Here is Intel’s Daniel Holmlund and Michael Mahemoff having a quick chat and demo about HTML5 Playground and the AppUp programme.
The playground is similar to what you’ve seen with tools such as JSFiddle, JSBin, Tinker.io, and HTML5Rocks’ own HTML5 Playground, with the key focus here being a “sharing and learning tool” in Daniel’s words. You can see here in the V1 release the pre-fab code snippets are prominent, ie it’s not just a blank slate. There’s also the ability to share code snippets, powered by AddThis.com.
My own take on it is coloured by a recent overdose of StackOverflow podcasts and talks, where both founders have impressed on me the critical influence on user expectations wielded by even the most trivial of features. As Joel Spolsky explained at Hacker News London, a UI is not just about attracting the most eyeballs; it’s about setting up first impressions to draw in some people while — if it does its job — repelling others. In other words, it’s about signifying which class of people the site is intended for, much as any social group has multitude signifiers of whether you could be one of them. (A sly comment in one of Joel’s post put me onto The Culture Code a while back. Very relevant topic in this context.)
Back to the billabong, my point being that this playground very much reflects the goals of sharing and learning by (a) prominently including the library of pre-built examples; (b) always showing the Share button (though there’s a good argument to make that even more prominent).
Source Software As She’s Developed
