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I've been saying for ages that our approach to personal computing is wrong. Everything is focused on apps nowadays. You need an app for accessing the camera, you need an app to access Snapchat, et cetera. On the other hand, what if our personal computing - let it be on your phone, on your laptop, or on your NAS - was about DATA POINTS? Everything on your device, including hardware like the camera, GPS, etc., becomes a data point that "apps" attach to. Slap some ML-based contextual recommendations to it, and you've increased productivity a lot. For an average person this means opening the camera loads details like Snapchat, but for a professional photographer, it shows the "Pro" things by default. Open an MP3/WAV/[insert other audio format] file, for an average person, this offers playback options, for a sound engineer, it offers analysis tools, detailed editing/post-processing utilities, filters, you name it. Then you can expand it by customising the launch interfaces. On a smartphone, you'd most likely want easy access to relevant information based on e.g. location (say, at home you'd get smarthome controls on your home screen, at the office you'd get your work email and related services, on the go you'd be getting relevant public transport/traffic information, at an airport, it would automatically pull up your boarding pass, at a Tesco, your ClubCard bar/QR code, and so on). Of course this would require a major paradigm shift in computing, which would have major pushback from people - most people don't like big changes, especially in things they use everyday. Hell, I can't even get my parents to change smartphone brands, because they're used to how things are on their old crappy Chinese phones, and apparently, Samsung's or Apple's "menus are confusing and things aren't in the places they used to be". |