A Thought on Environments: Portability

My friend asked me yesterday what I thought of the Kindle. My response was that I was a fan of actually holding a book, feeling the paper, reading in a full fidelity mode. I spoke of how tired my eyes could become from reading on a screen all day. I made a decent case for not adopting the Kindle.

Then, on a whim, I checked out the Kindle app for the iPhone and immediately found myself sucked in.

The first thing that did it was the free availability of a book that we have all been discussing here at the office, Bertrand Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy". Turns out that it is a "classic" and Amazon offers many of the classics for free. I have now downloaded 10 free classics for my iPhone Kindle app and am well on my way to finding book reading Nirvana.

Free content put the hook in my mouth, but what set it was the concept of WhisperSync. WhisperSync is a service that Amazon offers which will sync your content between devices. Now, this is not just the raw content, this is the detailed content, the state content.

For instance, let's say that I am on page 50 of "The Problems of Philosophy" on my iPhone. Further, let us say that I have a Kindle at home on which I do the bulk of my reading. As I read on the iPhone, the Kindle app updates the state for that book. When I get home and fire up my (physical) Kindle my place in the book comes right up (in computer terms, the state is restored). No futzing around with finding my place, everything is just magically the same.

This got me thinking about the synchronicity of environments. In our research the environment you work in is of paramount importance. That environment can be unique to you, or you can share it with others. Everyone can have their own, if necessary. The environment is at least partially reflected in software.

One thing Dr. Sousa-Poza and I talk about a lot is the ability to "save" environments. Environments should be transportable and shareable. If you need to see what I see then you should be able to load up a copy of my environment, see things just as I see them with the data I've been using. What's more, your environment should be able to subsume my environment! Environments should be nestable yet discrete.

WhisperSync brings an interesting possibility to my mind. Shouldn't the environmental changes that I enact on one device translate to another device? What if I access my environment from my iPhone and then switch to my laptop or a web browser? Shouldn't the environment be exactly the same?

This necessitates two things: A place of storage (centralized or decentralized, makes no difference) that all environments have in common and the ability to capture state.

Ideally, the system would operate like this (from the 10,000 foot view):

1. I access my environment and make some change to its state.
   
2. That change is transmitted to the "server" which keeps track of environment state. ("server" is in quotations as a means to capture an idea. It need not be an actual server. It might be better to think of it as a state oracle)
   
3. I switch to a different device.
   
4. As I start up my environment on the new device the state is restored from the "server".
   
5. I continue my work.

Such a system would be truly powerful from a portability standpoint. I could do my work wherever I needed to be and have that work mirrored wherever I go. I could work from multiple devices and not lose a thing.