Yesterday Cube Design moved into a cube (cube design moves into a cube). Today it started keeping a record of what goes wrong.
violations
Cube Design has principles, words, moves and open questions. Now it also has violations: bad examples, each with a screenshot, kept next to the rule they break.
The first one was Anlat’s main screen on a laptop: five doors side by side that had nothing to do with each other. It was logged at breakfast. Before lunch it had become one face of six pieces, the most used first.
Other examples turned into rules the same morning. Faces are always a complete square: pieces sit in the smallest square that holds them, and the places not yet filled keep a pale dashed outline. Two fingers coming together step one level out, on every screen inside another.
Anlat’s trial on a phone (example name): the main screen as one face, and a face whose empty places keep a dashed outline.
The bad example stays on show, now with “fixed” next to it.
a cube of its own
Then Cubes turned the idea on itself. It got its own cube: what it is made of (features, the library, decisions, principles, words, studies, data, code).
Its features became a cube too, about twenty pieces, turned by who uses them, where they stand and where the idea came from. Turn it to where does it stand? and the features still asked for gather on one side.
Cubes on a phone (mock data): the features cube of Cubes, and its face “where does it stand?”, with built and asked for.
A new skill now tells every session working on Cubes, Anlat, Mosaic or Cube Design to keep its app’s cube true, and to turn each request into a piece.
and then a mess
By afternoon that had made a mess. Several sessions wrote app cubes in one day, and yours showed every one of them flat, side by side. The cubes that live inside a piece showed up again on their own. Three cubes called features sat next to each other, with nothing to tell which app each belonged to.
“yours” in Cubes (mock data, rebuilt to show the problem): app cubes and their insides all on one level, with three “features”.
Underneath, the nesting was right; only the view had flattened it. The study went into the violations, and five requests went into Cubes’ own cube. The mess was exactly the problem Cubes exists to solve: many things, nested, seen flat.
a surprise every morning
The library also grows by itself now. Every morning a scheduled task adds a surprise cube: a dozen or so pieces, a few faces with their colours, a fact on a piece. The first one was musical instruments. This morning it was spices.
Cubes on a phone (mock data): today’s cube on the home screen, the spices cube, and its face “which part of the plant is it?”.
Selim is curious about tomorrow’s. For him it is the cube showing what it can do: fitting in many things, and shaping many things at once.