Future of Desktop Apps?

Type Managers. Who knew iLife Suite (minus gB) had a category besides "cool". Type Manager are like file managers for a particular type or types of files plus the grouping of tasks usually associated with that type.

The beauty of Type Managers is the bundle. The authors describes heavilly manual process that he would use to get MP3 files on to his MP3 player. You need rip the cd, maybe convert formats, populate ID3 tags from CDDB, organize you files in to your home made files stucture, then move the files to you MP3 player.

Of course this process has improved through the years, but not until iTunes came along did all of those functions come under one roof. iTunes will take care of your digital music experience from beginning to end, automatically ripping, coverting, tagging, organizing and copying your music to your player.

And the most amazing part, no one missed the control they once had over the files. Who really cares how many folders you'd have to go thought to get to the music, iTunes has it all for you in a sortable and searchable set. Folks who have moved from "all in a folder" to "genre/artist/album" folks are happy to let iTunes deal with the mess.

So where does this take us? The conqured realm is music and photos. How about movies and vidoes? Word/Excel/PDF managers? There is a fine line between managers and creators (Photoshop, Word, etc), but the key is to find the post-creation management needed to make everyones life easier. Render the file system invisible, you can find files by manager or by new and improved searches.

Well what do you think? Check out the original story and leave a comment.

Type Manager: "iTunes lets you do everything related to music files in a interface perfect for managing music files. If you tried to use iTunes interface for managing your photos you would be laughed at because it just wouldn't work. If you have Linux you can of use digiKam, another Type Manager, made for photos of course."

posted by Dan Flies @ 11/16/2005 12:44:00 PM