[jakubp]

I don't get why there is no way to edit apps live through the operating system. Before I knew how programs work I didn't understand why I can't recode anything as user - change menus in Windows 3.1, change what they do, change logic of forms, etc. Today I know how this works and I'm even more convinced this would be good for everyone, exposing the actual logic behind all we see in apps (start with text, forms, links, buttons, etc.) would only be to everyone's benefit - would expose bugs, help people learn UIs in depth, suggest better functionalities and have swarms of users contribute to computers.

Same with gathering user feedback -- the fact that we have such ridiculously unusable basic UI elements on mobile especially (people tend to NOT find basic UI elelemtsn of apps for months, sometimes years - how the f* is that even possible) is just one consequence of the fact that even if say 1000 users intend to do something and fail, the authors of the app never learn about that. WE get clubhouse to listen to one more type of radio, but we never get "userhouse" to get instant stream of people's complaints about an app (and a special physical button ON THE smartphone itself to launch that "instant feedback to the app author"mode so it's part of the base aspect of being a user of a smartphone)...

sigh.... one can dream.

[aidenn0]

> I don't get why there is no way to edit apps live through the operating system. Before I knew how programs work I didn't understand why I can't recode anything as user - change menus in Windows 3.1, change what they do, change logic of forms, etc. Today I know how this works and I'm even more convinced this would be good for everyone, exposing the actual logic behind all we see in apps (start with text, forms, links, buttons, etc.) would only be to everyone's benefit - would expose bugs, help people learn UIs in depth, suggest better functionalities and have swarms of users contribute to computers.

This has been done before more than once, including at PARC (which is listed as an inspiration in TFA)

[schmichael]

> I don't get why there is no way to edit apps live through the operating system.

I learned how to program on an Apple IIe which had a key sequence to drop to a BASIC prompt and allow manipulating the running program (if it was written in BASIC, which many were). My first programming was hacking my highscores over my brother's.

Then when the web came about in the 90s there was View Source. No one minimized, much less compiled or compressed CSS and Javascript (when they first came out). Web "apps" were rudimentary, but extremely hackable. You could copy and paste locally and hack to your heart's content.

The accessibility is what made programming incredible fun and alluring to me. I'm happy that there are many systems carrying on these ideals today, but I wish there were far more.

[Sophistifunk]

I just had to help my wife move her taskbar back from the left hand side back to the bottom where she likes it. She has no idea how it got moved, and I've got no idea how long she just put up with it in the wrong place before it annoyed her enough to get help. Regular users might want to automate things, but they absolutely should not be able to accidentally go inside systems and break them.

[RicardoLuis0]

that's actually quite an easy mistake to make if the taskbar is not locked, just dragging it to one of the corners of the screen moves it

[astrange]

Most things are web applications and you can edit those - sometimes people even do it with browser extensions.

The reason you can't do it the rest of the time is because developers would have to support it if they allowed it, and then they'd never be able to change anything ever again. Apps also aren't set up to allow this because of Conway's law, or maybe I have it backwards there.

[infinite8s]

Smalltalk systems have always been able to do this.

[astrange]

I think image computing is generally a bad thing for correctness, though, because it makes the program fragile. It's good that it has to write itself to disk in some simpler format than a memory dump because it's probably easier to repair that format if it gets corrupted.