I just read an interesting post by David Karger about PIM, end-user programming, data publishing, and lots of other interesting HCI ideas. The premise is that purpose-built applications for PIM impose strict schemas on their users, making it difficult to adapt, repurpose, or integrate the data with other applications. The alternative is something like Evernote, that lumps everything into one bucket, access to which is mediated largely by search. The tradeoff, then, is between a relatively undifferentiated interface backed by search on one hand, and a large number of siloed applications with dedicated interfaces.

David describes several systems (interfaces) his students built that leverage the Haystack framework for storing arbitrary data, and suggests that it’s possible to structure these data management tasks as authoring problems rather than as programming, thereby making flexible, extensible, customized interfaces more widely accessible.

Continue Reading