Ink & Switch

I’ve recently been using iReal Pro on an iPad to practice improvisation. It’s a convenient way to play backing parts for a chord progression. But creating and editing progressions in the app is a frustrating experience. Unfortunately, iReal Pro, like most apps, is a walled garden. Short of filing a ticket and hoping it will one day be prioritized, there isn’t much I can do to...

dear mimi

so imagine this. you’re in a folder. the folder is a(n infinite) canvas. all your files are there, live and living and usable, editable with your tools. now you invite a friend (me) into the folder, and we both see the same canvas. as you move files around, they move for me. when you play a video, or listen to a sound, i hear it too. we’re in one ...

Computing technology is one of the greatest levers humanity has ever created. We’ve built nanometer scale circuitry that operates in units of billionths of a second. Networks connect people around the globe (and beyond) at near-lightspeed. Almost our entire culture from foundational scientific papers to family photographs can be brought up on little glass panels we carry i...

Ink & Switch turns ten this year. For a decade, we’ve been chasing a stubborn question: what might software look like if it worked more like a workshop than a product? The answers keep surprising us. Our research into dynamic environments for creative work has grown from a simple versioned writing tool into a place where we can now build and share all kinds of things....

In the first lab note in this series, I introduced the task framework and motivated it with a few examples. In this note, I’ll give you a more concrete picture of the framework — the set of concepts you need to understand in order to use it — and walk you through its implementation.

Each user has a pool of task workers