title

On Modalities and Misadventures | The Observation Deck

title

Home

title

Menu

title

LIGHT

title

DARK

og:title

On Modalities and Misadventures | The Observation Deck

og:site_name

og:description

og:locale

en-us

og:type

article

twitter:title

On Modalities and Misadventures | The Observation Deck

twitter:description

twitter:card

summary

twitter:title

On Modalities and Misadventures

twitter:description

Part of the design center of Fishworks is to develop powerful infrastructure that is also easy to use, with the browser as the vector for that usability. So it’s been incredibly vindicating to hear some of the initial reaction to our first product, which uses words like “truly breathtaking” to describe the interface. But as much as we believe in the browser as system interface, we also recognize that it cannot be the only modality for interacting with the system: there remain too many occasions when one needs the lightweight precision of a command line interface. These occasions may be due to usability concerns (starting a browser can be an unnecessary and unwelcome burden for a simple configuration change), but they may also arise because there is no alternative: one cannot use a browser to troubleshoot a machine that cannot communicate over the network or to automate interaction with the system. For various reasons, I came to be the one working on this problem at Fishworks – and my experiences (and misadventures) in solving it present several interesting object lessons in software engineering.

name

On Modalities and Misadventures | The Observation Deck

description

apple-touch-icon

/icons/apple-touch-icon.png

canonical

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/16/on-modalities-and-misadventures/

icon

/icons/favicon-32x32.png

icon

/icons/favicon-16x16.png

icon

/icons/favicon.svg

en-us

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/16/on-modalities-and-misadventures/