Crosscutdrawing dynamic models
Crosscut running on a tablet

Crosscut is a research project developed at Ink&Switch in the Programmable Ink thread together with Marcel Goethals and Ivan Reese. It is a spiritual continuation of our work on End-User Programming (with an essay here), and the Inkbase project.

As a teaser, with Crosscut you can build-to-explore things ranging from custom step sequencers:

To bookshelf-designing tools:

To learn more, check out the 9000-word essay covering everything from philosophy, through design goals, to the actual implementation of the prototype.

Crosscut was also presented during my 2022 Strange Loop talk if you want to see it in action.

Overall, the project taught me a ton, and charted a direction for a next one, that is also finished, and also, as of yet, unpublished. We managed to push the essay out a couple of days ago after all! The project is called Crosscut, and you can read about it here. The essay is much more comprehensive than anything I would write on my own, and I encourage you to check it out and do so on a desktop browser as we have a bunch of live demos in there.

thanks everyone for great feedback and discussions on Inkbase and Crosscut I really enjoy hearing your perspectives on this work, and it's also helpful since chatting with you all forces me to get better at articulating my intuitions.

The only technical preparation I went through was creating a slide deck for the portfolio reviews. A ton of my projects are online, but I wanted to also walk through the process, give additional context, etc. I strategically picked two projects: Crosscut which shows the research-y and team-lead-y side of me, and Glide's Code Components which was the most recent, most production-resembling, solo work.

We hit this earlier on in Inkbase where interacting with a single item was nicely visualized with inspector panes, but groups of objects were not. We tried to explicitly solve this in Crosscut, but the solutions were far from ideal. I also hit this in my research at Glide where displaying lists of values is the main thing you do.