Morphic for the web
I was astonished by the mode of interacting in Self's Morphic environment, demonstrated in Self: The Movie;.
You create a green, empty "morph" on a 2D plane, and then right-click it to open a context menu How do you create an interaction semantics?, where you can assign behavior:
You can decompose any piece of content and rearrange it, Bricolage-style.
It's even realtime multiplayer in the local network!
What does this kind of environment look like if implemented today? GToolkit is cool. SqueakJS is cool. Figma for Smalltalk!? (Figma for X)
What if the morphs were more jelly/metaball-like?
Programming in 2D is only making a comeback recently (eg some of the projects in Linear Algebra as Spreadsheet like Paul Shen's)
(Systems with JT. BTW his channel has some great "OS Let's Plays")
also turns me off in many HCI prototypes I've seen, and in the old-school Smalltalk browser UI. feels very buttons and menus world, very un-wiggly
— Omar Rizwan (@rsnous) March 18, 2021
Another system by Randall Smith is Alternate Reality Kit
Also Dan Ingalls' Lively-Web, which isn't quite as performant or rich as I'd want - similar to Omar's sentiment on Smalltalk above.
Vanessa Freudenberg/Croquet Team is a good person to talk to about this.
Related: System Archaeology Seminar