April 1, 2005
MarkBernstein.org
 

Storyspace work in progress

Over at KoderSoftware, there's an intriguing peek at the Storyspace plans for a big Flash project.

New media artists sometimes focus so tightly on the technical challenges of the medium that we forget how useful tools like Tinderbox and Storyspace can be for the process of planning and refining the vision.

Programmers can forget, too; Aaron reminds me that I've forgotten to look into TextMate. People get wedded to their editors -- that's why you get silly, religious debates about EMACS vs vi. It's been going on since the dark ages: when I was at DuPont, an old and accomplished chemist lectured me on how visual editors like vi were obviously inferior to a good command-line editor like sed.

Over the years, I've become so broad in my taste for editors that I no longer am really good with any editor. That might not be terrible: from Tinderbox tech support, I've learned that lots of tech folk often spend an hour of hard thought to automate a boring, repetitive ten-minute task. Now, the automation might make sense if you're going to reuse it, or if it reduces errors, or even if you learn from it. But that's not really why we do it.