| Mar312009 | Three Devices |
There are three (3) major devices that I use:
- Personal laptop (an old 15″ MacBook Pro)
- Work computer (dual monitor Dell machine, running the Windows 7 Beta)
- iPhone 3G
I have illustrated this with a professional-looking Venn diagram. You can see the kind of data that I need access to on each of the devices.
I want to say I use each of these computers for very different things but it’s not really true. It’s mostly checking email and dicking about on websites. I attribute three factors that allowed me to justify going multi-device: 1) Web 2.0, 2) Wider adoption of Macs, especially amongst developers and 3) iPhone developer gold rush.
Web 2.0 is a horrible buzzword that has sadly slipped into my vocabulary. I basically mean websites that function like applications do. Things like Gmail, Flickr and Google Reader do the things that desktop apps used to do and they have the added benefit of being accessible from any computer in the world with an internet connection. These days, the website version comes first and then the desktop apps follow later.
Adoption of Macs among developers is probably a catalyst to the whole Web 2.0 thing. Before, Mac users and Windows users suffered a lot of segregation. They each lived in their own universe of applications and file formats and getting them to talk and share with each other was about as frowned upon as interracial marriage. Nowadays, everybody uses the same frigging websites and they work fine in any major browser. While it’s still hard to introduce a Mac into an old corporate environment with lots of legacy, Windows-only cruft, you’ve got a much higher standard of features, interoperability and compatibility.
iPhone developer gold rush has inspired a lot of big wins for the consumer. Mobile internet only a short while ago was a barren desert going through long periods of drought. Quality was low and applications were either written by hobbyists or the lowest bidder that your phone provider could find. The iTunes App Store has proven quite notably that there is money to be made and customers to be won; Apple solved the chicken and egg problem by building an incredible hype machine and selling a jillion phones. Hence, the gold rush. There’s actually a bit of Wild West mentality in the App Store, it’s more of a bazaar where people are churning out all kinds of trivial apps to cash in on all these trigger-happy customers before the App Fatigue (or the economic recession) sets in.
I like all this data convergence that’s going on. It means I can move between devices without losing access to my data and, more importantly, it means I could move away from devices.
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