If you find yourself nodding at any of the following, you just might love the Grove:
- You want to learn to program, but are put off by the avalanche of
cryptic error messages you always get whenever you try.
- Programming doesn't have to be frustrating! But all too often, it is, because we're still using operating systems that were created in the '70s for mainframes. The Grove makes programming simple.
- You've configured your own computers just so. But sometimes
you're visiting friends or family and you have to use their computers, and not
having access to your favorite productivity apps and shortcuts is a nightmare.
- The Grove is portable; your entire system packs up into a fun-size HTML file that you can use on just about any computer. Your Grove goes where you go. You'll never have to install Vim plugins on a friend's computer again.
- Your old computer died. You bought a new one from the same company but everything
looks and acts different. Why do these &%$@!$* $*&@*!#@s keep
changing stuff for no &@$&@#* reason?
- The Grove doesn't update itself, and old versions will always remain available. Its only requirement is a web browser, and since web browsers have to support old websites they're unlikely to break compatibility. The Grove is as permanent as any computer system can be.
- You have repetitive motion injuries from using a mouse or trackpad.
- The Grove is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any ailment, and these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. But the Grove's keyboard-only interactions put much less strain on your wrists than a traditional mouse + keyboard setup.
- You're a programmer with JavaScript fatigue.
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JavaScript development has taken a maximalist turn over the last few years. The community's response to every perceived problem with web programming has been to just layer on more and more powerful tools. The problem with adding more stuff to the development stack is that the stack is only as robust as its weakest link, and when that weak link breaks there's a lot more stuff you have to understand before you can fix it.
To program for the Grove, all you need to do is write code.
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- You dream of a world where software companies don't mediate our every interaction,
and where computers are no longer optimized for addictiveness.
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Ad-supported software creates a perverse incentive for the companies that create it. Users may just want to log in, accomplish their goal, and get on with their lives. The software company, on the other hand, wants to distract users for as long as possible so they see more ads, and keep them coming back with addictive intermittent rewards.
The Grove will never show you ads. It can't connect to the Web, so app developers can't mine your attention for profit. When you're using a Grove, it's just you and the task at hand.
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No. The key here is that the Grove is a truly personal computer. It doesn't have massive amounts of bloatware that it's constantly updating. It doesn't have hundreds of arcane system files that will break your computer if you delete them. It doesn't have applications like Word that store data in convoluted, inefficient formats. The only data it stores is the data that you create yourself.
When computers run out of memory or storage space, it's almost always because some program is spewing garbage that no one will ever read. A single human simply can't produce (by hand, at least) enough information to cause memory or storage problems on a modern computer.
A few reference points: Tolstoy's War and Peace is 3.2 megabytes of text. The complete works of Shakespeare take up 5.2 megabytes. Simply loading the YouTube home page downloads about 2.5 megabytes of data, incurring a much higher performance penalty (due to the relative slowness of the network) than loading the same amount of data from disk. So even if you're as prolific as Shakespeare, your computer will be under no more strain than if you were browsing the web.
A lifetime of writing can add up to a lot of data, of course. Mark Twain wrote between 1000 and 3000 words per day, suggesting that if he spent 55 years of his life writing and didn't take any days off, his lifetime output might have been close to 300 megabytes.
Even if you write as much as Mark Twain, it's going to take you decades to produce hundreds of megabytes of text. In that time, computers will get exponentially more powerful, and storage exponentially cheaper, while the total size of your oeuvre will increase only linearly.
It'll probably be fine.
Even though the Grove isn't a website, it's displayed in a web browser. If it looked more like a website, people might try to interact with it like it's a website, which wouldn't work. The 1980s-PC look and feel reinforce the idea that the Grove is a new kind of thing. The conventions you've learned for interacting with things in a web browser don't apply to it.