Friday, 1 December 2006
Could User generated pipelines be the Excel macros of the internet age?
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I've listened to this podcast quite a few times now and theres a bit I've cut out and posted up on Blip because IT Conversations doesn't have the clip feature any more.
So generally there talking about the fact that Open source is full of developers who can actually build things. This is frustrating for others if you buy into the concept of OSS2 (open source society), where open source software is just one aspect of a much larger landscape. Human ordinated services like Ning.com, Flickr.com and Ebay.com, bring complex programming tasks to a much wider audience. Ning.com is a great example because it allows you to simply look at what someone else has done, copy it and modify it. But still Ning is still too programmer centric for there liking. Then someone talks about Excel Macros and how you didn't need to be a programmer or programmer minded to create Excel Macros. They could have been the first step over the programming interface problem for a lot of people.
Bingo! Excel macros are quick and easy to create and they were sharable with friends and workmates. You could learn more about the language behind the macros called VBA if you liked and a lot of people did. I know lots of programmers who hated VBA, some of them would go as far as to call it VB for girls even (which is actually a pretty bad and sad comment). But the fact is that it helped people get what they wanted to achive done, and you can't laugh at that.
I've mentioned Apple's Automator which is simply a macro for applescript. And to be fair they are kind of simular if you discount the fact Excel Macros only lived in the walled garden of Excel and the Office suite. Maybe that was the problem with them generally. But It certainly interesting and makes me think the answer to my question is yes, or at least user generated pipelines (Xproc or whatever) need some macro application and need to be at least as sharable as Macros in Excel. Otherwise we got no chance of non-programmers using them.
