Breadboard

At the start of the Ink & Switch project that would become Embark, I built a prototype environment in which separate widgets could react to one another, allowing users to compose interfaces for different needs. I thought about it as Siri’s donation system paired with Konfabulator widgets or Mac OS X Tiger’s original Dashboard.

The ideas came out of some early sessions with Paul Sonnentag, Geoffrey Litt, and Peter van Hardenberg. As we were exploring what project we might work on together, an idea first offered by Paul gave us lots of momentum, and led us down this line of thinking. Ultimately, Embark moved toward documents.

For variations on the theme, see Orion Reed’s project.

See & download the source on GitHub.

I eventually made a version that visualized the “connection radius” but kept things fluid (we did not like this particular direction; the thinking didn’t quite land):

I also added a “text detector” widget which would donate found entities (dates, places, etc.) from freeform text. Then everything would react.

So you could drop in an email, for example (no audio):