Re: A few ideas for developers (Re: My current set)

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3961

Posted by sub
2005-08-27 02:26:55

[Continued from
http://www.outliners.com/discuss/msgReader$3953?mode=day ]

What am I getting to here? I am not quite sure where it all leads, but my idea is that connectivity of the “building blocks”, i.e. the separate modules making up our various applications, is as important as the applications themselves.

Original software “suites” were little more than collections of separate applications; integration came much later and in the beginning it was little more than a common launcher / menu. Think Norton Utilities, the early office programs, etc. A notable exception was Ashton-Tate’s Framework.

Where integration started to happen this was often a bundle of applications popularised in the same market, i.e. office environments, like word processors, spreadsheets and databases. In other cases it was a software porting of an existing tool, i.e. the filofax-like Lotus Organizer.

However, whichever way one looks at it, the PC represents a completely new platform compared to the office desktop; software vendors persistence, for marketing reasons, to long-gone metaphors, does not facilitate effective utilisation of currently available resources. E-mail is much more than an electronic version of mail, just as the QE2 was much more than a really big boat.

Information management innovation and effectiveness flourish when developers think “outside the box”. Brainstorm, for example, is an innovative and effective tool discussed here, that transcends the folder paradigm while still nurturing structure. Zoot offers an extensive range of tools that, in themselves may not be really innovative, but the whole seems to be the multiplication of its parts, rather than the sum of them!

[to be continued, probably]

alx

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