Idyll Language – Author interactive narratives for the web | Hacker News Reader

Idyll Language – Author interactive narratives for the web

idyll-lang.org

113 pointsiamwil22 comments

It's great to see Idyll pop up on HN. I'm the creator of the project and have been working on it as part of my PhD research at the University of Washington.

We've had a busy year, including receiving a donation from Albert Wenger [1], which is being used to hire another developer to work on the project. Feel free to ask any questions in this thread and I'll do my best to provide thoughtful responses.

[1] http://continuations.com/post/166234021110/support-idyll-int...

Not only is the tool awesome, so is the documentation and presentation. 10/10 (from someone who likes to complain).

This library looks really cool!

Frequently I'll have a data set (list of transactions over time, log of analytics events to a site, etc.) that I want to visualize. It usually involves slicing the data in multiple ways with a handful of queries.

It'd be really cool if I could load up a CSV file / SQLite database per document and embed charts that visualize queries on that data. The goal would be to keep the data, visualizations, and text as close together as possible.

Short of this feature being available, I can only do something like:

- write some SQLite queries

- write a quick script to run each query, and save the results to a file (CSV/JSON)

- reference each individual file from the Idyll document

Again, really cool project!

Agreed ‘out of the box’ sql data source (postgres for me) would be a killer feature to add. SQL is just text, but amazingly powerful and a million times more useful than a file reference.

Agreed that this would be really nice to have! We are working on a compile-time plugin system, so it should be possible to setup something the executes embedded SQL at compile time to allow generation of more dynamic documents.

Also see thegamma.net. Might be closer to what you want.

I've been working on a similar project in my spare time to create tools for interactive technical blogs [1]. It's funny, in the past day I've seen two projects that I would say have the same goals as me, idyll being one of them.

What are the possibilities around contributing to idyll? Building on top of it? Is it as simple as writing my own components?

I'm specifically interested in uis to define data structures. One of the more annoying things I found working with d3 to create graphs (as in graph theory) was defining the graphs procedurally, so I built a ui to define graphs graphically.

[1] https://akud.github.io/visualization-blogs/index.html

Hey Akud,

I'd love to talk more about possible ways to collaborate. Adding components that help interface with other libraries are a great way to contribute. For example, the recent integration with Apparatus [1].

Feel free to jump in our chat [2] or shoot me an email [3] and we can talk more.

[1] https://mathisonian.com/writing/apparatus [2] https://gitter.im/idyll-lang/Lobby [3] <anything> at mathisonian dot com

I'm a big fan of Idyll, especially how easy it is to get started with. Here's a screenshot of something I made not more than 20 minutes after first seeing it [1].

Also, can I put in a plug for nearley [2], the parsing library that Idyll uses? The Idyll parser is here [3].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/5I143

[2] http://nearley.js.org

[3] https://github.com/idyll-lang/idyll/blob/master/packages/idy...

Oo, I was just looking for something like Nearley. Perfect.

Nearley has been working great for us -- I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for other projects.

Amazing. A minor quibble: dragging back and forth over a number in the text to change it is not intuitive. (Not that I could think of an intuitive but elegant solution either)

I was looking for something like this fairly recently. I can't remember what I actually searched for, but I didn't find this.

It took me a minute to understand what interactive narratives were. It's not a term I've really heard before so I imagined something more like a text adventure. I'm so glad I clicked the link anyway because this is pretty much exactly what I was looking for and it looks like it will work great.

I really like the project and intend to try it sometime soon. I am trying to understand how mature this project is. The git log seems to go back almost a year but there does appear to be quite a lot of development. The examples seem to work well enough for me to believe this project has enough features to be useful.

The documentation is rather polished and effort clearly went into it, especially with the animations. The thing that keeps slightly perturbing me is that it seems like it would have been less work to show the actual widgets. It seems like the tooling should be able to provide interactive narratives for using the tooling. Is this a long term intention or is it seen as outside the scope of the project? To play with the widgets themselves in the documentation seems like it would be really nice.

The project is about a year old, and is still undergoing active development.

We are currently updating the docs to include direct interaction with the different components, so look out for that in the near future!

It took me a minute to understand what interactive narratives were. It's not a term I've really heard before so I imagined something more like a text adventure.

How about calling it "a high level front end framework based on React"?

> It took me a minute to understand what interactive narratives were. It's not a term I've really heard before so I imagined something more like a text adventure.

Me too. Here's a quick sketch at alternate messaging that might be helpful:

"Idyll helps you tell data-driven web stories using charts, graphs and other dynamic controls that respond both to direct user interaction, and interaction with the story as a whole."

Thanks for the input on this. Shaping the language around how to describe the project has been one of the most difficult things for me so far.

I think they could put 'media' between the 'interactive narratives' (interactive media narratives) and the associations with text-adventures will disappear. Maybe even 'rich media'?

Looks very interesting, especially the Vega integration. Thank you for sharing.

Don't see any licensing info at first glance though. Any chance you could release this under MIT?

The project is open source and MIT licensed! The licensing info is a bit hidden since we converted to a monorepo on GitHub, I'll update to make that more clear.

I've recently gotten back into (thanks to cyber1 and Brian Dear's book) PLATO and its TUTOR language, which despite being weird from a modern perspective makes making interactive lessons (its initial purpose) easy. I've always wondered why we don't have a modern equivalent to TUTOR, but Idyll looks (despite obviously having a very different syntax), to be filling a very similar niche.

This is awesome.

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