Top 10 Personal Technology Influences – #2 Cross-platform Applications

 

Welcome back.  This is the second in a 10-part series of articles discussing specific technologies that affect my life every day, that make my life easier and more connected to the world around me. In my last post (Technology Influence #1: Cloud Data & Dropbox), I discussed how cloud data and Dropbox, in particular, are enabling greater focus on actual content and less on the administration of the content's location. We can have our information with us, irrespective of where we are located or what hardware we are using, without spending countless hours managing copies, synching up changes, and without carrying various forms of physical media.

Today we look at the second technology influence that shapes my life in 2013.

Technology Influence #2: Cross-platform Applications

Cross-platforms applications, or the ability to use an application on a variety of different devices, are a separate, but closely-related, trend to cloud data. Applications that have native versions that run across my handheld devices, tablet devices, laptop and desktop computing devices are important for consistency of terminology and operations and use a single native data format.

For example, in Evernote, knowing that the primary elements of the application are stacks, notebooks, notes, and tags allows a user to adapt to different user interfaces as dictated by the platform display and input devices without having to relearn the paradigm of how the notes are organized and categorized.

Consistency of terminology and operations are logical benefits. But why is a single native data format so important? After all, lots of applications claim the ability to open and/or write data in other application’s formats. Have you ever tried to write a complexly-formatted Microsoft Word document to an RTF format and then open the generated RTF in an alternate editor? Was it exactly the same as the original Word document? How about opening a native Numbers spreadsheet in Excel? If you have done that you'd be the first. In addition to the more obvious advantage of providing a consistent model for operations you perform within the application, cross-platform applications also typically eliminate many of these data format woes by allowing your application-specific data to be transfered from one device to another without transforming the data.

Here is a list of some of the cross-platform applications I use regularly.

• Evernote: Multi-featured note management application. Runs on Windows, Mac, Web browser, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone;


• Omnifocus: Personal task manager. Runs on Mac, iPhone, iPad;


• Paprika: Recipe manager. Runs on Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android;


• GroceryIQ: Grocery list manager. Runs on Web browser, iPhone, iPad, Android;


• Junecloud Deliveries: Shipment tracker. Runs on browser; Mac (as a dashboard widget); iPhone, iPad;


• 1Password: Password manager. Runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android;


• Reeder: RSS and Atom feed reader. Runs on Mac, iPhone, iPad;

I'm a Mac user so you'll notice that some of the applications listed do not have Windows-native clients. That doesn't mean cross-platform applications are not applicable to Windows applications, only that my personal experience skews Apple. Trust me, I wish I had iPhone-native and iPad-native versions of Word and Excel.

Package cross-platform applications together with cloud data storage and you have a world where capturing, consuming and acting upon your data is relatively seamless. You get to concentrate on the data content, not on moving and transforming the data to any of a variety of different devices or applications through which you will interact with that content.

Next: Influence #3 - MacBook Air.

Previous Posts in the Series

• #1 Cloud Data & Dropbox

Image credit: 123RF Stock Photo