I woke up this morning and thought that I really needed to experiment with MT4, and here I am. But after reading the FAQ quickly, I said: just jump in. After a few minutes, I said: wow, my desktop is certainly different than it was in January 2007. Notable changes are probably familiar to lots of other Penn Staters.
- Vista
- Office 2007
- Some quick glimpses of ANGEL 7.2
- CS3
I forgot to mention that I took an Access 2007 last week, so I'm almost dangerous in that space, too.
I'm musing about the technologies that I'm using daily, but as ITS pursue its strategic planning effort, I wonder what our desktops will look like in 2014. What will be the common elements for faculty (both in teaching and research roles)? staff? students? How accurate will the technology and social predictions be?
Last week's news? Microsoft and Yahoo. The more interesting news -- much less public -- is what is happening in the inCommon space. I'd encourage everyone interested in IT to see what unfolds in that space. It's far more interesting than the division of advertising income among the large search engine companies.
It is an interesting question ... what will our desktops look like in 2014? Based on how I am using cloud resources more and more I am going to guess that pervasive access to virtual disks is going to rule the day. I am loving Firefox with Google Gears so I can work on documents offline and have them autosync back ... I am using Evernote for almost all my notetaking these days. The client works with the online service to keep my laptop, the web version, and the iPhone application seamlessly aligned. My google reader takes advantage of gears so I am able to read feeds on a plane if I want. Flickr is a much more organized version of my iPhoto library ... and so on.
I still think there will be room for local applications and storing data locally, but I do think we'll be interacting with it differently. I am not convinced that the desktop will become a very different place. For some reason the metaphor works for people. Mouse or touch pad driven interfaces with menus just seem to work. The iPhone UI is wonderful, but also very limiting when you consider the affordances of the traditional desktop UI. Copy and paste is so far impossible -- that is a killer. Navigation is limited, but there are things it does really well -- scaling images, rotating screen, and other finger stroke driven actions are revolutionary. Time will tell.
With all that said, I think the killer apps in the next 5 years or so will be based around social activities that bring people together. I think we'll see a stunning change in peoples' attitudes related to the power on the web. We are just beginning to understand how to connect and share in an appropriate and productive way. The next 5 years we'll see collaboration and communication shift from sending emails, to simply being aware of document changes, status updates, and location based opportunities. It is an exciting time to be a part of it all!
As a quick follow up ... check this video from Mozilla Labs out