MindsEye - Into the rabbit hole.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

The End of Windows?

I sit here today, thinking about the applications that I use on a daily basis in my Desktop PC, and comparing them to the applications that are now available in todays modern phones and tablet PC's. I have quite a lot of applications installed in my machine, and am an unusually heavy and wide-spread application user.

I will get to the point. Looking through my commonly installed softwares. I find that they tend to fall into a few distinct categories:

* Utilities - Software used in the maintenance and operation of the operating system and hardware itself all manner of tweakers, drive optimizers, task managers etc.

* Profession Specific Software - Software that is used for very specific, mostly professional types of activities such as Video Editing, Audio Processing, Office work, and Business productivity etc.

* Games - Self explanatory

* Network & Internet Tools - Browsers, FTP Clients, Torrent Clients, Instant Messaging Clients etc.

* Media Players - Tools for playing and managing the different types of media one views on a daily basis, MP3 Players, Video Players, Media Streamers etc.

Now the reason most people never migrated to Linux (aside from it being generally ugly and unfriendly), was because it lacked, for a long time, the software titles people were used to on thier PC's such as PhotoShop (yes there's GIMP but its not PhotoShop.). This argument holds water still when it comes to most tablet PC's that aren't Windows based. But thats really not where I am heading with this argument.

What I would like to say, is that the new type of interfacing with your computing devices is moving towards the touch-swipe type tactile hands-on interface that most mobile phones these days now have, and I cant see it going backwards. I don't see the mouse and keyboard as having much of a shelf-life now. That said, yes Microsoft has its Surface (tm) technology, but they are positioning that as Point-of-sale business model tech and not so much end-user tech, and this is where they are poised to miss the boat entirely.

The future is moving toward the multi-touch tablet PC, and I believe that this will replace the common desktop PC for all but the specialized profession uses in the very near future.

A tablet PC running say Android, meets all of the criteria for applications I mentioned earlier, and then some.

It has all the utilities it needs, it has the games, the network apps, the media players etc. and in time as components get smaller and more powerful, it will even have the ability to tap that last bit of the market - the professional level software like Photoshop and 3dStudio etc. and THAT, in my humble opinion, will be the end of Windows and the common home PC as we currently know it.

I think this will happen in the very near future, so MS has thier work cut out for them if they are going to remain competitive in the OS market, but I would dare to say that the competition will have already had such a head start on them that it will be nearly impossible to enter this market then. Already now a windows phone is a joke compared to any half decent Android phone.

Here's hoping for a Windows-less future.

///MindsEye

Related Links and links of interest:

Cristal
Cynergy Systems check thier Maestro project in the link below:
Maestro
Innovation in Interfacing
Microsoft Surface
Example of User driven progress with Android on a Tablet PC

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Indie Game Review - Gnop

This weeks first indie game review is a short and simple, but amazingly clever game called Gnop. What is Gnop? its Pong backwards, of course, and that is exactly what it is. You are the Ball. You have to get your ball past the paddles in a series of interesting side scrolling levels. If you pass a paddle, the ball flows fluidly to the next screen where you are faced with a new set of rules to figure out.

Its definatly worth the 5 minutes it takes to play it, and leaves you wondering why it took nearly 3 decades for someone to come up with it.

My rating for this game is simple: Since the graphics and sound are as minimalistic as its predecessor (the most basic you can possibly get), there isn't much of a scale to use here... I will simple go with: Play it!... and leave it at that. Enjoy!

Play it!