deliverables

I went with your "deliverables" topic, and got, I think, interesting results.

I want to do near term deliverables. The conference itself is a deliverable. Then, the first two days are essentially spent working on - planning - deliverables. The thing is, why wait. Anything we do immediately will only add to what we can do at the conference. My awareness swung to the absurd aspect of my plan. I thought "maybe we should plan it for October." Then I thought "let's plan it for August and October and January."

I have long wanted to do a graphics programming environment. We'll use that to build rendering functions. Another aspect of my plan: I want the user to fully understand the code behind the product. I want the product to teach users about itself. I'm seeing the content of our discussions in the course of building the product as a medium for beginning that project of teaching user about the product's methods. I'm mentioned similar ideas in earlier letters. I think I can map out an incremental build that will make the process intelligible for anyone, and everyone.

The next bit is a draft of the beginning step.


I want JavaScript for a page that displays a picture area and surrounds it with controls.

Let’s make the picture area 4 by 6 inches.
A white field.
Make the rest of the window sky blue.

Let’s do a command line!
The command line is a white field in the blue background with a cursor when you click in it, and you type in a command "drawpoint(number between 0 and 100, including decimal fractions if desired, the x value, similar y value, positive number of any size representing the size of the point in pixels, hexadecimal color value)". Pressing enter calls the drawpoint function and passes its parameters.

I have detailed some code for the drawpoint function here. I'm working things out as I go through part of it, but I think at the end I rework it into something fairly rational.

Paragraphs 4 and 5 of another post at my just revived blog respond another issue you raise, and record the emergence of my new process, and the post after that expands on the latter point, and introduces an example (since discovered to be flawed) of it application.

I am going to define the first step even more narrowly and write to you with that shortly.

Virtual Arcosanti is definitely part of my plan ... my version is low tech/no tech. I've just noticed how it fits in with another part of my Arcosanti plan that I'll detail for you shortly.

You could comment for me about how you would do these functions (back to the programming) in Web 2.0. I'd like to know something about that ... up to now, I haven't had a clue.