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Geoffrey Litt Profile picture
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13 Dec, 10 tweets, 5 min read
I'm building an extension that makes Twitter a better memex:

⭐️ Highlights: see someone's best tweets, not just most recent
📆 On This Day: revisit past tweets for inspiration
🔍 Search: find tweets to quote, w/ shortcuts for useful filters

DM me if you want to try the beta!
Early reviews are in 🤓

DM me if you want to give it a spin
Also, recommend this thread on why/how to weave together thoughts on Twitter. Totally changed the way I use this thing.

Goal of this extension is to better align the product with this style of use. Less news, more ideas

So far, seems like Highlights view is the killer feature for people.

Makes sense...when you come across someone's profile, would you rather see what they happened to be saying today, or the most popular things they've ever posted? 🤔
Wow, got a flood of DMs overnight 😅

I'm going to fix a few things today from the early feedback and then release more beta invites, will get to all of the requests very soon!
Just shipped an update to this Twitter extension:

📆 On This Day for Lists: Resurface old gems from the List you're reading. Works even better than on the Timeline!
⚪️ Light Mode support

If you have beta already, re-download from same link. If you want to join beta, just DM me!
Wandering through the back catalog, not just the frenetic feed ☺️
Highlights is already working pretty well, just needs some fine tuning.

"On This Day" still needs more improvement. Quite tricky to figure out the search criteria to resurface the "interesting" tweets from the past...

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More from @geoffreylitt

Geoffrey Litt Profile picture
6 Dec
I'm skeptical that anyone can design truly great software tools if they haven't personally experienced the problem firsthand.

Here's a short story about my encounters with the limits of empathy... (with an optimistic conclusion!)
While in college, I joined an early stage ed-tech startup founded by some classmates. My first project was to design and implement a reporting interface for teachers and principals to view results from student feedback surveys.
I was totally new to the problem space so I knew I had a ton to learn. The company had a few customers already, so I tried talking to educators in those districts. After a bunch of conversations I started feeling like I understood the rough landscape.
Read 24 tweets
Geoffrey Litt Profile picture
16 Nov
The tragedy of modern computing: too often we conform to the software, rather than molding it to our needs.

How can we empower everyone to edit their tools? Here are 3 ideas I think can help us get there:

(1/n)
1) Customization by Direct Manipulation.

Back in the stone age of CLIs, you had to fumble around in the dark, with no visibility.

GUIs were a huge step forward, letting us directly see and act on the objects we care about.
But then, what happens when you want to go beyond the existing features of your GUI software?

Time to do some programming.. which means right back to the stone age, where you can't see your objects.

Even "user-friendly" customization tools like AppleScript have this problem.
Read 11 tweets
Geoffrey Litt Profile picture
13 Nov
Just assembled a new bookshelf to hold some of my favorite books about computing ☺️
Two of these I see mentioned less often:

- A People's History of Computing in the US: great counterweight to hero narratives in computing history

- Changing Minds, by diSessa : incredibly deep insight into designing empowering computing environments for kids
Also, The New Media Reader is incredible. Felt like someone had perfectly curated a collection for my interests
Read 5 tweets
Geoffrey Litt Profile picture
11 Nov
1/ Interesting discussion today around the idea of Apple adding realtime collaboration to AppKit...

But I wonder if a focus on realtime collab misses the more fundamental issue of the web vs native battle: zero-install apps.

stratechery.com/2020/apples-sh…
2/ As pointed out by @kevinakwok, Figma vs Sketch isn't just about designers collaborating in realtime.

It's about the CEO being able to give feedback with one click of a link! No fiddling with installation first.

kwokchain.com/2020/06/19/why…
3/ Same point comes up in this great paper by @MidasNouwens and @cklokmose analyzing the "app" metaphor

They find that web vs native is more about the mental model shift from "files and apps" to "URLs", than the realtime collab per se

pure.au.dk/ws/files/12160…
Read 8 tweets
Geoffrey Litt Profile picture
22 Oct
Engelbart, on the danger of building "natural" systems
He references this point in this 1986 talk looking back at The Demo and his work on NLS / augmentation. Strongly recommend

I think I would be very sad if I time traveled forward to 2070 and found their version of computing immediately familiar, "natural" and "easy to use"
Read 6 tweets
Geoffrey Litt Profile picture
22 Oct
Hypothesis: the next big end user programming environment won’t be a “programming environment”.

It will be “just an app” where you put your data. But then sneakily becomes super powerful
I’d argue spreadsheets basically work like this.

This also isn’t a very hot take, I think Airtable, Notion and Coda all see this as their path to varying degrees
Read 4 tweets

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