Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Ten years ago, in July 2010, I left traditional print books for ebooks, and I haven’t looked back. Over the past decade, I bought about 300 ebooks and half a dozen print books and read around a hundred free ebooks. Of these print books, two were very interesting but unavailable in digital format. I bought a couple other traditional books because friends wrote them or I contributed to works, so I wanted a tangible artifact as a memento or signed copy I could hold in my hands. Finally, I got the last couple of print books to give as presents. My first ebook reader, a Bookeen Cybook Opus e-ink device. My transition to ebooks and digital reading happened almost overnight. I never had regrets or second thoughts. I regularly shared my experience with ebooks on Google+ and later on this blog where, in 2019, I posted a retrospective of my first 9 years with ebooks . The 10th anniversary is a suitable occasion to tell in some detail how the transition happened, what my exper...

The cloud IDE Repl.it was redesigned to improve the user experience on mobile devices. On smartphones, now the focused REPL pane takes up most of the screen. The redesign takes advantage of native mobile design patterns and lets you switch to a different pane from the bottom navigation bar . There are panes for the code editor, the console, and the output. A Python REPL in Repl.it on my Pixel 2 XL phone. Tapping the code in the editor brings up a contextual menu with some options of the desktop version. You can select, search, or paste text, or open the full command palette. On my Pixel 2 XL phone in Chrome, lines with up to 42 characters fit in the editor’s width. The editor wraps longer lines. But most of the code usually keeps the original indentation and its structure is still clear at a glance. The console pane wraps text, too, so no horizontal scrolling is required. You can get an idea of what Repl.it looks like on mobile by opening the browser on your ...