The Most Useful App Ever

I love the Instamatic application on my iPhone, it takes the coolest photos.
Carolyn Murphy 
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I have now been a smartphone user for the last half a decade.  I began of course with the Blackberry, and then expanded to the Android system.  In all that development there has been a tremendous amount of development of power and data manipulation ability.  It's even such that I now can almost replace my laptop - almost.  Blogging is something that I have done using that keyboard form factor, but if you have attempted to type more than a text message, you can see the futility.

So there was one thing which hadn't been done until about a year and-a-half that was thoroughly surprising.  Up until that point in time, there was really no way to print anything from the phone.  I have to wonder why.

What is it about the process of replacing the computing devices with more mobile computing devices that left an dearth across the entire platform?  Every portion of the computing experience was duplicated, from the ability to use a word processor and a spreadsheet to the ability to mindmap and plan.  There have been applications to organize appointments and to manage finances, yet none to get anything useful out of them.

In the 'good old days', there were these things called printer drivers, and whenever software was written, it was written to be able to send data to the printer, no matter what it was.  It was useful if you needed to take information off of your computer and share it with someone easily, even if they didn't have a computer handy.

Enter the best of the technological advances, and suddenly the useful pieces of technology went away.  Screenshots and printing (though screenshots are now available on the Galaxies III and IV, and possibly other devices) were suddenly gone.  I'm not really sure if they were gone because the technology didn't exist to make it happen, or because nobody who was writing the apps took into consideration that they might be good for more than social media and Angry Birds.  

The problem has now been solved with an app to print to wireless printers - incidentally the highest price app I've purchased (not even $15, but with the general free-ness of the app store...) - but that still leaves the overall issue of the loss of functionality it what should be an evolutionary step forward.

My point with all this is that as we move forward with what we do, we need to be able to keep the things that we need to be able to use before we get to the new stuff that we might want to use.  This isn't to say that we need to always do things the old way, but consider this: what would be the point of a word processor without a way to print the output?  Spellcheck is already everywhere on the phone, and there are much simpler things that can be done if the text will remain mostly on the screen.  The purpose of a word processor is to produce things that will eventually be printed out (or converted into a PDF, which is actually similar in function), yet that feature was the laggard among all the others.