Ink & Switch

Today we're officially sharing the "Introducing Patchwork-26" video from Lab Day at this year's @localfirstconf.com We bring you the first look at Patchwork-26, the latest in our ongoing effort to realize Malleable Software, Universal Version Control, and Local-First Software.

Yesterday I made a “plaything” for Igarashi et al.’s excellent SIGGRAPH 2005 paper, As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation! Works with a mouse, but it’s much more fun with multi-touch on an iPad. Link below 👇

Local-First Conf is back! Mark your calendar for May 25–26, 2027 in Berlin. Join the waitlist and get notified when CFP & tickets go live: www.localfirstconf.com

Everyone’s seen the Sketchpad demo. Few understand how it actually works. I reimplemented Sketchpad from scratch, and I’m making short videos that recreate Sutherland’s demos and explain how they work. The first 8 are up — from drawing a line to the famous rivet. Link below 👇

Ink & Switch's approach of being forward-looking while staying uncompromising on both the value of intention in what you make and the necessity of shaping the world to match your and your community'´s system of values is (in my opinion) the most essential message in software right now

Nearly every general-purpose programming language is Turing complete. So ask not what you can do with a language, but what a language makes worth the effort. A short note on "effective expressiveness": www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-so...

Outstanding new work on a composable and collaborative malleable computing environment from @inkandswitch.com!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxG... * Same data, collaboratively edited in different tools! * Same tools, themselves collaboratively edited! (cont)

This week in Livelymerge, Dan Ingalls gives us a tour of Morphic: the scene graph, halos, text editing, and programming tools of the live, malleable kernel that lives inside an Automerge document.

🗞️ The August 2026 edition of This Month in Automerge is out! Check out what's new in the core libraries the last days of summer, and a few projects from the community that caught our eye 👀 automerge.org/blog/2026-au...

We put a live programming system's entire heap inside an Automerge document — every object, class, method shared + persistent. It all worked, but it was sloooow. New lab note with Dan Ingalls and @pvh.ca on the optimizations that made Livelymerge 64× faster: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

📅👀 The next set of community calls are posted to the Luma. Excited to see everyone there (and we'll also have This Month in Automerge in between) Register here: luma.com/automerge

Everything in Livelymerge is persistent and shared — yay! Then I cmd-clicked a rectangle, and my halo popped up on your screen — whoops! New lab note with Dan Ingalls and @pvh.ca on the need for local state, and the simple mechanism that supports it: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

We put a program's entire heap inside an Automerge document. Every object is persistent and shared: you and I can live in the same running program — and change it while it runs. New Livelymerge lab note, with Dan Ingalls and @pvh.ca: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

The Local‑First Conf 2026 recap is live! Miss the vibe or curious about local‑first? Watch the 2 min video: youtu.be/DelQ1_ua2yY?...

Excited to have a ✨ guest post ✨ from @djwyen.bsky.social in our @inkandswitch.com Keyhive lab notes! The local-first setting is new to a lot of cryptographers; here Derek shares some of his insights working on the BeeKEM paper, cross-fork security (CFS), and fundamental protocol design tradeoffs 🐝

🆕 We're trying something new: here's the first ever This Month in Automerge 🗞️✨ Check out what's been happening in the core libraries, and a few projects in the ecosystem! automerge.org/blog/2026-ju...

We’re going to do some work on the Lab Day talks before we release them. In the meantime - all the Day 1 & 2 talks are up!

My talk at @localfirstconf.com is up, in which I argue that local-first has a role to play in improving the resilience of democratic societies in an era of geopolitical tensions. I'm pretty happy with how this talk turned out www.youtube.com/watch?v=--Ru...

My LocalFirst talk is up! How the Desktop UX needs to evolve This is a "part 2" of my #ubuntu talk last year. This time with more demos! www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IOL...

📃🐝✨ Excited to share a preprint about BeeKEM, a decentralized / local-first variant of MLS's TreeKEM (group E2EE) that we designed at @inkandswitch.com. Huge thanks to our coauthors for the writeup and empirical analysis — even we were pleasantly surprised by the performance results 📊

Something I haven't gotten to say in a while... new lab note today! It's on a kind of user interface that pops up only occasionally: the extemporaneous UI that allows users to 'wave their wand' & get the interface they need through direct interaction. Read on: alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/041/

Got @inkandswitch.com's Backstitch addon setup for live collab within my team, can't wait to get to work!

From research, to prototype, to a real plugin you can install in the Godot Asset Store, Backstitch is a branch of our research into universal version control brought to life in the Godot game engine! You can check it out now: store.godotengine.org/asset/inkand...

I just got around to watching this. I love it so much. Looks amazing for game jams. Good job Lilith and congratulations to @inkandswitch.com for yet another smash hit.

🍿For anyone that wasn't able to make it earlier this week, the recording is up! www.youtube.com/watch?v=afwm...

Backstitch (backstitch.dev) brings Automerge-based collaboration and version control to the Godot game engine. It's is vastly more usable than Git, and a lovely showcase of what Automerge can do. Great talk from Lilith Duncan introducing the project: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAJ_...

We’re doing a user study to find out how adding always-on live values alongside code effects writing and debugging experiences for functional programming. See reply for sign-up details

This is so cool. This is the dream -- people making stuff for each other with the things that we invent. I love it. jatazak.itch.io/multiplayer-...

We're thrilled to announce our next speaker batch for Local-First Conf 2026.