Applications or Actions?

So, what do I mean by an action? An action can be something that involves storing data, formatting it or publishing it. Naturally, applications have long supported these actions - but what irks me is that I need more than one application to complete a task.

For example, say I wanted to set up a new website about my cat. My workflow would usually be this:

1. Find a picture in my iPhoto library.
2. Open Photoshop to crop and resize. Then save for the web.
3. Launch TextWrangler and churn out some nice semantic XHTML.
4. Open Cyberduck and FTP my XHTML and JPG up to the web.
5. Open Firefox just to check it all works.
6. Use Mail to email everyone I know to tell them about my new site.

Whilst listening to some music from iTunes, of course.

For this simple task I need 6 applications, plus 1 background process. Each of these programs has features that I need for my project - but I am not using enough of each program to justify launching the full blown functionality of that application.

iTunes is a comprehensive music management application. I don't need the library functions whilst building my website - just stick an album into the playlist and off it goes. iPhoto has my entire photo library on hand, but all I need to see is the pictures of my cat. Photoshop has just about everything I'll ever need to enhance images, but all I need to do is a little cropping. TextWrangler has great functionality, but I'm just writing some bog standard XHTML.

I'm being spoiled with all the features that these applications give to me - but I don't need them.

My contention is, why do we need vast applications when most of the time we're only going to use 20% of their features? What would be more useful is application fragments.

A fragment could consist of a text editor, or a cropping tool, or a layering engine, or a character map, or a database. When I boot the machine, it would go into a mode where I could say:

"Hey Macintosh. Today, I'd love to put on some Radiohead - The Bends, I think. Can you find for me some pictures of my cat? I'd like to crop these pictures, then write a website for them. Then, I'd like to email all my friends to tell them about my new website. That'd be grand."

Using Spotlight, Macintosh could find The Bends out of my music library and spin it in the background. Then, it would find all of my pictures tagged with 'cat', and display them in a nice grid interface. I could double click on one and it would organise a cropping tool, with a nice resize mode. Once I was done there, it would launch a text editing mode with syntax highlighting so I could finish the XHTML quickly.

I would be using elements of all of these programs - syntax highlighting, web rendering, mailing, cropping, searching, playing media - but the experience would be seamless. The underlying technology would support the action I was doing - building a website - rather than flicking between applications.

There's hope for this kind of implementation yet - the iLife suite seamlessly manages media effortlessly. Making a movie, for example - iMovie can draw media from your photo/music databases without launching iTunes/iPhoto first. This is the kind of stuff I'd want to see.