Note: this is a pretty shoddy draft of a more interesting and well-written post on where we’ve landed with the latest iteration of our “big viewport” software, Landscape. I’m posting it here for myself — to get the writing practice back up and running — and for other people who don’t mind seeing how the sausage is made.
Peace
Landscape Context & Evolution
Landscape is a container environment (an operating environment) for downloading, using, and navigating Urbit software. It’s been evolving as a concept since 2015, well before Dan or I worked at Tlon. The evolutionary arc of Landscape informed our latest updates to Landscape, as we’ll describe.
As an “environment”, Landscape can be loosely described as the embodiment of Tlon’s latest thinking on how digital products (or software in general, really) can be interacted with, made useful in one’s life, and developed—or hacked together—in a systematic manner. Landscape in its ideal form is like a piece of paper, a lattice, or a glass you’d put flowers in. We’re designing Landscape as an “empty vessel” you can fill with software, people, and information that’s actually meaningful to you.
Our vision for Landscape is for it to become a representation of an ideal next-generation personal computer.
This doc briefly outlines the evolution of Landscape:
The theses that informed its initial design and overall “arc” of development,
The more granular problems Landscape has been designed to address, and
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