How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
numinous.productions
numinous.productions
> Consider, for example, the way the program Sketch has eaten into Adobe’s market share, after duplicating many of the best features from several of Adobe’s products, perhaps most notably Illustrator. And consider the way Figma is now eating into both Sketch and Illustrator’s market share. Both Sketch and Figma have done this without needing to make an enormous investment in research. That’s a big advantage they have over Adobe.
Leading up to the time that Sketch emerged, UI designers were complaining constantly to Adobe to provide features to support their work. All of us were using a tiny subset of Photoshop's features crammed into the corner (the vector editing features). Remember Adobe actively killed Fireworks[0] the exact product specialized for UI designers that should have prevented Sketch from emerging. I consider Adobe leaving an opening big enough for Sketch to emerge one of the biggest mistakes I've ever seen a tech company make. It was plainly obvious that there was product category there, so many people were talking about it that to me as a designer it was deafening.
Not to mention, if you were paying the slightest bit of attention to graphical apps for artists, you would have noticed Acorn[1], a Photoshop competitor released in 2007, three years before Sketch, maintained by one person, based on the support Apple was aggressively adding to AppKit for this type of application. If you were an expert in this market and you didn't realize that someone was going to use that same toolkit to make a UI tool, which so many people were asking for, I don't know what to tell you. And of course that's exactly what happened with Sketch.
This isn't a story about Sketch copying Adobe products, it's a story about Adobe's product leadership making a series of mistakes that left a gap in the market.
That section's claim is that these mediums are often common goods, so it's hard to build moats around one's investments. Extending your comment to more explicitly attack the central claim, I think you're suggesting that if Adobe _had_ paid attention to this market, they'd be able to defend their position, and Sketch/Figma never would have been relevant. Maybe they would have been able to more quickly create a "spinoff" app because they could adapt existing code, or maybe they could take advantage of their existing network effects (e.g. through educational channels). And, more broadly, that the general claim is weaker than it appears: media inventors can often find ways to defend their turf through mechanisms like this.
That might be true! It's hard to adjudicate counterfactuals like this. I'd be curious if you have any lenses that might help us think about that. Given that we're on Hacker News, I'll offer: one reason why startups often outcompete incumbents is that line extensions like this are counterintuitively often _harder_ for the well-resourced incumbents because of inertia, culture, etc.
I can't help much on the perspective on startups, because that's not my area of interest. My area of interest is what I call "the big creative apps": The Photoshops, the Logic Pros, the IDEs. But I think there's enough overlap with this space and general "tools for transformative thought" to make some interesting observations.
First lets elaborate on what happened with Sketch and Adobe. The argument that Sketch emerging was a product failure on Adobe's part hinges on three things:
1. The community was asking for exactly this type of product.
2. With Fireworks, Adobe already had exactly the type of product people were asking for, they just weren't investing resources in it.
3. They discontinued Fireworks "citing the increasing overlap in functionality"[0]. Then Sketch emerges proving there was indeed a separate category of app there.
I think it's hard to look at those three points and not see a product direction failure on Adobe's part. Compare that with what happened with Ableton Live, e.g., Apple's Logic Pro team was also well-positioned to take advantage of that opportunity, but I wouldn't call them not doing so a product failure because: the community was not asking for a version of Logic Pro focused on live performance, and Apple did not already own an existing product that filled that need that they shutdown.
Like you mentioned, the reason the distinction is important about why Sketch emerged, is that I disagree with the comment that companies that invest R&D in developing these types of products haven't been able to create moats around them. I actually think they've been able to do so rather effectively, e.g., consider Adobe's other product lines: After Effects, Lightroom, Premiere, and even Photoshop itself for everything except UI design, are all the most popular apps in their categories[1]. Even Microsoft Office is still more popular (and more well-liked) than Google Docs[2].
In fact, I can only think of two situations where an entrenched player has completely lost a market, the aforementioned Adobe losing the UI design market to Sketch, and QuarkXPress losing it to Adobe InDesign (another situation which involved a failure to read the market with Quark betting against OS X[3]). It seems that the general pattern is an entrenched player only loses the market when they make a grave strategic error.
I'll also just quickly point out that both Lightroom and InDesign both illustrate that big companies can in fact use their advantages to extend themselves into new peripheral product categories.
So now we arrive at the real question: If these companies are able to make moats around new creative apps, why don't companies invest in making more of these types of products? This is where things start to get interesting. There is some evidence that they still do, e.g., VS Code and Atom are both major new creative apps from big companies. Framer and Quartz Composer also come to mind. But somehow none of these are as satisfying as a Photoshop, Illustrator, or an Ableton Live. I'd chalk this up to three things:
1. On the desktop-space, with file-centric workflows, most of the big creative apps are based around a file type, e.g., image editor, 3D editor, audio editor. So the most obvious way for a new one to emerge is for there to be a new file type that needs an editor, and there just isn't very much we can't already represent with our existing file types.
2. The next problem I'd put squarely on Apple. Another angle for creative apps to go in, is less about more power in editing existing file types, and more about collaborative editing. But collaborative editing goes hand-in-hand with supporting mobile (collaboration is a similar problem as cross-device support, and the simplicity that comes from designing for mobile also benefits collaboration). But Apple simply doesn't allow sustainable software businesses on their mobile platforms, so you're not going to see much development in this space because the ROI is too small.
3. Finally, and this may just be me, but the business models have changed. These products used to be expensive paid upfront to do powerful things, but now the general trend, with examples like Figma, Notion, Lightroom CC, the model is free or inexpensive to use, but without any control over your data. The way I think of these products is that the business model has started to bleed into the product. E.g., Lightroom CC does not allow offline photos, not because that would be difficult to implement, and not because people aren't asking for it (because boy are they ever!), but because the whole justification for the existence of this product is that it's a gateway to charge cloud storage for someone's photos effectively forever. For me at least, this makes many new developments in the creative apps space taste like ash, because I want my creative products to be powerful and flexible. I don't want to see business model decisions showing up in the product.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
[1]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...
[2]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/31/office-suite-market-...
Tools for thought have to become like prosthetics, an extension of your body. For this it has to have really low friction.
Here we have two problems:
1. the ideal power user UX has some learning curve for newcomers which hinders adaption a lot;
2. I prefer typing, but it's hard to beat a piece of paper in ease of input and flexibility of arrangement, type of input (graphics, text, plots, mindmaps, tables all there without any toolbar to click).
The 2nd point makes me think that a general interface is just really hard and specific ones can be done really well already.
Examples of tools for thinking I like:
- org mode: suffers a lot from (1.) and is not that generalized (more is possible, but little effortlessly).
- Deepl Desktop App: real AI collaboration for translation. The UI could be more streamlined, but is fine for now: hit ctrl+c+c, check if the translation is ok, click "insert" and your sentence is translated within your document. It translates 90% as good as I do, I catch the other 10%.
- Soulver/Opalcalc/NaSC: a bit like excel but all calculations always visible (trade offs: not working for tabular data, not as flexible as programing)
- wikis: amazing for long term and collaborative storage, problems with scaling, relevance, discovery and organization
- paper: great input flexibility, hard to refactor, no computer assist (calculations, data etc)
- jupyter notebooks: finally mixing documentation and programming, sadly problems with structure and state
- grafical programming languages (touch designer, pure data, bitwig grid etc.): predominant in the art-world, I think because you can tweak values and connections best.
... the greatest drawbacks being that you can‘t show relevant ads, personalize the UX, or gain deep insights into your users‘ needs.
Solved amazingly well by orgmode babel/tangle.
I mean jupyter notebooks for machine learning e.g. also profit from state, because to work fast you often really don't want to recalculate something that took half an hour. (If it takes hours I guess you should store it to a file anyways...)
- distribution: global at low cost
- accessibility: low barrier to create/view
- funding: ads, patreon, product placement
- creation: video editor + smartphone
- composition: screenshot/record anything
- annotation: free-form text/audio/overlay
- UX: any structure the creator can imagine
Perhaps universities have studied online videos for UX patterns employed by creators to communicate complex topics? Which ones deserve formalization in tool workflows, while leaving room for ongoing experimentation?
The mnemonic medium tool is fantastic, it forces our brain to keep an idea current; we tend to naturally forget stuff if it isn't necessary to our survival. That the software "knows" when you're about to forget something seems to be what's novel here.
The tool is always paired to an individual though, so I bet this will have to be personalized down the line.
What do I need to be reminded of at time X?
As for the What... I feel like I can only learn one "neural diff" at a time. Which one totally depends on what I already know: some times I learn nothing, other times there's too much new information unrelated to anything I already know. Ideally the tool would know what I know, compress a whole essay, and "program" me with a story composed of something like the following operations:
a) add a new connection between concepts you previously thought unrelated
b) change a connection between two concepts, they are not related how you thought
c) insert a new concept
Of course the hard part is knowing what I already know, but I could tell you.
PS. This whole ordeal seems to be related to what good teachers and advertisers do: first get to know the audience, then tell a story with good rhythm and spacing.
PPS. The key to augmenting our thoughts with technology is trust. Our nature requires our brain to keep us alive. We can learn to externalize thought processes, yet if that externality can't be trusted, our instinct will be to unlearn our connection to it.
Imagine if every discussion of a complex societal problem was situated within both a:
A) Problems map: spelling out concrete sub-issues
B) Systems diagram: illustrating how parts of the system interact (useful for understanding levers, forces, feedback, etc.)
It seems non-ideal to try to "solve" intermeshed problems if we don't even try understand both of the above.
It's like driving while blind.
Perhaps this isn't "tools for thought" but "tools for seeing"? Is anyone working on this or doing it well?
*Somewhat excerpted from https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1219732275174133760
It is a humble prototype [1] for: what if the web was simply made of paper and you have a stylus?
Collaborative drawing
Drawing over websites
Drawing over images (and making them transparent)
Those were important features I came up with.
Currently I’ve noticed the following by using it that it helped me as follows:
- it is super easy to talk about websites because you can draw over them and circle things and so on.
- By line drawing images and playing with the transparency of my pencil, my drawing skills improved
- It has been the quickest way to communicate about math if you also use voip with another program
[1] While I find it transformative, it is that just a little bit. Also, it works best in Chrome and since my implementation of webrtc is totally free (no TURN server), it doesn’t work with corporate wifi. Also while collaborative drawing should work quite well collaborative web annotation is really buggy (you need the same viewport).
I actually don't see that for general purpose tools, only where censorship or free speech come in to play.
> The reality for Jobs and Apple was that the company’s users needed Office (along with Adobe’s products) more than they needed a Mac. I’ve long argued that being in this position is a big reason why Apple hasn’t enabled sustainable apps: never again would a software developer hold Apple hostage. The irony, though, is that when it came time to launch the iPad Pro, Apple had no one else to turn to.
[0]: https://stratechery.com/2013/why-doesnt-apple-enable-sustain...
[1]: https://stratechery.com/2015/from-products-to-platforms/
What would Apple be doing differently if they weren’t hypothetically trying to hold back tools for thought?
As I'm fond of pointing out, Sketch is the last major triumph of the Mac as a platform and it was released the year before the sandboxing requirement came to the Mac App Store. I'd argue there would be more Sketch like success on the Mac if Apple were trying to cultivate it as a platform for powerful software instead of actively hurting it. But that's what they’re doing by trying to make it like iOS, which is an OS that has produced no new industry-defining software like the desktop produced Adobe CS, MS Office, Ableton Live, and Sketch. If you don't think that's caused by Apple's policies than what do you think it's caused by?
For the arguments that it is caused by Apple's policies, there's the two Thompson pieces I linked to above, and I cover more details myself in this piece https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...
I see how the App Store impedes existing apps of that kind, but the presence of newcomers like Pixelmator and Pixelmator pro seems to imply that it’s more about legacy than about anything fundamental.
I also don’t see how this is about the wider category of ‘tools for thought’. MindNode for example is a world class tool for thought that thrives on the App Store too.
Given these examples it’s hard to see how there is any general conspiracy against tools for thought, although I grant that meeting the needs of people like Adobe is a low priority.
MindNode’s about page lists seven people. That’s pretty close to the maximum level of success Apple’s policies allow on their platforms. If you don’t care about ambitious apps sure, no big deal, but I care.
Couple of other quick points: I’m less concerned about existing apps like Adobe (they’ll be fine), I want new apps that are powerful like those apps. Also, and this is pretty subtle, I don’t think there’s any kind of conspiracy here, I know I talk like it is, but I don’t think executives are sitting in a room saying let’s make our products bad for powerful apps, it’s more like indifference, and “hey iOS is making us so much money, why not just use that same stuff everywhere?” But an implication of that is it moves the Mac to a more iOS-like software market, and that’s a market that’s failed to produce technology that’s the same caliber as things like Adobe, Office, Ableton. Whereas what Apple was doing before the iPad was producing apps of that caliber with the OmniGroup’s apps, and Sketch.
One of those (partially at least) is IMHO the way swift makes apps unextendible when you compare it with the flexibility of objc app in this area and that's a huge part of creative search too.
It seems like Apple has added a lot of powerful stuff - e.g. CoreML, ARKit, massive improvements to 3D apis etc, which makes the ‘share sheets from iOS’ comment seem like an inaccurate dismissal.
Team size seems like an odd measure off success. If Apple is actually supporting the development of new tools, you would expect the team size for more powerful apps to go down, not up.
It’s fair to say that the rise of iOS (and Android and the web) has drawn attention away from the Mac, but it’s not clear that this has anything to do with Apple investing in the Mac or not. The market isn’t just larger for Apple it’s larger for everyone else too, so that is going to guide everyone else’s strategies as well.
What kind of apps of the caliber of the ones you list are missing? And what kinds of functionality should Apple have been investing in to enable them?
To answer the question of what they should be doing: The dream of the Mac in 2010 was a bunch of Cocoa native apps built custom for the platform. Sketch had just come out, Acorn and Pixelmator were great Photoshop alternatives, one of the best text editors was TextMate. All of these were native Cocoa apps that presented a consistent desktop experience, and more and more use cases had apps like that on an upward trajectory.
Then Mac App Store sandboxing came down like a hammer on those dreams, and it followed with AppKit languishing, AEpocalypse, then notarization. It's been nothing short of an all out attack on native Cocoa apps. And with these trends the dream of a consistent, native, Cocoa desktop experience is now completely and utterly dead. Most new apps use Electron, or non-Cocoa in-house GUI kits. And the actual powerful Cocoa apps are forced to either handicap themselves to be in the Mac App Store like Pixelmator, or tread-water trying to figure out some way to modernize their stack like Sketch to try and stay on the top of the heap by competing with Figma, with zero help from Apple.
I could go on and on, but here's a few bullet points:
1. The size of the company is incredibly important for powerful apps because they all support vast ecosystems, this is one of the ways sandboxing handicap's apps because sandboxing prevents ecosystems from forming. Every major creative app has a vast ecosystem of peripheral technology that springs up around it, and those ecosystems need employees to support.
2. The best case study on what Apple should be doing differently is to look at 3D, a market that Apple has almost entirely lost, I don't have time to write out the decade of neglect here, but this podcast is great summary https://greyscalegorilla.com/podcasts/is-this-the-end-of-the...
3. They never got Mission Control/Spaces right, that's a true desktop-first technology that just isn't finished.
4. They have no automation strategy for the Mac, just letting AppleScript languish with no replacement.
5. Nearly every new app on the Mac has a command palette where you can type menu commands. This is an obvious true desktop-first feature they should add to AppKit.
6. WKWebView/WebView is another example of Apple's absolute contempt for macOS developers. Do you know there's no built-in search for WKWebView? You have to invent your own search for a web view in 2020 in Cocoa app! I don't even know what to say anymore...
7. Node-based editors are all the rage in high-end creative apps, they're every where from Foundry Nuke, to SideFX Houdini, to Blender, to Cinema 4D. I'd say Apple should provide some built-in support for doing this type of UI/implementation, but now I just feel like I'm dreaming...
It’s fairly clear that things like sandboxing are good faith efforts to improve platform security against risks that are very real.
It’s also clear that they are seeing their platforms as unified, and attempting to bring as much technology to the Mac as they can, rather than reserving some for iOS.
Without these kind of improvement the Mac platform would have no future.
I can agree that it would have been better for the dream of Mac application space if they hadn’t had to address these issues, but I can’t see where the idea that it is bad faith comes from.
UPDATE: I think the fatal flaw of Apple's security teams approach is that it only would have worked if there were some way to pull mobile use cases back to the Mac, because those use cases are compatible with sandboxing. But that just hasn't happened, the use cases that moved to mobile, e.g., social media, chat, video consumption, aren't coming back to the Mac ever. And the use cases that did stay on the Mac: audio/video editing, 3D, programming are just simply demonstrably not compatible with sandboxing.
It’s not at all clear to me that the use cases that did stay on the Mac are demonstrably not compatible with sandboxing. Can you explain that?
Certainly in-process plug-ins aren’t compatible, but those are utterly insecure and Apple continues to improve out of process extension mechanisms.
But yeah plugins are a big one.
I don't know how you'd pull mobile use cases back to the Mac, that's Apple's strategy, not mine. My overarching point is that Apple seems to be trying to trying to fix what they perceive as macOS's flaws, e.g., security relative to iOS, instead of improving it's strengths, e.g., that it can run categories of apps that haven't had much success on mobile, like the major creative apps. If the users of these apps are given a choice: Use a less effective versions that works in Apple's ecosystem, or switch platforms, we already know what is going to happen, they'll switch platforms, that's what's happened with the markets Apple has already lost like 3D and special effects.
UPDATE: Here's the question I have, how does improving the Mac for mobile use cases (e.g., the ones that work well with the new security model, I think we can take this as a given since it's a security model that came from iOS) help Apple sell Mac's if the main reason people buy Macs is to use software that doesn't work with this security model?
And if you're still not convinced about the security model being incompatible with the major creative apps, then I'd ask: Why haven't any major creative apps been successful on iOS? Because I attribute that to the security model as well.
Your observations about people switching platforms seem accurate.
However the security strategy Apple is adopting seems to me to be nothing to do with mobile, and everything to do with a globally connected world where personal data is valuable and subject to attack.
The fact that it originated on iOS has nothing to do with it being mobile, and much more to do with it being a clean slate where they didn’t have to deal with legacy insecure apps.
It seems unclear to me why you’d think that major creative apps haven’t been successful on iOS because of the security model when the processing power, storage, input method, and screen size all seem like they have much more influence over this and are only just now becoming viable for these apps.
I also note that you are increasing the conflation of ‘major creative apps’ with ‘Tools for thought’.
SwiftUI and Catalyst, Apple's biggest developer technology pushes since Swift, both are explicitly for this purpose. Not to mention Apple themselves porting a bunch of their own apps from iOS to Mac, and then all the previous technologies that have gone from iOS to Mac. And Apple Arcade being mainly about mobile games on the Mac.
> However the security strategy Apple is adopting seems to me to be nothing to do with mobile, and everything to do with a globally connected world where personal data is valuable and subject to attack.
The apps that people use Macs for listed here like Adobe CS, Sketch, Ableton, etc... don't harvest data the same way mobile apps do. That's not their business model. The security model is about mobile apps like Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, etc... whose business model is about harvesting data. But nobody runs apps like that on desktop, therefore the security model is less relevant for the platform. And again, the reason Apple is pushing it is because they are just blanket applying their mobile app strategy to the desktop even though it doesn't make sense there.
> I also note that you are increasing the conflation of ‘major creative apps’ with ‘Tools for thought’.
Yes, I'm explicitly talking about the major creative apps in this conversation. If you're talking about apps like MindNode, then I agree that an app like that is being served pretty well by Apple's technology stack today, but then there's not much to talk about there :)
The point about "processing power, storage, input method, and screen size" is a valid counter hypothesis, personally I disagree, and I think the evidence points to the security model having a devastating impact on these types of apps by how sandboxing impacted the creative app market on macOS. But I can certainly understand a different perspective here.
It is also about prevention of malware and exploits. Apple can’t control the attack surface of of 3rd party apps, but it can contain the damage caused if they are exploited.
Those major creative apps are gigantic attack surfaces.
Beyond plugins - what is this ‘devastating impact’ sandboxing has had?
The devastating impact isn't the plugins themselves, it's that no major creative apps are sandboxed in the Mac App Store, and the apps did invest in Apple technology stack are struggling for relevance. The devastating impact is in the lack of apps, and the problems the current apps are running into. I expect you're response will be: These apps are declining for other reasons, but I disagree and see a simple pattern: Apple had a strategy of supporting creating apps from 2000-2010 and creative apps thrived on their platforms, their policy was to work against creative apps from 2010-2020, and those apps stopped thriving. Simple cause and effect.
I don’t see Apple working against creative apps at all. I see them as securing the platform in a way that is vital to the future.
The makers of these creative apps simply don’t care about security and have chosen not to invest in it.
The makers of creative apps are therefore working against users over time.
But... with that said, I do think there is something more insidious going on, and just because it's not a conspiracy doesn't mean it's not systematic. If you go upstream and look for the cause of the neglect and distraction, the root reason is simply that Apple's incentives don't line up with creators anymore. The majority of Apple's revenue no longer comes from this type of customer, like it once did, and in fact, per Ben Thompson article Apple has a lot to lose if a new killer app emerges, because those apps threaten Apple's control of their platform. Apple in 1996 had to listen to Adobe and Microsoft (and still has to listen to them on the Mac), but they don't on iOS, and that's because the restrictions on iOS haven't allowed a apps like Adobe's and Microsoft's to emerge. It's hard for me not to think that some of the reason so many security features get pushed through on macOS isn't because deep down there's some desire for that iOS-like control on the Mac as well. A companies incentives emerge from their cumulative decisions over time, even if it's not done consciously.
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I doubt it requires big research to make good tools. Inventing "zero" wasn't done by committee. In any event, the research has been done. It is steadfastly ignored. E.g. something as simple and straightforward as Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" applied uncreatively would measurably improve the majority of user interfaces out there. There's a near total disconnect between good UI design and what gets inflicted on IRL users. Evidence: every change ever made to every app or web app that made the users scream. Heck, "Google backtracks on search results design (techcrunch.com)" is on HN front page as I type this. At best people are fucking UI/UX to make a buck, but most of them do it because they suck at their jobs.
This isn't limited to UI design. E.g. MLs have had type algebra for decades and yet it's only just barely gaining traction among "professional" programmers today in A.D. 2020. Instead of flying cars we have Rube Goldberg machines made out of other Rube Goldberg machines.
That's why "When small groups of motivated people [try] they make rapid progress." Because what we're using now is refried merde.
It doesn't scale either because people are stubborn about giving up crap[1] -or- it just hasn't been let.
Canon killed the Cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
Dynamicland may be fantastic but you can't buy it for money.
([1] This might be the real problem: People just don't give a fuck. Thinking takes energy- calories -and so, as an evolved animal, if you can get by w/o it, you will. "The Internet is for porn.")
I've known what I wanted to make ever since reading Ted Nelson's "Dream Machines" and that was twenty-odd years ago (it was published way earlier, that's just when I got ahold of it.) Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" was even earlier.
(I've been playing with a very simple UI demo that incorporates elements from Raskin and from Wirth's Oberon OS. Its backing store is a git repo and all changes are autosaved. It's dreamy. Raskin warns that excellent UIs are addictive in the sense that once you get used to them it's like withdrawal if you have to go back, and he's right. Mac, Windows, X et. al., it's all so painful and clunky now.)
So yeah, with a little work, and standing on the shoulders of giants and not on their toes, you can make something fantastically better than current tools/OSs. It's not hard.
It might even make money in the marketplace, eh?
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> What's needed is the development of a powerful praxis, a set of core ideas which are explicit and powerful enough that new people can rapidly assimilate them, and begin to develop their own practice. We're not yet at that stage with tools for thought.
Speak for yourselves, eh?
Here's where I think they fall into the same trap as so many people do (philosophers, psychologists, designers-of-tools-for-thought, etc.) when talking about thought: They do not define the term.
What is thought?
(As an aside the only place I've seen that can begin to claim to have a concrete mathematical theory of intelligence amplification is "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby.)
Anyhow, the folks who have the goods on the structure of subjective experience work under the rubric of "Neurolinguistic Programming" (the other NLP). Unfortunately the school of thought is still seen as pseudoscience! Oh well, what a world...
Anyway, the "machine code" of thought is called "submodalities" in NLP jargon, an (outmoded) model of "microcode" is called "strategies" but that's deprecated (I don't know how to succinctly describe the replacement models, and many of them don't have names), etc. Using the patterns and algorithms discovered or reified by the NLP folks you can rapidly and easily reprogram your mind. [2] At that point you don't really need external "tools of thought" but if that's your thing you're in a much better place to make them. (I.e. if you want to make mind-machine interfaces and such like, or design audio/visual/kinesthetic UIs and UX flows.) Here you're going to want to pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" to get a handle on the finer points of cognition and storytelling. See also Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre".
[2] For example there's a spelling "strategy" that involve using visual memory to recall the word (as a picture) and a kinethestic check for correctness. In other words, remember the word, feel that it's right, then read it off from the picture in your mind. Most good spellers use that strategy, most bad spellers do something else. You can take someone who is bad at spelling, teach them to use the proper "strategy", and suddenly they are good spellers. It's analogous to replacing a buggy spellcheck subroutine with a correct one. Spelling isn't hard, we have just been teaching badly. We are in a transition time in psychology similar to when alchemy became chemistry.