Creativity can go sky high

Kevin Lynch, the chief technology officer of US-based Adobe, has a mission: transform the creative process across mobile devices, personal computers and the “cloud” (where massive data is stored remotely).
That means you can create work on today’s touch screens, such as iPad and other tablet computers, and then upload to the cloud to share, to inspire and then finish it on PC.
That’s a vision that Lynch presented in his keynote speech at the 2011 Max Conference in Los Angeles earlier this month.
In his opinion, apps (short for applications) on tablet computers can actually compliment the laptop computer or PC.
In a recent survey, about 60 per cent of respondents said they plan to buy tablet computers soon, while about 90 per cent said they want to do creative work on their tablets.
For consumers, this will allow more widespread creative expression, while small and medium-sized businesses will gain from the broadening of their customer base.
There could also be an online creative community in the cloud.
According to Lynch, this is going to be one of the three “techtonic” shifts – client and cloud computing – “where we really have a shift of how people are developing software from being purely on the client, or even just purely on the cloud, to really being a blend of both client and cloud computing working together”.
The second big shift is social computing.
“It’s about how we’re all more profoundly connected to each other via the Internet and how that really changes how we experience software.
“Software is no longer a solo experience. It’s really one where your friends are involved. There’s definitely humanity around you that’s using the software. So how does that change what you do?” he said during the Max keynote address on Ocober 3.
“The third trend is a major shift to a multi-screen world where we’re using not just one big screen to access content. There’s a variety of different screens that need to work together to help people succeed at accessing content over the Internet.
All these shifts are happening at the same time, affecting those who build apps and design the content.
For example, client computing and cloud computing will be combined, so the two have to strike a balance, since the future of computing is to combine processing on a local client and take advantage of a wide variety of different services across the cloud.
In the field of education, these trends will allow kids to interact with the world more freely and creatively, opening up new opportunities for all levels of students.
These trends will also transform the creative process of digital marketing and digital publishing.
For example, social analytics can be used to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing involving social media like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the likes as people can now browse the Web with their mobile devices while watching TV.
This allows them to link with social media for real-time interaction with the rest of their online community.
In terms of digital publishing, the benefits will lead to more innovative designs of digital content and more reader engagement, among others.
In the end, there will be the creative cloud, creative services and new business catalysts as computing has leapfrogged in the past several decades from the early years of using punch cards to terminals and mouse, and today’s touch screens.