GoKawiilOur field has a weird relationship with terminal and command line interfaces. The time has come to re-evaluate it.
I’m on a kick lately getting my friends to try building native user interfaces. I built my first serious Mac application a few months ago, and since then I’ve built more native UI thingies than in my entire career prior to that. Let’s take a quick tour.
This is MDV.app, the greatest Markdown viewer in the world until someone else writes a serious markdown viewer. I’ve already written a bunch about MDV and won’t wear you down with more advocacy for it. It is great, though.
I had almost no hand in writing this UI code. Why would I? Like most user interfaces, MDV doesn’t break any new ground. It’s not a challenging problem. But building good UI is very hard: this kind of code is tedious, repetitive, exacting, and gated by platform conceptual knowledge. It takes years to get good at this kind of work. Which is why I would never hand-write this program. Instead, I summoned it.
Moving along:
I spent the last year doing Math Academy, from Foundations I through Machine Learning, which you can shorthand as “I taught myself calculus”. I like Math Academy a lot and have a bunch to say about it, but here it’s just the set-up to another SwiftUI app I willed into being: a native calculator-style frontend for SageMath, which is the default math system for cryptographers.
Three big things this app does for me: it automatically renders Sage output in LaTeX, which gets handier the deeper you get into multivariable calc, it point-and-click exposes Sage methods on objects like vectors, matrices, and expressions (which is much nicer than typing trig_simplify over and over again), and it provides a “little language” of shorthand inputs that make common operations (like “take the gradient of this expression”) quick to type. [1,2;3,4] is a matrix in this system; you should already be sold on it.
I’m not packaging this application up. If you want it, just screenshot this section of the post and give it to Claude. It’ll build something useful. You see where I’m going with this.
(it would be more useful if I cleaned up all my genre labels, most of which date back to the first MP3 rips I did back in 1997).This is DJ Roomba, my Apple Music player. The genre map is a dubious feature. What isn’t dubious is the embedded LLM agent, which has tool calls to read my library, my last played list, and my upcoming tracks. “I’m going to the basement shop to build a picture frame; give me a no-skips playlist to fit the mood”. Turns out the mood is “lots of Kurt Vile and Tom Petty”. No notes.
It’s backended by a SQLite database, a sane one with a reasonable schema, which was also a surprisingly useful feature.
... continue reading