Today, personal computing is organized around apps: large prefabricated units of software developed by professionals for the masses, with few opportunities for customization. How might we reorient computing so that people can deeply tailor software to meet their unique needs?
We think a promising workflow is gradual enrichment from docs to apps: starting with regular text documents and incrementally evolving them into interactive software. Potluck is a research prototype that supports this workflow. Users can create live searches that extract structured information from freeform text, write formulas that compute with that information, and then display the results as dynamic annotations in the original document.
We’ve found that Potluck is versatile enough to build personal tools for managing recipes, workouts, household chores, and more. We share some findings from building these tools, and envision a computational environment where these primitives help people grow documents into personal tools.
This repo has the code for the Potluck prototype. It's quite usable for a prototype but it's not a polished product or actively maintained.