comments on HN about the design details of the original "Ruby" version of VB and VBX was part of my inspiration for writing this article in the first place. Your recollection of "firing an event" is my favorite kind of classic Silicon Valley story.
If you're interested in this sort of thing (design-oriented IDEs targeting runtimes/frameworks), there are a few other similar tools:
+ Rightware Kanzi (https://www.rightware.com/kanzi)
+ DiSTI GL Studio (https://www.disti.com/user-interface/gl-studio/)
+ Altia (https://www.altia.com/)
Most of them have found niche markets in verticals like automotive/medical/embedded, where it's easier to just ship a runtime for the UI.
UI/UX designers working on the dominant platforms (web/mobile) have a lot of nostalgia for Flash--particularly the perceived ability to actually ship functioning product. There's no lack of new tools trying to improve on the status quo: drawing pictures of UI and throwing them over the wall for developers to figure out how to implement.
I suspect that we haven't seen the aforementioned IDEs become industry standard for a couple reasons:
+ They're by nature more difficult to use than drawing tools, often surfacing a lot of advanced parameters, state machines, and code
+ The variability in languages/frameworks/platforms inherent in web and native development make usable output a much harder problem than having everyone all-in on a single framework/runtime
The demos and engine are free to use and modify for non-commercial use right now. The repo is here: https://github.com/lynaghk/subform-layout
The happy path issue is definitely one of the big pain points in the "designer throws mockups over the wall" workflow. Simulation of the production medium in the visual design tool can help a bit, but the real solution is to get designers working in the production medium. That's easier said than done, of course. (And ultimately more of an organizational/practice issue than a tooling one.)
Thanks, Nick. You're not the first person to mention this, we'll take a crack at reworking it. ;)
Thanks, gus. We're working on some fixes for IE as we speak.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5953345 for a discussion of a well-done performant mobile web app.
The official Apple take on use of their products in custom photography and video for promotional purposes is covered on page 12 of the App Store Marketing Guidelines: "Custom still photography and video of Apple products are allowed only with express written consent and approval from Apple." [1]
That said, there are plenty of examples in the wild, even in app store screenshots, of violations of this policy. So Apple's enforcement doesn't seem to be particularly strict.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/appstore/AppStoreMarketingGuidel...
Gruber's comment here is a bit ingenuous:
"Don Chadwick is the designer behind both the Aeron and the Chadwick. The Chadwick is the one he put his name on."
The Aeron was a collaboration between Bill Stumpf and Chadwick. They'd worked together on chairs before for Herman Miller (Equa chair, 1984 & Sarah chair, 1988). I'm not sure Bill would have appreciated naming any of these chairs "the Chadwick."
Bill Stumpf was an extremely talented industrial designer. He passed away at age 70 in 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/obituaries/10stumpf.html http://www.hermanmiller.com/content/hermanmiller/english/pro...
It's also worth reading some of the backstory on the creation of the Aeron chair: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671789/the-untold-history-of-ho...
This reminds me of a passage from Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow."
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
"Clothing is the outward expression of a man’s state of mind. It is his attire that tells the world what he thinks of himself." -Pearl Binder
"Dressing conscientiously is exalting in the act of being alive." -Gay Talese
It doesn't much matter what Zuckerberg signals or doesn't signal to Wall Street bankers by wearing a hoodie. It won't have a material impact on his company's offering.
Coco Chanel used to say that one shouldn't leave the house without putting some effort into one's appearance -- if only out of politeness. It is, after all, the rest of us who have to look at you. The most unfortunate part of this story is that Zuckerberg fails to realize -- or care -- that a little sartorial attention imparts respect for the people with whom you are doing business, both personally and professionally.
Whether he likes it or not, Zuck is now a high profile individual, with all the attention that follows suit. That's, in my mind, an opportunity to think critically about how he presents himself aesthetically. Contrary to what most posters here seem to think, fashion isn't binary: there are more choices than a hoodie and jeans or a suit. Putting some effort into his appearance doesn't mean he has to look like, or imply endorsement of, Wall Street bankers. If anything, purposefully flaunting that convention is the opposite side of the same coin.
The OP is rehashing the concepts around pervasive or ubiquitous computing: the notion that computing will expand out to meet us in tangible products, as opposed to being solely accessed on dedicated computing devices.
There's been much more than "a smattering" of work in this area. Lots of really smart industrial designers and engineers have been working on these ideas for quite some time. I personally based my Industrial Design degree thesis around these concepts almost 12 years ago. Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab comes to mind. The Ambient Devices Orb was a well-covered, if early and underdeveloped, attempt to bring a consumer pervasive computing device to market.
These products are here today and will continue to emerge. A recent example would be the thermostat from Nest Labs, a device that beautifully marries the industrial design of Henry Dreyfuss’ Honeywell round thermostat with a digital display, the tangible and intangible interfaces working seamlessly in concert.
This is a really beautiful piece of writing; it’s quite a gift that Mona Simpson would deign to share such a personal eulogy with the world. The Jobs family certainly didn’t owe any of us insight into his final time on earth.
From all popular accounts, Jobs was an intensely private man about his personal and family life; something refreshing in an age when celebrity is conflated with talent and young people like Mark Zuckerberg opine that privacy is an anachronistic social norm. Love him or loath him -- and there is certainly enough evidence to support both reactions -- the conversation is almost always about the work and Steve Jobs as a professional. As one who still values the notion of personal privacy, I’ve always been grateful for that.
Yet what makes this piece so potent is that Simpson reflects primarily on Steve Jobs as a person: a brother, father, and husband, not a boss, or showman. In so many ways, her eulogy could be applied to any person who has lived fully and loved their family deeply.
There’s quite a sublimity in that contrast, something I suspect was not lost on Jobs and his family in the creation and dissemination of this eulogy and the Isaacson biography to the public.
And perhaps on that point, it’s wonderfully surprising that Steve Jobs, widely considered an arbiter of taste and design curation, wasn’t yet familiar with Mark Rothko -- one of the premier painters of the 20th century -- until the final year of his life.