Applications for creating and consuming

I would like to see more applications that let me easily switch between creating and consuming. That is, the same application can be used to easily view some media, and to modify it.

Ironically, the best examples of this tend to be on mobile platforms. For example, the gallery app usually allows me to view images and videos, and also to annotate and modify them.

This doesn’t have to entail complex creation mechanics, for which more heavyweight tools are often required, and will make the act of opening a file to view it take too long. Although perhaps this is a problem with the current state of computers rather than the concept itself. While i am not keen on the way Mac OS distinguishes between windows and running programs, you can much more pleasantly use a full graphic manipulation program as an image viewer when it is always running in the background.

When i use Windows, i always set images to open in Paint by default. It loads fast, and lets me annotate the images i am looking at.

There are a large number of markdown editors available that show the source and the content in two panes. I would like to further expand this concept and be able to write html in the browser itself. The mainstream browsers all have two methods of viewing the source code of a page: the inspector, and the view source button. Neither of these does what i want: the inspector doesn’t make modification as easy as it could be, as it is more for inspecting than modifying; the view source button provides me with an entirely static page.

If we continue to have distinct applications for creating and consuming, as i think we probably will, i would like to see two buttons in file managers. One to edit, and one to view. As far as i can remember, every file manager i have used has a default application to use for opening any particular file. But i always have the trouble of often wanting to open for example a html page first in a browser, and then in an editor. These two distinct tasks share a button, leading to an experience where i am frequently surprised by which application the file opens in.