A new way of looking at data

More and more people increasingly use multiple computers - an office machine, a home machine, a blackberry, and a laptop - and they find the need to juggle data between all three. I’ve maintained for a while that the biggest unsolved problem in computing right now is synchronization, but this post is about something else.

A lot of companies are starting to realize that it’s a good idea to ease up on the crazy proprietary storage schemes and walled gardens. Microsoft has (kind of) opened up .docx, XML is taking off in a big way, and any web app worth its salt has to have some kind of API.

I’d like to take a look at three really cool things that are pushing this envelope one step further - through what I call the why-didnt-i-think-of-that approach.

1) Markdown

John Gruber’s amazing markup language (basically - the stuff that tells your screen what gets bolded, underlined, and linked) is designed to make sense even if it isn’t properly formated. This really takes a demonstration to explain, so here goes:

Want to underline something? Just type _underlined text_ Want to add a bullet point? Type * this is a bullet point

Looking at a non-formated Markdown document, you can tell exactly what its supposed to look like; which makes it really, really easy and portable.

2) TaskPaper

This application takes the concepts pioneered by Markdown and applies it to a much neater format. In short, Taskpaper a pretty powerful to-do application. The twist is that it uses regular .txt files to store data. If you want to tag something, you just add a @tag to the end of the to-do. Once you finish a task, simply type @done, and Taskpaper crosses it out. This means that lists can not only be read outside of the application, they can be created and edited as well

3) Apple Mail

New to Leopard is the ability to track notes and to-dos inside Mail. The twist is that (you guessed it) instead of storing these files as some kind of unreadable file, Mail stores the data as standard email. Combine this with gmail’s advanced filtering and you can not only easily store and read your notes & to-dos from a web browser, but you can have gmail perform specific actions on them. Say you want to forward a copy of all your to-dos to your secretary - just have Gmail automatically forward any messages matching that value. They’ll even show up on her copy of Mail, because the app will automatically download them into her lists.

All three of these apps share one thing in particular - an open-ness that goes beyond an easier to adopt file format. They’ve all realized that a good old .txt file still holds an immense amount of power, even in this day and age.