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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth
@alexwarth.bsky.social
640 followers 170 following 59 posts
Principal Investigator at @inkandswitch.com Formerly at Alan Kay's research groups (YCR/HARC, CDG, VPRI), and Google Creator of OMeta, co-creator of ohmjs.org
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Dec 27
If you're a fan of @worrydream.com's Inventing on Principle, check out Seymour, a live programming environment I made with Saketh Kasibatla

harc.github.io/seymour-live...
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jul 25
For more info, see: www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/no...
Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for exploring scenarios
Ambsheets is a research project about new kinds of spreadsheets for exploring possibility spaces and making better decisions.
www.inkandswitch.com
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Reposted by Alex Warth
jonathoda.bsky.social
Jonathan Edwards @jonathoda.bsky.social · Jun 16
Reminder: LIVE Programming workshop submissions due July 21. liveprog.org
Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE)
The 11th Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE 2025) will take place online. LIVE invites submissions of ideas for improving the immediacy, usability, and learnability of programming.
liveprog.org
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Reposted by Alex Warth
ohmjs.org
OhmJS @ohmjs.org · Jun 16
One of the biggest production users of Ohm that we know of is Shopify.

They used Ohm in the Liquid HTML parser that powers their prettier plugin & VS Code language server — as well as the Shopify Admin's CodeMirror-based editor.

www.npmjs.com/package/@sh...
npm: @shopify/liquid-html-parser
Liquid HTML parser by Shopify. Latest version: 2.8.2, last published: 2 months ago. Start using @shopify/liquid-html-parser in your project by running `npm i @shopify/liquid-html-parser`. There are 8 other projects in the npm registry using @shopify/liquid-html-parser.
www.npmjs.com
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Reposted by Alex Warth
geoffreylitt.com
Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Jun 10
New longform @inkandswitch.com essay! 📜

Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

by me, @joshuahhh.com, @pvh.ca and @seaofclouds.com

inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

It's about why people need agency over their software tools, and how to make that happen.
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can...
inkandswitch.com
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Reposted by Alex Warth
geoffreylitt.com
Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 22
what if you could model a problem in a spreadsheet, and then instantly start applying powerful *filters* to explore your space of options?

that's the idea @alexwarth.bsky.social and I have been exploring recently at @inkandswitch.com ... 1/
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Reposted by Alex Warth
elliot.website
el @elliot.website · Mar 26
Last week I finished my research residency at @inkandswitch.com. Here's some rough documentation of what I worked on during that time vezwork.github.io/polylab/dist...
vezwork.github.io
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Feb 25
Ooooooo love this
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Reposted by Alex Warth
spiralganglion.com
Ivan Reese @spiralganglion.com · Feb 5
The Ink team at Ink & Switch is starting something new — publishing our internal lab notes.

These are (mostly) unedited, with all our puzzling and musing and prototypes unfiltered.

Take a peek: inkandswitch.com/ink/notes/
We’ve begun publishing the internal research notes we write within the lab. Some of these newly published notes come from our archives of past projects, others are being freshly written about our latest work. Be aware that these are notes we write for ourselves. Sometimes they’ll mention a term or name that you won’t be familiar with. Many notes link to other notes that aren’t public (yet?). If you’re interested in our quest to build a dynamic notebook with programmable ink, or are working on something similar yourself, there’ll be lots to see and learn here.
inkandswitch.com
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Feb 4
Curious to learn more? We're publishing a series of notes about our experiments. Our first note introduces how amb values work and why they improve on existing spreadsheets: www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/
Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for exploring scenarios
Ambsheets is a research project about new kinds of spreadsheets for exploring possibility spaces and making better decisions.
www.inkandswitch.com
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Feb 4
What if a spreadsheet cell could hold multiple values at the same time?

That's the idea behind Ambsheets, a project I've been working on w/ @geoffreylitt.com at @inkandswitch.com. It's a new spreadsheet that makes it easier for you to explore many possibilities simultaneously.

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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Feb 1
So exciting on both counts!!! The book is a beauty!
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Feb 1
Lol
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 28
I spent about 45 minutes making this. After I showed it to Alan, he gave me an internship at VPRI, working on the STEPS project. A couple of months later, he would be co-advising my Ph.D.

Best ROI *ever* on writing a computer program.

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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 28
The hero of this story is Etoys' "color sees" tile.

When the wire's red sensor sees the color yellow, the wire turns yellow. Otherwise, it turns black.

You can make AND, OR, NOT gates the same way -- it's nothing that a 5th-grader would have trouble making on their own.

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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 28
Logic Game, 2005.

I made this logic circuit simulator to learn Etoys, Alan Kay & co.'s programming language for kids. I represented the state of the wires and logic gates with their "costumes" -- there is no hidden state. This makes the behavior of the circuits visible.

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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 25
@chrisshank.com My Sketchpad triggers haptic feedback in the Pencil when the cursor snaps to a line / point / etc. and it's quite tasty! Doing it via the I&S wrapper for now... it will be cool when that functionality is available via browser APIs.
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 25
It's a recreation of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad that I've been working on. It's not quite ready yet, but I'm making progress!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RyU...
Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad
YouTube video by Animation History
www.youtube.com
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 25
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 25
Market research for a new business venture? :p
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Reposted by Alex Warth
pvh.ca
pvh @pvh.ca · Jan 18
Used my Ohm JS harness to design & implement a little programming language for Finite Cellular Automata and then shipped it as a toy into Patchwork.

It's really cool to be able to work on a little programming language and pop out to change the syntax without even reloading my browser.
A screenshot of a grid with rules describing Conway's Game of Life in a custom programming language alongside.
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 24
Love this!! Thanks for giving us a look behind the curtain, super interesting @rob-sheridan.com :)
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 24
Please do!!
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 24
We tried all kinds of things, but my memory is fuzzy. At some point I found a bug report and this, and the OP was told that it wasn't a bug :/

Anyway, if you can simultaneous touch and pencil interactions working in the web browser (maybe in a tiny demo?) we'd love to se it!
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 24
We get around this by capturing the touch and pencil events in the wrapper application (which is a native iPad app written in Swift so it doesn't have this limitation) and sending them (as JSON objects) to the JS code that's running in the WebView.

cc @spiralganglion.com
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alexwarth.bsky.social
Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Jan 24
IIRC, the browser (even when it's running in a WebView) purposely ignores pencil events when touch events are going on and vice-versa. There's no technical reason for this -- the people in charge decided that interfaces like the one you see in my video would be too confusing / error-prone.
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