Pardon me if this is to weird for words, but our other conversation brought out the phenomenon of Apps. Attached below this is the original fragment.
Basically I was surprised by the growth of "Apps", especially with the apparent convergence of everything in the browser (Web Apps). It has now been explained to me by several of my friends in accademia. Their students have, for me, an odd relationship to computers. Few can program and generally find the idea foreign. For a while I thought this an aberration but more evidence piled up. So why is this? Twitter? Facebook? Lazy dumb-ass kids? No. Jobs explained it all in the WWDC keynote. He described the concept of a file hierarchy as being a pain for most folks who simply want an App to manage their files and to hell with the file, its name and extension, and where it is in the file hierarchy and syncing the damn files from/to all my devices. And setting up sync to iPad to allow more music files (larger disk) than my iPhone (smaller disk). Files and their management are a bitch. Jobs sez that all data should have a simple App managing the data, and actually, the data should not even be on individual devices .. instead they should be in the cloud and managed by the OS/App pair. Better yet, the Time Machine notion is generalized so that all backups, over time, are also available to you. Oh, and if 10,000 people have the same music, there is one, count it one, copy of the file in the sky and we all share it! Well now, there's an idea! And I bet it works. And I bet it makes Google run like the devil to catch up because they're still stuck in yesterday's Web App approach. Well, I don't mind Web Apps and I love the convergence due to the simplification: one solution across all browsers and OSs and platforms. But Jobs has this right due to the explosion of devices: phones, tvs, tablets, netbooks, desktops, laptops, servers etc. Its just too hard to have a single web interface across them all. So the race is on: Will Web Apps win, or will Apps win. I'm betting on the latter, and on iCloud to do the best job of implementing them. Final point: this is definitely going to up the ante to get security right. And I'm betting Apple is hot on that, probably some sort of key-pair approach that is made easier by King Jobs and his court. Let the fun begin. I'm glad I now at least have a map! -- Owen Philosophical note: The WWDC Apple keynote by Jobs made a good point. The trend away from browser interfaces to Apps. This is not a biggie for us, but Google's in a tight corner now. Most vanilla computer users will want an App for every Google service. Jobs' comment that raw data in file hierarchies is too weird for the general user. I thought that odd until I spoke with a few educators who say their students despise looking around for where their files are and launching the right app for them. Hard to believe. But Google really is in a tough place with the new iCloud. I was at a talk with all of Apple engineering in the early '80s where Negroponte, discussing Mac color displays will have to be twice as good as PCs due to being late to the party. Well, Jobs listened and spent LOTS of engineering time on getting color right across computers and printers. He's going to do it right this time with iCloud. Us old farts will hang on to our splintered unorganized world till the End Of Time. The rest of the world is passing us by. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
