Hi Folks,
I enjoyed your thoughts about emerging tools. After reading through your posts, I got to thinking … what is new?
What do you think the next generation of tools will look like? How will their underlying functionality be improved? As I mentioned in a response to Nicholas, Usenet is almost 30 years old now…and Reddit is a great updated version. But functionally, it hasn’t changed much in terms of capacity.
What is new? What is the future? Will learning change? How might it be different?
The next generation of tools will be content users creating tools from buildable and scriptable templates! We’re already getting close to that. Weebly is the logical evolution of Dreamweaver. Less power but more focus on the drag and drop functionality. I have Tasker on my phone and it’s changed the way I use my Android. I think tools in the future will be fewer and farther between, but with a wide list of possibilities that can be created from a small number of tools.
Hi Nicholas,
Interesting ideas. Fewer tools that give the user more customizable control?
There’s been such an enormous proliferation of tools in the past decade, it is hard to imagine the trend reversing, but maybe? It seems like the market might continue to diversify to meet niche nuances also? For instance, Weebly is one step in the evolution of Dreamweaver, but so is WordPress and Google Sites and a zillion other tools/services/sites?
What is Tasker, and what does it do for you? (what do you do with it?)
Tasker is this program that you can download onto your Android and set it to script certain events for you. It’s sort of a stepping stone for people like me who like complex Android functions without having to design your own Apps / ROMs and without having to get into some of the nitty gritty stuff that could ruin your phone.
Basically, it allows you to automate things. I use mine to do a lot of things: automatically silence my phone if it senses that it’s face down, speak calendar notifications out loud, put my phone in airplane mode automatically during certain hours of the night, turn on and connect bluetooth automatically with NFC, translate certain words and read them aloud in English, and force disabling auto-rotate in YouTube but keeping it on in other apps, auto adjust brightness at certain times, etc. A friend of mine uses it to auto-execute certain touch placements in apps when his phone is on at night and he mines bitcoins that way! He also uses it to replicate an old radio alarm clock so that when his alarm goes off it reads headlines to him in the morning.
It really turns your phone into much more of a personal device than just a home for apps. I imagine as tools like that become easier to use, the options for tools in the future will become more powerful and intuitive.
That sounds great!
It doesn’t appear there is something equivalent in iOS. For the first time this fall, I used ITTT to send me a notice each time a comment or post is submitted to this blog. I was notified of this comment, for instance. It has been very helpful – but not near as powerful as Tasker apparently is.