These talks are amazing and his app looks fantastic. While it's easy to be creative in code, it's still easy to lose a huge amount of what we were aiming for while coding. It's exciting to see someone like Bret Victor working on problems like this so explicitly.
> it's still easy to lose a huge amount of what we were aiming for while coding
This is something that I've been working on a lot. A lot of the time you have an idea about how something should be working, but then you look at the code and it turns out it'll be a bunch of work and refactoring to get what you want... at which point, you might start to think of "cheaper" solutions...
Sure, sometimes the cheaper solution is really great, but most of the time you're letting your own implementation difficulties get in the way and cloud your design vision.
I really like Bret Victor and he's been really inspiring, not only with the kind of things I want to build, but also how I go about building.
I've started building my own touch interfaces and incorporating visual programming environments to work alongside the text based code that it is built on.
Moonbase started as exploration and became a product, although development on this specific codebase has halted.
Nox is still in exploration mode, but plans to eventually take up where Moonbase left off and is my attempt to have my design and interaction side take precedence. Right now it is just a simple exploration of a touch-and-hold graphical menu.
BTW, I know Bret hates visual programming metaphors like "boxes and noodles", but they do make sense for some sorts of things, especially audio and image filtering. I'm quite a big fan of both MaxMSP and Quartz Composer.
We need to use things like recursion and iteration in order to properly express our ideas and I have yet to see an abstraction of these concepts that makes perfect sense to the untrained and unexperienced mind. Who knows, maybe we'll get there.
