Hacker News Reader

The originator of the notebook UI is Mathematica if I recall correctly. You can try the web version at [1] - it doesn't quite have the elegance of the desktop one, but is a much better notebook than Jupyter in my experience.

[1]: https://lab.open.wolframcloud.com/app/view/newNotebook?ext=n...

View on HN

I think MPW (the original Mac IDE from Apple) in 1985 can claim prior art on the notebook UI

Perhaps, but this patent (https://www.google.com/patents/US8407580) and a history of litigation (e.g. (http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/) may be enough of a barrier to prevent its adoption.

That patent is about a user interface for hiding/showing the code that creates particular rendered outputs, not for the general idea of a “notebook” UI.

I suspect there’s prior art (Hypercard? every spreadsheet ever? this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_graphical_user_interfa... ?), and the patent seems pretty obvious, but in any event, I don’t think other “code notebook” implementations are currently infringing this patent, and it seems relatively straightforward to work around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com