Current Mood:
Esctatic
I look nothing like the advertising material Apple has so ubiquitously spread around the airwaves. I am neither a hip and cool twenty-something with no responsibilities and a distaste for everything “business” nor am I a fourty-something stodgy business type. I am an overweight, not particularly stylish thirty-something who works all day holding down a desk in a manufacturing and engineering company.
I have growing distaste for Microsoft’s OS business, but I am particularly fond of products like Office 2007 and OneNote from them. I have no particular love for Apple, but I’ve come to respect their OS, and now that I own one of their flagship products, their really slick and useful hardware.
I work in IT and I work with Windows machines all day long. In fact, I’ve worked with what amounts to pretty much the same GUI since 1995 and Microsoft has asked me to spend what precious free time I have doing exactly the same thing into the foreseeable future.
Microsoft expects that I will continue to do my blogging, music production, social networking, and very little else on an OS that constantly gets in my way, is difficult to customize, lacks modern window management that even free software has managed to implement pretty well, and generally has the look and feel of that radical departure that Windows took with Windows 95.
Everything else has been evolution in design; great for business which relies on not having to re-educate user bases of the barely computer literate on new paradigms. Hey… I can dig that. I face these issues every day in my day job.
The problem for me is exhibited in a simple activity that I participate in at least once every couple of weeks.
A few months ago, I bought an Axiom 61 MIDI controller so that I could start practicing piano again and so that I’d have a keyboard to adding parts to tunes and building percussion loops. To do this in Windows took me no less than an hour of prep to get the keyboard working and then a $100-$300 piece of software to get a convincing enough piano to want to practice with it.
On Friday, I got the Macbook Pro. On Saturday, I took it downstairs and hooked up the Axiom and turned it on. Nothing happened; no pop-up, no “I need to install a driver for this”, nothing. I figured what the hell and started GarageBand, an app that is bundled with the Mac. Within seconds, I was playing a reasonable sounding piano sound through the headphones.
So what does this mean? To me, it’s that OSX is purpose built for folks exactly like me; folks who want to be able to get their creative job done with as little trouble as possible in a convienent and stylish package that actually works.
And work, it definitely does.
The touchpad and new “chiclet” style keyboard are worth the cost of admission alone. The new Macbook has what would say is the single best keyboard and “mouse” input hardware of any laptop ever. The unibody build is very solid, the laptop is unbelievably thin, light, and powerful compared to the Dells that I previously used. The screen is really bright with excellent contrast compared to other laptops I’ve owned and used. The headphone circuitry is excellent.
As I work more with the Mac, I’ll probably write more with my experiences in the realms of computing that mean the most to me.
Please share any thoughts you have on alternative operating systems to Windows and what effects they’ve had on your work process.
While you’re working on escaping the MS realm, I’ve been delving into it more deeply (not by choice, of course). We’ve just switched over to the .NET platform, and the decision was made to start using Silverlight for our UI layer. Sure…why not ? The controls are really slick looking, and the developer can instantiate pages as objects and render them in an onClick event (The rendering looks pretty seamless, too).
Now, for the fun part, binding a Silverlight control to a datasource. Silverlight controls can only be bound to ObservableCollection(s) returned by web services. OK…fair enough…I can do that. So…I create a class a web service to return my data and expect it to populate a gridview…No dice. I spent a week and a half trying to figure out where I’d screwed up my code, only to discover that I didn’t have a clientaccesspolicy.xml file in every project I was referencing. The clientaccesspolicy.xml file is needed, because, despite the fact that all my code is running on the same domain, since the services are running on a different port than the .aspx file, calls to them are considered cross-domain and, thus, I need a file to indicate that I grant this access. Thank you, Microsoft, for once again attempting to save me from myself. Take me back to the vi and gcc days (or at least to the Borland Turbo C++ on a DOS platform days). Ugghhh…
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Good for you, I am glad you are having a positive experience. Like you have enjoyed my switch. I was hesitant that OS X would not be as customizable or have the applications I need. Yet, It seems like when I run off to find something I need and find nothing it turns out it is built into OS X somewhere.
In other cases when I hit a brick wall, I backup and find another route. I don’t spend my time bludgeoning my head on my desk trying to figure out how to get something to work as advertised because of a ‘driver’ or hardware conflict.
Easily, Apple hardware plays nice with most applications and devices because it is Apple’s hardware and not some crazy brand video card that no one has ever heard of.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a cult of Mac person. After all, Apple purchases their hardware from the lowest bidders, just like everyone else. I might know 3 people who have had flawless ipods, everyone else I know have had to send their’s in for service.
When it comes down to it, I work with the OS that the job requires. Like you, my everyday machine is OS X for now.
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