In Brief
- Hardware control devices should be as dumb as possible:
- they tell the computer about e.g. if a slider was moved, or a knob turned, or a button or key pressed, and nothing else.
- they display (via screens or LEDs) only what they're told to display (save possibly for a power LED and a small number of 'status LEDs, but as much as possible should be under the host computer's control: thus Make Hardware Dumb And Software Defined. That is: SoftwareDefinedHardware
- It should be possible to assign any button to any action, and have any encoder/slider control any continuous parameter: Make Everything Addressable.
- On the topic of MakeEverythingAddressable, we come to MakeEverythingScriptable. There is a need for a common language, and my suggestion here is Lua.
A 'universal scripting language' needs to be as compact and easily-embeddable as Lua, and not involve TooManyParentheses like e.g. Lisp/Scheme/Guile.
(Yes there is beauty in Lisp, but for connecting buttons and knobs to actions, we don't need it.)
- Most actions can be specified using integers, floating point numbers, strings, and possibly arrays and dictionaries. Nothing more.
- Every common scripting language has support for these (though some like Javascript make it hard to use integers as integers), so make everything addressable using something such as this.
- The thing about MakeEverythingScriptable is that if it is ubiquitous, far more people will learn to use it, and expect it. As such, a the moment, scriptability is mostly the niche domain of nerds, geeks and power users. Scriptability needs to be brought to the masses.
- The user interface should communicate with the engine of the app in the same way scriptability does. Thus anything that can be accomplished via the UI can be accomplished via scripts or actions. Forcing everything through the script/action core, though harder at first for the developer, later empowers the user to use their software to the fullest extent possible.
- Give the user all the precision they want, when they want it, and keep things tidied away at other times.
- Give the user as many options to control things as possible. For example, panning a document using a joystick/gamepad? Just because you can doesn't mean you should, but make all things possible first, and then make the common cases as easy and accessible as possible.
So it boils down to
- MakeEverythingAddressable
- MakeEverythingPossible
- AnythingCanControlAnything
- MakeEverythingScriptable
- SoftwareDefinedHardwareControls That is what Hedgehog is all about.