[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What would an IDE built for the Apple Vision...
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Ask HN: What would an IDE built for the Apple Vision Pro look like?
The OS for Apple Vision Pro brings a new design language focusing
on depth and utilizing space beyond a square screen. If IDEs
weren't confined to a 2D window, what would it look like? Are there
any features you can think of that would make AR coding more
productive than simply on a monitor?
Author : simse
Score : 20 points
Date : 2023-06-10 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
| sturza wrote:
| I imagine something like https://pharo.org/
| mindcrash wrote:
| I think it will be a wholesome natural interface, so I imagine
| some form of a LLM will be included which can be used to actually
| make the interface elements work and connect them to the outside
| world, while having the possibility to design and modify the
| interface you are building with your hands/fingers (think
| Interface Builder, but spatial).
|
| If they manage to pull something like this off and be first to
| market I guess Magic Leap, HoloLens, and whatever Meta is cooking
| up (if they still are doing something in that space anyway) will
| very likely be pretty much dead, by the way.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| More open windows.
|
| But in all seriousness, you can have a tree of small code windows
| connected by various dependencies. So it will be much easier to
| see a piece of code and it's uses / definitions, and thus
| understand a codebase's architecture
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Get in the car, we're reinventing HyperCard/Smalltalk!
| womitt wrote:
| Make the window active you look at - tried to make it with oculus
| developer kit didn't work that time, maybe with this hw
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Sounds to me like you want to use the old Delphi IDE where all
| the editor windows are separate.
| vdievsowgdj wrote:
| just look at what IDEs that runs exclusively on ios are like:
| crap.
|
| nobody invest into a closed platform. i expect jetbrains to came
| up with something marvelous for ar/vr, but it will run on the
| upcoming version of Microsoft or HP glasses. you know, the only
| ones today that works just like an external monitor without a
| locked in ecosystem like apple or facebook.
|
| the silly apps and games and such will net millions tho.
| simse wrote:
| Totally. Any iOS, or in this case realityOS, IDE would
| necessarily have to be remote only to actually be useful.
| omeze wrote:
| This is flame-baity but honestly what Id also expect. No one is
| going to invest in developing IDEs for this thing to rival VS
| Code or whatever if Apple wants a stranglehold on its
| ecosystem. Maybe there will be extensions to existing editors
| since people can ise it as a display extension for their macs.
| We didn't see this happen on windows with game dev and the
| quest though.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Neovim, but curved slightly
| esafak wrote:
| "Design for spatial input":
| https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10073/
| zingerlio wrote:
| I think a robust eye-tracking functionality for code editors has
| a ton of potential for the Vision Pro. A lot of the barriers and
| benefits of vim/emacs style navigation can be replaced or
| augmented by smart, interpretive eye tracking. It's like digging
| into the future where machine starts to read our minds, and an
| intimate integration of where you look is a big step.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Most programming work is still text editing with various amounts
| of debugging, refactoring, and autocompletion.
|
| It is not obvious to me how an AR interface would make a
| difference other than more virtual screen real estate. You would
| still need a way to enter text, build code, run tests, etc. This
| means a keyboard and pointing device (mouse, trackpad, etc.) are
| still needed unless something else can do it better.
|
| Granted, for the same cost as the Vision Pro you could get
| several large, high resolution monitors and have lots of screen
| to work on.
| kabirgoel wrote:
| > Most programming work is still text editing [...]
|
| Text no longer needs to be the primary way of conveying
| programs. There are practical reasons text works best on
| screens, but if your coding environment is boundless then
| there's no reason to believe you can't do fancier things like
| direct manipulation of ASTs pretty easily. Imagine "grabbing"
| an AST node and attaching it to a different parent, all in
| space.
|
| Beyond simple AST manipulation, the Vision Pro will probably
| enable Dynamicland-esque "programming spaces" where you
| manipulate objects in your virtual environment to construct
| programs.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| This was one of my first thoughts when I tried Hololens back
| in the day -- it would be great to watch the execution of my
| software, or visualize all the messages being passed between
| functions or different services on my network, and go all in
| on block-based programming in 3D (trees can be packed more
| densely in 3 dimensions, even moreso in 4)
|
| I was expressing this to a friend who was involved in VR in
| the 80s (VPL research) and was simultaneously elated and
| disheartened to learn that they had the same idea ! Googling
| around for it now I suppose he was telling me about "Body
| Electric" or "Bounce" and looks like any other 2D data flow
| language [0]. Maybe just ahead of its time. A patent about it
| [1] describes the problem with wires going everywhere and
| needing to provide the user the option to hide any set of
| connections. I'd want to accomplish this by representing the
| whole connectome in 4D space, and then shifting the
| projection into 3D to hide and reveal a subset of
| connections. Further visual filtering could be performed with
| a depth of field focus and fog effect, controlling all these
| parameters to isolate the subset of the system you want to
| inspect.
|
| [0] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/bounce/SpaceSeedCirc
| uit...
|
| [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5588104 (bonus,
| figure 3 shows the dataglove as just a hand plugging into the
| PC)
| stoniejohnson wrote:
| This seems like a very literal interpretation of "spatial
| computing"; I don't think anyone will be physically
| manipulating ASTs with any regularity.
| klyrs wrote:
| We already have plenty of these, and they suck at doing
| anything serious.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Sounds like a good reason to try to do better. Unless you
| suppose the UI of programming is solved and everyone who
| wants to have control over a machine just needs to bite
| down and learn vim ?
| klyrs wrote:
| Grabbing AST nodes and dragging them around is _never_
| the bottleneck when I 'm programming. Cut/paste is plenty
| efficient even in notepad and doesn't require gross arm
| movements. Feel free to try it, but I maintain doubt that
| a literal forest of code is going to be anything more
| than a gimmick.
| kevinmershon wrote:
| Agreed. So, in a word, Emacs. It's just Emacs buffers
| everywhere
| lurker137 wrote:
| I think it might make large scale code visualization in a similar
| way to how SourceTrail does it more feasible:
| https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail
| solomatov wrote:
| > would make AR coding more productive than simply on a monitor
|
| One obvious thing is much more space. I.e. unlimited number of
| extra monitors, or entities which work as such.
| tikimcfee wrote:
| Can I throw my hat in the ring? I've been working on this for.. a
| long time.
|
| AR VR iOS and macOS app for arbitrary code rendering in 3D space.
| Terminal like rendered glyph by glyph means perfect control over
| ever mesh and texture.
|
| The iOS demo is fun. You can walk around your code like an art
| museum, draw lines of executed traces, and perform visual
| hierarchical search.
|
| https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
| jungturk wrote:
| Thinking about depth:
|
| Using it to present stacks of information (version history,
| undo/redo chain)
|
| Using it to render background information that doesn't need to be
| swapped into the foreground to be useful - the
| architecture/module that the code you're working in serves, the
| remote services that fulfill certain commands, the test coverage
| available to you in this module.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It would look like a 3D world, like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ
| colinplamondon wrote:
| I would expect extracting out more of the meta-logic via GPT, and
| showing relevant panes dynamically.
|
| If you get an error, automatically search for the answer and
| propose the change.
|
| If you add a new flow uncovered by tests, propose the test.
|
| Generally, have panes that are dynamic to what you are doing, and
| tightly couple them.
|
| I could imagine looking at different zoom levels of a code file,
| folder, or architecture, and working primarily on abstractions,
| approving / rejecting the resulting proposed edits.
|
| Strategic coding more akin to a game like Supreme Commander or
| Planetary Annihilation.
| icapybara wrote:
| This sounds kind of frustrating because it would be hard to
| predict or trigger. "Last time I ran into this error a super
| helpful window popped up, this time I'm getting nothing?"
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Go to definition/usage opens new window but lets you easily
| toggle between previous windows easily (using eyeballs)
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(page generated 2023-06-10 23:02 UTC)