The Future Of Creative Media Applications

I was just reading an intresting blog entry by Grant Skinner. It fits right in with what E has been saying for years about  mass customization.

The next steps for companies like Adobe are to standardize their APIs (not necessarily inter-company, but within their own suite), expand the extensibility and communication models fully, and most importantly to eliminate the deep rooted conception that the interface is a sacrosanct part of the application, and begin looking at it as a component (a very important component, mind) that sits on top of the core application. With these things in place, suddenly there will be a third party market for developing application surfaces on top of these functional cores. It will be possible to build a view for Photoshop that is specifically optimized for the workflow of one market segment, or even a specific company or task. Creative professionals (including programmers), will suddenly be able to build or purchase customized interfaces that better reflect the way they work. Likewise, it will be possible to create "macros" that automate, optimize or enhance workflows within an application or across a variety of tools.

This is the concept of user generated content applied to applications. No longer would these companies be limited to providing just the features that they can build, test, surface in the UI and test within a version cycle. They can focus on what they do best: creating amazing technology, and leave some of the burden of feature development to third party developers. They then have the option to select the cream of the crop and integrate it into the next version of the "default view" for the application. This will provide a more rapid, and semi-democratic feature development process, which seems like a logical extension to the "public beta" model that's arisen in the past few years. Of course, licensing details will be critical, but that's a topic for another post.