The Universal Solution for “How To” Knowledge

It’s hard to write instructions for how to do things, especially if they’re real world things. Howstr Alpha was designed to finally solve that problem. An expert would create instructions in graph form. Then Howstr would make it extremely easy for non-experts to follow those instructions. Since all of the instructions would be in the same schema they would all be compatible. One person’s instructions on how to make pie would seamlessly fit into another’s instructions on how to host Thanksgiving Dinner.

I built the desktop authoring tool in Livecode because it creates full stack cross platform apps. I built the web app for users in Bubble because it’s fast. The hardest part was that Livecode doesn’t have many libraries like a more traditional programming language so I had to implement a graph database and graph algorithms and graph visualizations manually.

This alpha proved that my design worked. The expert can use the state > change > state pattern to describe any activity and the non-expert an use the use > do > get pattern to follow the instructions. A cool thing for nerds is that the underlying schema for capturing instructions seems to be an even balance of imperative and declarative. Rather than having to choose one, you can use one or both, just fill out details in the state and/or change as appropriate. I particularly love that the schema and engine create an instant-BOM (bill of materials). No more painstaking manual counting of how many screws you need 👍