Ink and Switch interactive homepage
Ink & Switch is celebrating its tenth anniversary with Tenfold, an interactive homepage highlighting a decade of human-centric computing research.
summary is enough The interactive homepage is a fun brief diversion, but the real value lies in exploring the lab's influential essays on local-first software.
summary
Ink & Switch marked its tenth anniversary by launching Tenfold, an interactive homepage featuring ten customizable letters built from their research technologies. The site showcases their core themes of local-first software, dynamic notebooks, and human-amplifying computing environments. Commenters praised both the interactive art piece and the lab's historic essays, while debating subscription models for local-first apps like Allume. A lab member also jumped into the thread to share the design backstory.
key points
- Ink & Switch celebrated its tenth anniversary with Tenfold, an interactive art piece composed of ten letters built using their research tech.
- The lab focuses on four core research themes: user-owned data architecture, customizable tools, dynamic sketching media, and collaborative history tracking.
- Commenters heavily praised the lab's foundational essays—such as local-first software and dynamic documents—while debating subscription pricing for derivative tools like Allume.
who should read it
Software engineers and researchers interested in local-first architecture, collaborative tools, and human-computer interaction.
discussion warm
consensus
Commenters universally praised Ink & Switch's historical essays and research contributions, while noting that the interactive homepage had some frustratingly inconsistent UX controls.
pushback
Some users pushed back on the subscription pricing model used for Allume, questioning why local-only software requires ongoing monthly fees.
Yeah, I'll take the blame for that :)
Backstory: when we first set up the sandbox, we offered a handful inputs that devs could optionally use in their letters. You could click and drag directly on the letter, drag a little token on a "Kaoss Pad"-like control surface, scrub a timeline, toggle a big global mode switch, and more. Everyone used a different subset of the these inputs, based on whatever seemed like the best fit for the idea behind their letter. Some people even bypassed all that and implemented their own input handling (like Lilith did for the bullet hell game in C0). But most …
A lab member explains the design backstory behind the inconsistent interactive behaviors across the letters, offering a fascinating peek into their collaborative build process.
Generated by an LLM from the article and thread. Check the sources before relying on it.