2015 technology wishlist

The start of the year is a good time to be thinking about the end of the year and the kind of world I would like to see. Usually this leads to resolutions and predictions. Unfortunately I find most predictions worthless since the pundits seldom go back to check on their previous predictions. The other problem is that people start out making predictions and then the articles turn into wishlists. That's why this year I'm just going to write a wishlist.

I'd like to see:

• more viable identity providers.
• more social environments that understand the benefits of Reed's Law and ridiculously easy group-forming.
• Wikipedia starting to use identity technology to improve the user experience. For example if I donate or become a member then I'd like to stop seeing obnoxious adverts (and they really are adverts) asking for money. The Guardian's membership programme is a good model that Wikipedia should adopt.
• a viable successor to the Leica M9. The Leica M Type 240 just isn't a big enough improvement.
• a viable replacement for Aperture. I have zero faith in the upcoming Apple Photos app and there isn't enough official  support for migrating from Aperture to Lightroom.
• a viable replacement for the old Mac Pro. The new Mac Pro abandons all of the strengths of the old Mac Pro.
• more mujicomp and less ryanaircomp.
• fewer people bemoaning the web we lost and more people asking new questions about the world we actually live in where everything gets touched by the network.
• more device-native apps. I'd like to see more apps that are designed to really exploit the capabilities of our current generation of interconnected mobile devices.
• more apps that provide multi-device workflows
• more experience reports about the issues involved in building backend services that support multiple native mobile and web apps.
• the Software Craftsmanship community changing its focus from converting new people to helping each other learn and grow.
• less hype/advocacy for microservices and more documentation/descriptions of techniques that work with collections of small services. You'll be able to tell if you're seeing hype by the number of awkward questions that they raise.

The screens in our future

Through historical accident, television has come to be seen as the first screen with our mobile devices as the second screen. This implies a mental model that's usually driven by television people who really mean that television is the primary screen whilst all others are merely secondary screens. When these devices are viewed from the perspective of the programme makers that is correct. But things change if we look at them from the perspective of the user.

The first screen is the one in your pocket. All others are secondary.
— Adewale Oshineye (@ade_oshineye) May 26, 2013

When we look at usage it becomes clear that mobile devices (currently just phones and tablets) are the primary screen whilst television and desktop computers are the secondary screens.

Mobile is my screen.
Tablet is our screen.
TV is their screen.

-- Simon Davies and Ade Oshineye

The above quote is a synthesis of points made by Simon Davies and Ade Oshineye during an Internet Week panel discussion. They reflect a way of looking at screens/devices that may have surprising amounts of explanatory power.

The mobile (phone) screen is the most personal screen. It tends to belong to one person who carries it everywhere and seldom shares it. That person will customise it with a combination of apps and bookmarks that's practically a fingerprint. 

The tablet is large enough to be viewed by multiple people and is often shared within a family. As such it accumulates layers of choices from all the people who have used it. However it still tends to feel like a device that belongs to a small set of people. Whilst both of these devices empower people by giving them control over usage and content, the television is different. 

Whilst it may belong to one or many you're never allowed to forget that the content on your television is decided by other people. They decide what you can watch and when you can watch it. As for customisation…forget it.

The final step is to realise that we shouldn't be thinking about a fixed number of screens. We're facing a multi-screen future. That means there are going to be N categories of M screens in your life. And the values of N and M will only increase over time.

This is not a problem we will solve by building responsive websites with a fixed number of breakpoints. This is not a even problem we will solve by pouring the same content into a fixed number of buckets or screen sizes.

This is a Cambrian Explosion of contexts, interactions between contexts and user journeys across contexts. Time to adapt.