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Comment by TelmoMenezes | Hacker News Reader

Ok, but there is no reason per se why Photoshop.app or Garage Band could not be easily connectable to other stuff through programming. We could have the best of both worlds if it were not for social/business issues.

The disgusting thing is that we seem to be moving in the opposite direction -- more walled gardens, more dumbing down of the interfaces for its own sake, more incidental complexity on the development tools side for its own sake.

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I absolutely agree with this point. I think there might be incredible potential in just getting the different existing tools playing nicer together. When I was working in gaming I was blown away that the native formats the game engines used were the same as the 3d graphics tools. It was great, a modeler would make nodes and animations in his world, and I'd have access to them in mine -- we were speaking the same language but each of us interoperating with our specific piece the way we wanted to. Compare this to "2D" programming where there is often incredible friction going from PhotoShop to what we use. Exporting to the right format, slicing, (dealing with different resolutions). Everyone wants to somehow magically take the PSD file and just use it as their UI (and many companies have been trying to do this admittedly), its the dream.

I'm no android fanboy (I find their development environment heavy and full of boilerplate) but I would like to see their intent/activity model replicated elsewhere. Using an android phone or tablet, you really see app symbiosis (a task may be fulfilled by many applications, dispatch happens at runtime and is user-driven)

There is a reason why Photoshop and Garage Band are not easily connectable to other stuff through programming. Writing useful flexible APIs is incredibly hard work.

And, as it turns out, Photoshop is scriptable and has a plug-in API.

Totally disagree. We're moving in the direction of publicly-available APIs, standards-driven development, open-source development tools, and a wider variety of interfaces.

The old Amiga from 1985 actually worked like this. Everything was scriptable in Rexx, you could wire apps together anyway you liked.

To me the antithesis to this line of thought is a scene from Star Trek Next Gen where Geordi is on the holodeck and instructs the computer to create a table, then goes thru a few iterations (4?) before he gets something similar to what he wanted. Did he say actually say "that'll do"? I don't recall. Makes me think there are unintended consequences here.

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