Connections

Computers will integrate with your life, much more that we can imagine. Now they are, let us say, a little connected. Mainly what really happens is that the applications installed in your computer are not very well at talking with each other. In this article we will consider interaction beyond the export to office menu entry we find on a few of them.

If you are Mac user, now you have a new approach called "Automator". You create a "workflow" of things to be done with the output and process of several applications who make use of this technology by adding actions in a list. Let's go to an example of this: imagine you are a news photographer and you want your photos published as soon as posible to your editor: well, you have to import the photos from your digital camera, copy them to a certain internet folder, and send a warning e-mail with the location, along with the report you have to write about the images taken.

With an automation script, you connect your camera to your notebook, double click on the run button on the "Publish To The Daily Planet" task of your Automation window (you have previously programmed this), and you can start preparing the text you think will describe the shots you have captured.

If you have to do the these tasks separately, you have to be alert on the import process, so you don't loose time when it finishes and go to the copy step quickly. It is really painfull to interrupt a thinking process to attend a copy-to operation. If your automation is clever enough, you can copy the files to another location if the first internet server is down, or publish them in a blog.

In a near future, you may be able to send flowers to your loved ones on their birthday, automatically, along with a message sent to you to alert yourself how a good person you are.

Linux users may know this things better as open-source software is good on producing open formatted output, witch integrates with ease, at least for Linux users whom are computers experts, most of them.

But for the vast majority, oh poor Windows users, things are quite fragmented. If your computer has survived the connection to the internet, and you have finally had enough of computer games, now you can do specific tasks and make a little connection between them.

Let us say that you are a musician, you can download a sample a friend has sent you by email, play it in your computer and add some instruments. Then you save the file in your harddrive, sent it back to your friend by email with a copy to another friend who will add the vocals.

You have used two applications that know little of each other, and if you go to see your singer, without your computer and the email has failed by some odd reason, you have to go back to your home and try it again. There is no workflow there. Workflow is like having the band playing together, over the internet.

Everybody know how to use the email, but email really is a poor tool. May be an internet folder, with a chat (or instant messaging software) get us a closer look of what may be a band playing togheter. Tracks are compiled in a folder (FTP, WebDav pr SFTP, you name it) accesible to all members of the band.

This folder has to have an automatic versioning system with the ability to store the history of every modification a file has suffered. May be a CVS or something like that. CVS is a technology software developers have been using for years to do that, precisely. CVS keeps a record of who made those changes, and even has the ability to lock a file to other members of the developing process.

With a stream server, they could "join" to play together like internet gamers do so well, and polish the song to make it sound really good.

These technology concepts are not new, but the building of the process ordinary people need demands an integration between tools and servers that will appear on the horizon as those ideas gets louder.

The feeling of this is like having your digital life all arround you all the time, and you use all the e-gadgets to put things together. Let s make a list: pda, cell phone, camera and music player, they may be a single artifact or not, but they have to have the same contacts list, agenda and have access to the same storage system. Lets go beyond: your credit card (your cell phone account is turning into a payment system), your gps, your wrist watch, and everything you may have with batteries has to work to make your life easier and connected.

We have a long journey to see this things happening for real. Integration means sharing, and sharing is no good for big corps, scary for the one who knows is going to loose something in the trade, and a difficult task for a heart that is not generous. And generosity is on the side of them who generates.