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# System prepended metadata

title: Universal Nomadic Applications
tags: [thoughts]

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tags: thoughts
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# Universal Nomadic Applications

I consider Netflix a good example of a nomadic application, today. You can start netflix on your smart tv and select a movie and start watching. Then your telephone reminds you that you need to go to a meeting, which for some odd reason is the old-fashioned non-virtual kind. So you switch of your TV and step in your self-driving car (still not flying though). And while the car is doing its thing, you start netflix on your tablet. Netflix knows where you stopped the movie on your TV and you can resume from that exact moment.

Netflix almost behaves as if the netflix application on your TV and the one on your tablet are one and the same. It is not yet entirely seamless, you must select the movie before you can resume it, but it is close.

Now imagine if this behaviour was the default for all applications. I call this concept nomadic applications.

## A nomadic OS

If your devices are just input/output devices, all connected to the same computer through the internet, all applications would automatically get this feature. Your browser/device would just be a window to your computer.

Cloud computing is already the norm for many applications, why not for your personal applications as well? Streaming games is starting to get popular, as you can time share expensive resources like advanced GPU's by using more cheap resources like bandwidth.

If all applications would stream to a remote UI, while running somewhere in the cloud, you could scale up and down the resources used by your cloud computer as needed. Losing a device would be a shame, but you wouldn't actually lose any data. Upgrading to a faster, expensive laptop is no longer needed, you can just upgrade the maximum resources your computer is allowed to scale up to. And you could do this for a very short amount of time, so it would probably be very cheap to do if you only needed this extra power very incidentally.

Now there are lots of people uncomfortable with the idea of running everything in the cloud. And when the cloud is a metaphor for one of the many silo's that weild vendor lock-in like a weapon there is good reason for that. But in this case the cloud could also mean the shared household computer in the basement. All you need is a computer that has enough resources and fast and wide connectivity - fast meaning low latency, wide meaning a high bandwidth.