The HiStory Behind EarthWalker
Often, digital tools designed to help data containers "speak" have the following Pain Points:
- too expensive for being people's digital EDC (EveryDay Carry) tool (Cool software, but I often simply don't need 80% of its functionality. Anything you suggest for quickly looking at numbers inside my daily files would still cost more than $1,000? No joke? Subscriptions!? Argh...)
- domain-specific without need (I don't want to set up a project, define a coordinate system, or worry about dimensions. Industry-specific information is not important today; I just need to rapidly analyze what the numbers in this file are telling me.)
- rudimentory in usability (I spent 4.2 minutes and 42 clicks just to finally observe the numbers in one file! Hurray! Only 420 more files to go...):
Multiple simple daily tasks can then quickly transform into an out-of-budget no-go or a multi-click endurance test. Once, that's exactly what happened to one developer...
...When endurance demanded time for recovery, the developer closed his eyes and commanded his brain to think of "finally something good."
The brain delegated the task to a "far-far" department, which activated the usual remedy from the childhood-memories shelf. Office walls dissolved—the sky turned blue, and the sun shone bright. The developer was now a boy again, on summer holidays in Grandmother's village. Months of worry-free joy stretched ahead, full of happiness, surrounded by friends having fun, books telling great stories, and nature itself—sharing a welcoming river, a whispering forest, and a vast field of sunflowers full of tasty seeds...
"...Hey! That's enough; time to come back and traverse another data container," the "far-near" brain department intervened.
The memories began to fade. But before they vanished completely and realities swapped, something odd shimmered into view: the partially missed seeds in the sunflower's head were replaced with numbers—and its green stem morphed, first into part of a scatterplot, then into the outline of a histogram, then a barplot, and then...
...And that is how 🌻 EarthWalker was born.
