34 // Bring your own client with Geoffrey Litt

In today’s world, apps and their data are tightly coupled—but what if each person could pick and choose their own tool for use in a collaborative project? Geoffrey Litt is a researcher working on this problem at MIT. He joins Mark and Adam to talk about email as the original BYOC case study; how shared protocols enable niche software; whether it’s possible to design software for someone other than yourself; and how to accidentally become an expert.

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Show notes

• Geoffrey Litt / @geoffreylitt
• “teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”
• Project Cambria
• MIT Software Design Group
• Ink & Switch
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Doug Engelbart
• Superorganizers profile of Geoffrey including Muse screenshots
• Bring Your Own Client
• email as one of the first internet protocols
• Pine, Mutt
• Superhuman, Front, Tempo
• not many clients support video in HTML emails
• tractor attachments and the three-point hitch
• HTML meta tags for Google and Twitter
• progress enhancement
• reverse engineering
• ad blockers
• end-user programming
• aspiring programmer progressing from Livejournal to HTML coding
• PHP
• Hubspot, Mailchimp
• “toolmaker humility” from Balint @ Craft
• Solid
• accessibility in collaborative writing
• VS Code won the text editor wars
• “ed is the standard text editor”
• episode on video games
• Flash, Java servlet
• Changing Minds
• Bonnie Nardi
• ethnographic study of distributed problem-solving in spreadsheets
• Wildcard