Applications are like isolated cities, each with its own customs and infrastructure.

Both applications and isolated cities have a lot of needless redundancy. Cities have an excuse: they’re in physically different places and are forced to duplicate a lot of things. Applications don’t have such an excuse—they all share the same hard drive, processor, memory, and operating system. Yet despite such proximity, for the end-user, applications don’t actually have that much in common with one another.

For example, both Microsoft Word and Macromedia Fireworks have spell check, but they work in different ways and include separate dictionaries. On my computer, I counted 7 separate implementations of spell check—all of which work slightly differently—with 7 different lists of every word in English. No wonder I have to upgrade my computer as often as I take out the trash*.
(more…)