This week we did a three day "App Jam" at @Playbit_ . Lots of cool things were built, like a multiplayer math art app and a MIDI composer. My own project was a flow-based programming app for graphics. As if Quartz Composer was multiplayer. Pure C & WGSL, no libs, 1.5M wasm file.

Today we at Playbit are sharing our first iteration of the Playbit runtime, our vision for building playful personal-scale software. playbit.app/ Personal-scale software means programs by you, for you and for the people in your life. An app for your friends isn't very useful if only some of them can run it, so usually these projects have only one option: the web, an abstraction which many apps don't fit well into. We wanted a better solution, so that's what we're building. A runtime designed for highly dynamic graphical apps that are collaborative, with a really good set of developer tools. The Playbit runtime is a bit like an OS, but lives inside a host environment and gives guest code a small system layer to interface with. In practice it’s a minimal ABI-stable syscall interface with well-defined semantics. While we only support macOS in this initial release, our vision is for a powerful multimedia and collaborative platform which you can write your app for once, and run it on any platform. Learn more and grab the macOS app at playbit.app/ With love and a bit of code, – Edward, Nick, Julia and Rasmus

Rasmus Andersson @rsms gave an awesome key note introducing @playbit_ - a new operating system & development environment which encourages playful learning, building & sharing of local-first software on a personal scale.

Getting time zone synced between host system and playbit was more work than I expected. On the plus side, I walked away with deeper knowledge about IANA time zone data and how libc & the Linux kernel keeps track of time zone independently.

Here's a screen recording of a quick demo. (I'm running a debug build in an emulator here which is why it's in a macOS window.)

We're about to send out the first early-access invitations to Playbit, starting with 100 randomly selected email addresses from the early-access signup form on our website. If you have the curiosity, feel brave and are comfortable with computer programming, let me know if you'd like to get access. This first release *only works if you have an arm Mac.* We essentially give you a mac app that is a virtual machine which runs Playbit (think: a video game in full-screen mode.) This makes it easy try. In future early-access releases we will increase compatibility to other architectures and platforms. It will be a *very* early release where most of the exciting and interesting features are promised for the future are absent. You can sign up for early access here: playb.it

Playbit is an endeavor to build a new operating system for software creatives. After over two years of research, Playbit is now a real company and we are hiring our founding engineers. Are you up for the challenge? playb.it/careers/

Playing around with logotype ideas for @playbit_

Okay, let's do this github.com/playbit/playsys

Built a super basic GUI for testing the Playbit CRDT "DOM" implementation (v2 in C) and it immediately helped me find bugs. Playing and experimenting is important not only for getting a feeling for things but also to lower the friction to trying stuff.

Would you be massively disappointed or curiously excited if Playbit looked like this?

👂 @rsms lays out what's he up to with @playbit_ "When I grew up in the '90s there was this idea of shareware..." (✂ from changelog.fm/449)

Doesn't look like much but celebrating a small win with the Playbit display server: Multiple textures, multiple render pipelines, camera & view transforms, depth stencils, etc. over partitioned WebGPU 🥳

this, but for good reasons. Anyhow, earlier this week I got it working! Here's a server program starting with dawn_native that opens a UNIX socket. Then a client program with just dawn_wire (internally it uses the official webgpu.h API) which connects to the socket.