Computer Human

I wanted to start gathering my thoughts here about my recent explorations with the command line.

Im currently obsessed with the idea of a command line interface that gives normal people a way to control their computers.

This idea is independent from the tooling and customizations available for customizing their development environment. While this is also fun, its not something anyone can just pick up and use.

A large part of my focus is to explore object primitives that can be viewed, modified, and created in ways that can help us be more productive.

By primitives I largely mean contacts, calendars, reminders, tasks, links, media, and notes.

Today, each of these things have application specific interfaces. Spotlight allows you to surface these objects and preview them, but they remain disconnected when it comes to interacting with them. I have to use Calendar to create and event, Photos to create and album, Safari to open links, etc.

While each of these tools are great (and not so great) on their own, I can’t help but feel like we lose so much of the magic in the space between.

Another thing I’m focusing on is orientation in time and space. A few months ago I was inspired by a chat/project with my friend Chet. He mentioned the idea of navigating information against time (when it was created, modified, viewed) and space (where you see it in relationship to other things).

Might sounds kind of vague (it is atm) but some of the prototypes I’ve broken ground on make it a lot easier to grok.

A lot of the design is centered around the idea of a personal object graph. Similar to everything happening in knowledge graph space, I think there is an opportunity to expand on this model further to give people richer ways for interacting with files. One that is both visual and expressive.