Alexander Obenauer

Computers are not a kitchen. They are clay, they are Lego, they are jungles of imagination. It's true that our current trajectory devolves their universality to a set of discrete isolated applications == multiplexing a set of appliances on one device. That's an economic win sure, but it's tragic if we fail to unlock more of their flexibility for "end users"! IMHO that's the biggest unsolved problems of computer science: that it takes so much professional learning to unlock the real potential (and even that fails us programmers much of the time! How frequently do you say "I'll solve it myself" and the time invested is actually worth it? In the words of Steve Krouse we've not quite solved "End-programmer Programming" yet.) I do want FOSS to follow through and offer live inspectors for everything, but no, I no longer believe users should "learn to code" as the salvation. We're nowhere near it being worth their time, we actually went downhill on that :-( Conversational AI and "vibe using" will play a role, but that's more like "adversarial interoperability", doesn't cover what I mean either. I want cross-app interoperability to be designed in, as something everyone'd understand users want. I want agency over app state — snapshot, fork, rewind, diff etc. I want files back (https://jenson.org/files/), and more¹. I want things like versioning and collaboration to work cross-app. I want ideas and metaphors we haven't found yet — I mean it when I call it unsolved problem…

This very much reminds me of Alexander Obenauer's Lab Notes[1] and OLLOS[2]. They're both great, recommend reading them. [1] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/ [2] https://alexanderobenauer.com/ollos/

On my personal site, I've published my explorations (so far) on the future of personal computing, by way of designing an "operating system of the future." https://alexanderobenauer.com The site is built in Svelte using Elder.js as an SSG.

Is it Ollos by Alexander Obenauer? https://alexanderobenauer.com/ollos/

After skimming https://alexanderobenauer.com/articles/os/1/ - I think the items are more like objects than files. Files have a uniform I/O interface, while items seem like they can have unique properties instead of having a uniform interface.

https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/ Notes from the founder.

I didn't understand much from the homepage, but looking at linked Lab Notes[0] I see 2 major takeaways: 1. "Atomic apps", which I understand to be apps that separate presentation from the data. 100x this. We used to have it, with files and programs that could open them, but with move to cloud apps, this feature of computing is disappearing. How do I make a directory that contains stuff from my google drive, onedrive, figma and youtube? Interestingly, there are now SaaSes that let you "index all your company resources", which try to tackle this problem. 2. "Graph OS". The author has really impressive Obsidian graph[1]. However, I don't believe this is a good approach for all apps, or for all people. I tried many times to make my notes reference each other, with backlinks and stuff, and I now believe that my brain is not wired for this stuff. Still, kudos for the author for making it work for them. [0] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/ [1] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/014/

I'm reading through The Lab Notes from Alexander Obenauer[1], and I'm noticing lots of coincidences. Universal data portability [2] in particular shares the same code insight of reusing all user data in any context where it's needed, and Universal reference containers [3] are the primary use case for my idea of Wit. With the example interactions in that website you can get very close to what I imagined my system to be (though I would use a "select+tag" metaphor more often than the cumbersome drag&drop). I still have the idea to allow spreadsheet-like processing on top of those metaphors, but the essence of the system is quite similar to that one; many information systems are converging in that same direction toward a similar model of interaction. [1] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/ [2] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/002/ [3] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/003/