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Christian,

Your comment "deliverables" got me thinking about ... well, first I thought let's you and me begin working on deliverable this very minute. Also, another of your comments has me questioning my inclination towards secrecy.

I worked on some ideas in a draft letter. They turned out overly complicated. Later, I got an idea for something simpler. I found - this was really exciting - that I was working on a long-treasured concept, shelved for some time: a graphics programming workshop. The user can experiment with graphics algorithms.

I then composed a short essay describing something very rudimentary, in the above way, in enough detail to illustrate the basic architecture.

The question is, what will attract users to such rudimentary thing. The answer is, the documentation. The user will come to the product through a series of descriptions of its workings. That series of documents starts to exist (I wrote about this in an earlier e-mail) as soon as we exchange letters about it.

Then, almost to my horror, I was confronted with the importance of getting those documents on line. For a moment, I despaired. Then, to my amazement, I remembered my blog, abandoned for some time, and realized: it will work.

Another question will be, how does this relate to my mapping concept? It is deep underlying structure for that ... is my contention. Here's a logical proposition: the purpose of software is empowerment of the user. The most fundamentally empowered state for a user is being able to write code. The truest software design parameter, then, is to teach the user how to write code. My plan is to integrate this function into all my products, so that the user is constantly learning about the code behind everything she is using. We begin, here, at the opposite end, by building basic components, and documenting the process.