The Devil In The Details; Or, What The Hell Have I Been Inventing Anyways?
Saturday • March 30th 2024 • 12:23:59 am
I fear the only thing exciting about this particular text is its title, but if you care to hear what programmers sound like, stay and listen for a minute.
My invention; you know the windows you have on your desktop computer, I connected them with wires that represent data flow and exchange.
This means that an application that snaps photos, or records videos, is instantly useful, because you can wire it to a gallery application.
And in my program, all applications on your desktop, are editable, and composed in a visual programming language.
It is just more boxes connected with wires, couple of levels beneath that, there is code in a code editor box.
But that rarely needs to be edited, that just sets up the components that you connect together.
I very quickly solved the only problem these types of systems suffer from, my program is not necessary when running applications that it makes.
These wired windows on a desktop that I describe, are just the first layer, of a two layer integrated development environment.
You can drop in a web cam, or a security system video feel, and take snaps of that, and have a little gallery.
But the actual applications that my system focuses on, are standard application designers, you can make windows, forms, databases, wikis.
Then you click a generate code button, and all these freindy user interfaces, emit a bunch of folders with code.
That you can then run in a web browser, or a web browser based application window on your desktop.
So I am inventing, a powerful code generator, with a visual programming language user interface.
That encompasses, more than just connecting boxes together, but things like spreadsheets, drag and drop UI builders, and firewalls and databases.
I wish this was more exciting, but I am just taking the best ideas, and putting them into a single program that integrates them together.
If you have a spreadsheet with a list of fields for a form, you can send those same fields to multiple builders.
A user interface builder, a database scene generator, an admin back-end builder, a programmer interface builder (or API).
One spreadsheet, making all these different windows come alive with things that need attention, that need to be configured, prior to code generation.
Lots of things are possible here, I want a series of started projects for song making, and a whole bunch of classic game builders and designers.
I would like to capture fun ideas like HyperCard, and Zooming User Interfaces, forgotten Desktop ideas like Drawers and floating icon bars…
And get a feel for what their original inventors were seeing, when initially sketching out these great ideas, now lost to history.
There is also a business process builder, where people in a company get an inbox, and instructions that they must follow.
The business process is visually managed, by a neat little graph, that allows for putting the human in the circuit.
Flow execution will pause, until a person or AI, verifies something, and clicks approved or denied.
It is a small, but also very broad program, as these things go it took many years, and it will take many more.
I am currently at a point, where I can replace the parts I programmed manually, with their generated versions.
When this is done, the program will be written with it self.