The cloud is here. Cloud computing, that is. The term is not self-explanatory, but what it essentially means is that more and more of the tasks we could perform only on hard disk-installed applications (apps) are now doable on the Web.
Whether you want to type and format a document, do a bit of number-crunching on a spreadsheet, or view PDF files, Web-based apps from Zoho, Google, or Scribd, among others, would often suffice. In the old days, as in the 1990s until the early 2000s, such tasks were mostly the preserve of applications installed on the hard disk, with Microsoft’s Office suite enjoying, or having enjoyed, a nearly dominant position in that domain.
| Why Pay for an App? The shift from the hard-disk apps to those of the Cloud (the Web-based ones) has not been a complete one, though. And will probably never be. This is not only about applications that demand intensive computing power such as photo or video editing. Some reticence about floating into the cloud has actually come from the domain of text. That should be at least a bit surprising. After all, it's almost conventional wisdom now that text has been the most malleable as to its rendering into the digital format, as opposed to, say, images or audio. Because of that, nearly all of humanity's written texts are now being converted eagerly into their digital versions— everything from ancient scriptures to contemporary court records. One illustration of this great words-to-bits phenomenon is the rise of search engines. Cheap to "digitize" and store, text made itself fairly easily available for the tireless "crawlers", or search engine algorithm, to mine, index, and present in useful ways. The surprise, therefore, is that some text-focused apps, such as Devonthink, Scrivener and Together, all of which are hard-disk-only apps, are doing rather well commercially.* This raises the question: why would anyone, in this day and age, pay for an app that captures, manipulates, or stores text? To begin answering this question, we need to know what the apps just mentioned actually do. Devonthink is a multi-purpose app that can capture and index text documents, PDF files, and Web pages or even full sites. What's unique about it is that it uses artificial intelligence in a manner that boosts the utility of the text you have on your hard disk. For example, because Devonthink indexes all the files imported to its "databases", whenever you view a document it "suggests" other files that have a similar congregation of keywords, leading to sometimes surprising connections between seemingly divergent topics or files. Together (formerly Keep It Together), is another information organization app. It effortlessly captures text in its various formats, whether from a Web page or a PDF file hosted on your computer, and keeps them in easily navigable groups. And as the app’s name suggests, it can bring together different formats, of audio, video, text, and images. In addition it has a good-enough word processor. One of my favorite features: one can immediately edit (in rich-text format) all the web pages (or more accurately, Web archives) one grabs. Apps that offer more or less the same features include Yojimbo, EagleFiler, and Journler. Scrivener is a writing app that is especially helpful for those who want to do more writing than text-formatting. Instead of the clutter of text-formatting tools (as in Microsoft's Word or OpenOffice.org's Writer), Scrivener offers a clean interface geared toward better access to multiple files (simultaneously), as well as bringing all the "research" files, of different formats, that one may use in the course of writing in one place. Of the apps that offer similar capabilities is Ulysses. Information Butlers Considered each on its own, the features listed above (with the possible exception of Devonthink’s artificial intelligence) are hardly novel nor uncommon. Many of these are offered, free of charge, by Web-based services. But what seems to make these apps unique nonetheless are three things. First, they bring together a whole host of relevant features that one could only get otherwise by going to multiple Web destinations. For instance, one can bookmark and annotate Web pages through the excellent and free-of-charge services by Diigo or Google Notebook. Yet, if the page you've bookmarked is removed, your work is gone. By contrast, on Together one can capture the whole page and store it on hard disk, and edit and annotate with no risk of data loss, unless the hard-disk crashes of course. In addition to annotating, one can compose text and view other formats, all from within the single accommodating window of Together. Second, it could be standard to get one or two gigabytes of free online storage through services like Mozy, Box.net and DropBox, but that is no longer enough for most users. And that is not only for music fanatics. Individuals who want to maintain large libraries of text and wish to add to them over time will eventually run out of space. For those, hard-disk storage remains a more attractive option, especially if you couple that with the other conveniences that apps like Together or Scrivener offer. Finally, these apps appear to respond to our increasing demands with respect to information. As we get more and more on our information "plates", information "butlers" become indispensable. This is indeed what these apps are. They help us make better sense of the loads of information we have by making it easier to view the different incarnations of information in their larger perspective, and often within the boundaries of one window. So far the Web browser has not been able to match that. Inescapable here is the fact that all the above-mentioned apps are Mac OS-only. They don't work with Windows or Linx computers, only Apple's. Why this is the case is not easy to tell — but the outcome of the trend is. More users, lured by those apps, will consider Apple's computers, rather than the cheaper) alternatives. The apparently inevitable and irrevocable shift to the cloud is, therefore, probably not going to happen anytime soon. Web-based apps have afforded us many convenient and (at times infinitely) cheap services. This meant rough times for operating systems. After all, if all we need to get our work done is a Web browser, who would pay for (or bother about) an operating system? But what is on offer so far seems insufficient. Text, it turned out, loves context. And the apps that are most successful at meeting that demand have been the old-style hard-disk ones. That should come as good news for those who develop operating systems. Operating systems are not doomed to become a "commodity" if they can attract apps that surpass what the Web browser window can do. | |||
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