This article aims to express the mental model that I have built over the last few years for thinking about human-computer interfaces, software, and how we might produce a step-function increase in building and using software. A new way to program, if you will. Note that this is more of a mental-model/philosophy than a falsifiable scientific theory, and not fundamentally novel. For many years I have been searching for an idea to work on within software that is deep, impactful, personally fulfilling, and one that enables a massive business to be built on top of it....

Note: This is not a random rant against AI, after all I am a Founder of an AI startup, Overlord Systems. Much has been written recently about how software no longer has a moat because AI gives you both engineering ability and a high speed of producing software, therefore making any piece of software copyable in a short time, and thus software is no longer a moat. Only, this is isn’t true in the way it’s being advertised....

In ‘Thought 2: Regex is Like Assembly’ I wondered why we are still doing regex in this kind of hard to understand, symbolic way, when we have already invented high level programming languages. There is no reason regex can’t be written as clearly as any other programming language we use today. I thought doing this would be an interesting project, and so I came up with Regexl, a high level language for writing regex, that can be used as a simple library....

‘Thoughts’ are a place for me to write down random ideas that I think are interesting. They might be of any length, discuss any topic, and will probably not be formal, scientific, or rigorous in presentation. They are also, in some sense, a way for me to connect with interesting people, so if something here piques your interest or you have some comments to make, please do reach out! (omar at bloeys dot com)...

‘Thoughts’ are a place for me to write down random ideas that I think are interesting. They might be of any length, discuss any topic, and will probably not be formal, scientific, or rigorous in presentation. They are also, in some sense, a way for me to connect with interesting people, so if something here piques your interest or you have some comments to make, please do reach out! (omar at bloeys dot com)...

In Part 3 we setup the basis of our simple path/waypoint system, however we still can’t use it easily because the gizmos we used are just simple graphics, so in this post we will create interactive tools in the scene view that we can use to control objects, which we will do using Handles. According to the Unity Docs: “Handles are the 3D controls that Unity uses to manipulate items in the scene view....

After talking about inspector attributes in part 2, it is time to switch our focus to the scene view. Most of editor scripting in Unity is changing and dealing with the editor by adding buttons, making UI changes or creating new windows, however, there is a small part of the editor API that allows you to work with the scene view, and those are Gizmos. Gizmos are all these little UI elements and graphics present all over the scene view, all the different icons on objects, like the sun and camera icons, the outline around selected objects and the collider outline are all in reality gizmos....

When you are first starting out with editor scripting in Unity, the best thing to starting playing with is the inspector. Being one of the things we interact with the most as Unity developers, it is quite beneficial to be able to change it and generally control it. Lucky for us it is the simplest part of the editor to extend and edit, so even if you are not keen about going very far with coding the editor in Unity, you should at least acquaint yourself with the inspector part of it....

Game development is a lengthy and highly complicated process that can take months of a developers life for even a small project, therefore any thing that helps improve the workflow and speedup the process is very welcome. Now while modern game engines try to cater to the needs of developers and make their lives easier, there is always space for improvement, especially given the specific needs of each project. Luckily for users of the Unity3D game engine, there exists an easy to use and powerful editor API that allows the creation of basically anything you want in regards to working with the Unity editor UI, be it simple extensions or full-blown editor windows and custom tools that interact with your game....

After fixing the performance problems of the Visual Item Database, I decided to start dealing with a very annoying problem that has haunted me was for as long as ‘Categories’ have existed, which is the fact that in order to add or remove a category from the database you have to jump into code and add things in a relatively large number of places, which is something you don’t want to have for a tool that is supposed to be used by designers a lot, and when you factor in the fact that this process will probably be done more than once, you never really want to have it....