Hi, I am Robert Gri, product manager. Today I’m preparing presentation slides. I took a bunch of photos, and they all went into some directory. Lucky me they are all JPEGs, because it’s a format that my presentation editor understands. I created slides, imported and arranged images.
Then I spotted that one image needs to be color-adjusted. Unfortunately, my presentation editor cannot adjust image colors the way I wanted. So I took another application that can edit pictures.
It turns out that my slides app cannot export images to files in a way to open it in other programs. Lucky me (again), I haven’t deleted the original photo file, so I opened it in the photo editor, tweaked it and re-imported it to the slide editor.
Let’s count how many needed actions it took:
- scan the images
- locate their folder
- check the image formats
- import images into the slides program
- arrange the images on the slide surface
- locate and launch the image editor
- reopen image files
- tweak colors
- save images back to the files checking for appropriate image format
- re-import images into slides, replacing the originals
Only three out of ten actions listed above are actually useful actions. Other seven ones – are the tax we pay for the fact that my operating system uses files and applications.
How the above scenario could look like if we used more advanced approach:
- While the presentation slide is open, I scan/took pictures and they immediately appear on the slide surface. No file names, no image formats, just image objects directly appearing where they needed.
- I arrange images at will
- I select an image and adjust its colors without switching applications, without saving-loading, importing-exporting, etc.
This is how I expect my computer to work in the 21st century. And this is not how it works now.
Something needs to be changed.