When Apple announced sales of over 1.5 billion applications including over 65,000 available in the first year of the ‘App Store‘, I’m certain that even they were surprised with the scale of its success. This is pretty solid evidence that at least iPhone users have an appetite for not only consumable digital media like music, video and games, but also for adding new features to their existing device. The Apps Store is a rather incredible library to browse, featuring everything from word processors, spreadsheets, expenses calculators, calorie counters, motivational tools, photo editors, vector drawing tools, real-time train updates, instant messengers, twitter and facebooking integration, lad’s magazine readers, e-book readers… just a seemingly infinite scope of tools and resources! As a single concept the App Store has turned a humble telephone into one of the most important inventions of the last decade.
Personally I am also an ardent lover of Apple’s Safari browser on both Windows and Mac platform, of which at least favoring Win Safari is quite a rarity. This is almost exclusively due to Safari’s clearly superior font rendering capability, hugely improving readability and the visual pleasure the browsing experience. But in a recent conversation with a colleague about our browser preferences we agreed that Firefox had a clear advantage over most for having incorporated ‘Add-ons’ for some years now. At the time of writing, Mozilla have achieved over 1.6 billion downloads for Firefox Add-ons! Win Safari has finally adopted a similar system of Plugins, which has opened the browser up to a similar level of development opportunity – something that I hope will put it on the map within the Windows environment for the future.
Online, WordPress is my blog and CMS tool of choice 9 times out of 10. Putting aside the native advantages of the tool (simple install, small footprint, super-simple control panel, beautiful admin interface, off the shelf SEO optimisation…) this is really something that’s dominated by it’s ‘Plugins’ library too. I standardly run about 10 Plugins on almost all of my installs to improve Search Engine Optimisation, add managed form elements, cut out comment spam, dynamically generate XML site-maps, integrate RSS feeds, display real-time statistics and more. And for all of that, WordPress is leagues ahead.
ex-ten-si-ble [ik-sten-suh-buhl] (adjective)
- Capable of being extended.
It’s the simple concept of building extensibility into an application or a device that quite clearly enables users to pick and choose what they want to run on it. At the end of the day with 65,000 application choices for my iPhone, I can turn the thing into whatever I want, and to an extent I have. It’s part of my everyday life and I really do rely on it for quite a lot – that’s fantastic for me, because for my monthly contract I’m getting some really heavy use across a lot of different aspects in my life – from organisation and efficiency to learning and entertainment, and that means real value for money.
Quite clearly Apple, Mozilla and WordPress have all fostered their respective app, add-on and plugin developers in order to generate such wealthy libraries. I’m sure these things don’t just pop up overnight. It does seem to be an inherent part of certain internet communities currently, that a team ethic amongst developers and amateur tinkerers seems to crop up all over the place with an inherently positive outlook and willingness to help those in need of support (there are forums upon forums of people happy to support WordPress installs out there) and to slowly but surely improve the resources we each have available, whether it’s for an open-source end (Firefox, WordPress) or a commercial end (Apple).
I just really can’t wait to see what’s going to come up for each of these tools over the next couple of years.
