Potluck shows an enhanced text document on the left, and a computational environment on the right. We share some findings from building these tools, and envision a computational environment where these primitives help people grow documents into personal tools. We’ve found that Potluck is versatile enough to build personal tools for managing recipes, workouts, household chores, and more. Users can create live searches that extract structured information from freeform text, write formulas that compute with that information, and then display the results as dynamic annotations in the original document. In this essay, we present a research prototype called Potluck that supports this workflow. We think a promising workflow is gradual enrichment from docs to apps: starting with regular text documents and incrementally evolving them into interactive software. How might we reorient computing so that people can deeply tailor software to meet their unique needs? Today, personal computing is organized around apps: large prefabricated units of software developed by professionals for the masses, with few opportunities for customization. Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software Potluck Dynamic documents as personal software
