Application
Applied arts
Applied Arts are arts within functional items (as opposed to Fine art, art which "has no purpose", such as poetry, paintings, etc.)
Applied art is a notion which varies greatly according to space and time. In medieval Japan, for instance, only a general conception of the "beautiful" existed, negating the difference between "fine Arts" and "Applied Arts".
Applied Arts were considered inferior to fine arts, and only a feature of good quality craftsmanship. In the beginning of the 20th Century, Applied Arts grew in popularity. Architects started designing objects of everyday life (mirrors, cups, chairs...) in accordance to their style (Modern Style, Art Deco).
One very famous school of Applied Art was the Bauhaus. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_art [Feb 2005]
Killer Application
A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful that people will buy a particular brand of computer simply to run that program.
The first example of a killer app is generally agreed to be the VisiCalc spreadsheet on the Apple II platform. The machine was purchased in the thousands by finance workers (in particular, bond traders).
The next example is another spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. Sales of IBM's PC had been slow until 1-2-3 was released, but only months later it was the best selling computer.
A killer app can provide an important niche market for a non-mainstream platform. Aldus PageMaker and Adobe PostScript gave the graphic design and desktop publishing niche to the Apple Macintosh in the late 1980s, a niche it retains to this day despite PCs running Windows having been capable of running versions of the same applications since the early 1990s.
There have been a number of new uses of the term. For instance the Mosaic web browser is generally credited with starting the rush of computer users to join the Internet by showing them the World Wide Web, although others argue that e-mail was the reason. This does not hold up to scrutiny, as email preceded the internet. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_app [Jun 2004]
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