In my last posting I discussed personal productivity in some depth, but I never commented in any depth about 2 applications that really shouldn’t exist in their current form, and hopefully wont exist in their current form at some point in the future. They are:
- The browser
email has messed up the productivity of computer users for well over a decade and it really should be fixed. Luckily there is a chance it will be fixed with Unified Communications (see this posting for a discussion of Unified Comms.) We really do need an Interface that caters for the fact that we communicate with others in various ways. We do so via phone, instant message, email, etc. and through collaborative interfaces (such as Webex or DimDim or even Second Life). A sensible application would be one that provided a complete trail of all such communications that could be sorted and grouped by person, project and so on.
We use email to send people files, which would be fine if it were clearly a separate act (rather than just another email) and if such files were managed. Mostly they are not managed (for version) and they are not filed in a general purpose filing system where they could be linked to by multiple applications. I have to maintain file versions manually. It’s not that hard, but it’s not automated and it could be. As an electronic delivery system and document management system, email is a disaster and you have little choice but to live with it, unless you are a big company and can spend on document management.
I use Google’s Gmail as by email back-up system. Every email I receive that is not classified as junk, I auto-forward to Gmail so that I have a complete archive of all files that costs nothing (thanks Google.) This means that I can delete local emails and their attachments with impunity, but I do that only once a year. If I want to keep an attachment I drop it into my file store when I first read the email. All of which is fine, because it works, but why do I have to bother with all this, when it could be automated – and we could add in voice messages and instant messages and all mobile phone traffic.
I could rant a little more about all this, but I think I’ve made my point.
The Browser
This application shouldn’t exist in its current form. Admittedly it’s better than it used to be, when Microsoft won the browser war and let IE atrophy. But it’s not the functionality I’m complaining about here – I salute those who enhance browser products with useful functionality. The problem is that the browser shouldn’t really exist at all in its current form.
Apple got this right with iTunes and I think that the success of iTunes owes a lot to this. When you visit the iTunes Store in iTunes you see an iTunes display that just happens to be served from the web. You’re not in a browser and you can’t navigate to another site. Your application is served from the web.
There are many other applications that should run like that. Google’s Gmail and Google Docs should run like that, as should all the applications on Zoho. In fact, let’s be precise about this, the Mac or PC desktop is the workspace. By making the browser become a workspace, which is what happened, you end up with a workspace within a workspace and that’s just plain peanut brain.
It gets worse. The browser has effectively constrained web site design so that it presumes a browser and hence it has stuck with being a set of linked pages. In most products, when you invoke help which happens to be Internet-based, you get Internet pages, rather than a help subsystem that happens to be fed from the web. That’s the point here. The connection between an application and the web should be seamless instead of browser based.
Admittedly, and hopefully, this is changing with AJAX, Adobe Air, SilverLight, etc. But right now few people are thinking in the right direction. The whole point is that the browser should be an application that is mostly invisible. Some screen space needs to be given up to searching and bookmark libraries, for the sake of surfing, but that’s about it.
As I’m writing a series here about productivity, I will, in future postings, devote some time to how to be productive with the browser and email on the Mac.
Click on this link: PDQ Mac to see a list of other postings on Apple Mac productivity.
Once I can afford it, I’m seriously considering turning my XP Pro desktop PC into a Terminal Services server and getting an Asus Eee PC as a client for it. I’d put rdesktop on the Eee PC and use it mainly as a wireless client machine to run XP apps remotely.
Couldn’t agree more about email… although I think the task of unifying communications is a rather ambitious one. In any case, I wanted to let you know that the html5 specification has a whole section dedicated to Offline Web Applications (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/offline.html#offline ) and that Safari, Firefox & Opera have committed to implementing html5. This means that in a few years time we will be seeing completely stand-alone apps that you initially install from a website, but after which they run from your desktop, communicating to the web as needed. I saw some very interesting work towards this goal by Apple at this years WWDC.
Many thanks for this input.
it would be better with other languages support, but thanks..
this is very very intresting I use I tunes and never quite relised how good it was till you pointed it out. intresting read
i tunes is definitely the way forward for everything!