Linked List: October 30, 2022

Sunday, 30 October 2022

Decker 1.0 

John Earnest:

Decker builds on the legacy of HyperCard and the visual aesthetic of classic MacOS. It retains the simplicity and ease of learning that HyperCard provided, while adding many subtle and overt quality-of-life improvements, like deep undo history, support for scroll wheels and touchscreens, more modern keyboard navigation, and bulk editing operations.

Anyone can use Decker to create E-Zines, organize their notes, give presentations, build adventure games, or even just doodle some 1-bit pixel art. The holistic “ditherpunk” aesthetic is cozy, a bit nostalgic, and provides fun and distinctive creative constraints. As a prototyping tool, Decker encourages embracing a sketchy, imperfect approach. Finished decks can be saved as standalone .html documents which self-execute in a web browser and can be shared anywhere you can host or embed a web page. Decker also runs natively on MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

Decker is astonishing. At first glance you might mistake it as shallow, a fun nostalgic gimmick. How serious could something that looks so retro be? But it’s in fact quite deep: Earnest created his own custom scripting language, Lil, which is very approachable but includes things like an SQL-like query syntax for tabular data. The whole thing is beautiful and fun and useful and so engaging that I literally had a dream about using it last night. I don’t know what I’m going to make with Decker but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to make something. It’s that inspiring.

Even the names are perfect. “Decks” are to Decker what stacks were to HyperCard. Decks contain cards and cards contain widgets. The file format is plain text and very much human-readable. A deck shared on the web contains the whole runtime to present and run it in a browser, so all you need to do is publish a .html file. Decker’s Guided Tour is a fine example — both for trying Decker out and for viewing the source. (You’ll want to try it in a desktop browser, or maybe an iPad with a keyboard and trackpad — it’s not meant for phones.)

The native Mac app is just 4 MB. It’s free of charge and open source, but Earnest is accepting voluntary payments on the downloads page. Be generous! And if you make any cool decks let me know.

Kolide 

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Daring Fireball last week. Kolide is an endpoint security solution that gives IT teams a single dashboard for all devices, regardless of their operating system.

When you’re a small company dominated by engineers, you can keep up with fleet management with nothing more than trust and a spreadsheet. But once you start to hire marketers, designers, and the rest, the number of laptops balloons and the line between “work” and “personal” devices gets fuzzy. But fuzzy isn’t going to cut it. You have to prove you’ve got device security under control to close deals with customers, pass a third-party audit, and prove you’re ready for acquisition or an IPO.

Kolide can answer questions MDMs can’t:

  • Do you have production data being stored on devices?
  • Are all your developers’ SSH keys encrypted?
  • And a host of other data points you’d otherwise have to write a custom shell script to learn about.

Want to see how it works for yourself? Kolide is offering DF readers a free trial, no credit card required.

‘Only the GOP Celebrates Political Violence’ 

David Frum:

But if both Republicans and Democrats, left and right, suffer political violence, the same cannot be said of those who celebrate political violence. That’s not a “both sides” affair in 2020s America.

You don’t see Democratic House members wielding weapons in videos and threatening to shoot candidates who want to cut capital-gains taxes or slow the growth of Medicare. Democratic candidates for Senate do not post video fantasies of hunting and executing political rivals, or of using a firearm to discipline their children’s romantic partners. It’s not because of Democratic members that Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed metal detectors to bar firearms from the floor of the House. No Democratic equivalent exists of Donald Trump, who regularly praises and encourages violence as a normal tool of politics, most recently against his own party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. As the formerly Trump-leaning Wall Street Journal editorialized on October 2: “It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr. Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr. McConnell. Many supporters took Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice President Mike Pence all too seriously on Jan. 6.”