Gates also said that while Longhorn and Apple’s new Tiger operating system have similarities, it’s obvious to him which system he’s using.

“You can always tell whether you’re on a Mac or whether you’re on a PC,” he quipped. “Take your applications and stick them in there and see if they run.”

Ah, so that’s the why Longhorn is superior — because it happens to run more applications.

I find it unimaginable that in this day and age, when a meeting is called in a conference room of a large technology company, there are still grown men and women in business suits crawling around on the floor under tables plugging in network cables and laptop power supplies. Hasn’t this problem been solved many times over?

The reading of many excellent design blogs in the last six months has made me curious once again about what was going on over in Mac-land, something that happens every few years. I’ve found that the reasons I’ve been turned off to the Mac in the past are, in descending order:

1. An excruciatingly bad experience at my first design job where I had to use an outdated PowerPC that crashed ten times a day.
2. Status quo: My current software & skill set are honed for the PC. A lot of the Mac interface seems like it’s sacrificed far too much funciton for form (e.g., you often have to use the mouse instead of tabbing through forms, unless third-party software is installed).
3. I like to use what users use. Since the majority of my work is for the web, I’d always lived by the belief that you should experience the site the same way your users do, to optimize your work for that common platform/browser combination. The flip side is that when you use the minority product, you’re catching all the other bugs no one else at work sees.
4. Expense. Any way you slice it, the Mac is more expensive.
5. XP is as good as OS X. This almost seems like an odd time to use the Mac when virtually every tool the graphic designer needs is available for Windows. My limited amount of print work never requires the mention of a Mac. And for the software design cycles, Windows is now far more mature than OS X.
6. Mac user smugness. I’ve always been turned off by the holier-than-thou attitude (and I’ve only seen it from the Mac side, since I’ve always sat on the Windows side). I’ve never been that religious about my OS choice, or cared enough to flame the opposing camp. After all, it’s the finished work that counts. But even Apple introduces proprietary audio formats, competes against its closest allies, awards outrageous bonuses to its billionaire CEO. The difference is, Apple outspends marketing dollars (per revenue) to put a pretty face on an otherwise typical corporate machine.

But there are many valid reasons to re-evaluate my OS use:

1. However corporate, Apple is not Microsoft, the most tactless software company in existence (except for maybe one other).
2. Mac OS X uses UNIX. The chances of me re-evaluating OS 9 were pretty slim. But now, with all of those underlying UNIX features…
3. Most designers use it… what am I missing here?

In typical fashion, I’m jumping on the bandwagon years after it first breezed by. I got my hands on an old G4 tower, made a trip to the Bellevue Apple Store to buy another stick o’ RAM, and promptly installed Jaguar, Apple Developer Tools and FINK. So far, I like it. It’s the same Mhz/RAM as my XP machine, but for some reason it’s much slower. I’m quite sick of staring at that rainbow-pinwheel-hourglass while the computer thinks about my last click.

As I already mentioned, my biggest complaint at this early writing is the reliance on the god damn mouse. Alright, Apple may have been the first to introduce widespread mouse use, but do we have to use it for every dialogue window?

I’m also not impressed by the brushed metal or photo-realistic icons. I’m partial to more digitized icons (when designing for the screen, I enjoy working on a pixel level, as opposed to scalable photo icons) and prefer a desktop that actually has less visual personality, so there’s less conflict with the work you’re actually doing. And I still find it hard to tell what applications I have open. But many of these complaints will fade as I familarize myself more and start using design tools on OS X to do real work.

Adobe wrote in March on a since removed page that it prefers PCs for Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator, showing that on “equal” machines, the PC outperformed the Mac. Apple responded and stood by their original claim that the Mac is faster.

Then on Monday Adobe announced that they’re dropping Premiere for the Mac. This is major news, but justified since Apple continues to compete against its most loyal software vendors. Final Cut Pro being Mac’s video editing program that competes with Premiere and the new Font Book usurping Suitcase (as problematic as Suitcase has been), being two of the most recent examples. It’s only going to make inter-office file-trading harder, compatibility issues more frustrating. This is not a Mac vs. Windows argument — I simply don’t want to live in a world where there’s an Adobe Photoshop (PSD) format and a Mac photo-editing format, a Quark format and a Mac layout format. OS/2 lost the desktop market because it wasn’t interoperable with the status quo. Thinking too differently is going to make the Mac even more obscure. This isn’t a new argument of course, but this week’s Premiere announcement is disappointing and adds new fodder for the “Apple is dead” pundits.

In the spirit of other geek résumés:

• 1981 - First computer, a TI-99/4A. I immediately started entering BASIC programs from magazines and writing my own. One rule — I had to “wash my hands” before using it.
• 1982 - Went to my first TI-99 user group. Boy, the early 80’s computing community.. talk about geekfest. At least my excuse was being nine.
• 1983 - Watched Wargames and was inspired.
• 1984 - Dad brought home our first household Intel-based computer, a Compaq “Portable” Plus 8086, larger and heavier than most sewing machines, with a six inch green screen and a 10 MB hard drive.
• 1985 - In junior high computer classes in front of the TRS-80, I RULED.
• 1986 - Started using local Omaha BBS’s for email, file exchange, and even chatting on multi-line BBS’s. Citinet, The Crypt, Mages Inn.
• 1988 - Debuted a BBS called FAST (on a 1200 baud modem).
• 1989 - Went to some BBS-centered gatherings at Perkins. Mostly awed by the geekdom, but also met some of the best friends that I’ve ever had. Jen, Ed, Chris.
• 1990 - Disciplined for stealing my teacher’s password, logging in and sending broadcast messages to my friends as him.
• 1991 - I started using the Internet (still before Mosaic was released) at UNO, in the Gateway newsroom in the dark afterhours on large black and white Mac displays, with Ed. We emailed, posted to newsgroups, chatted (with Unix ‘talk’), FTP’d, used Photoshop 2.0 to scan and distort photos, played computer games (eventually Marathon) and ate pizza until the early morning hours.
• 1992 - Got a used 386, Windows 3.1 capable machine for $300. I could finally multitask (other than through some hacked way like Borland’s Sidekick), and no more command line.
• 1993 - Posted to newsgroups about VW’s and drugs.
• 1994 - Went on a 7000 mile road trip around western North America with Ed, visiting and staying with more than a dozen people we’d corresponded with online via newsgroups and the sito community. The Internet was still safe in 1994.
• 1995 - Luddite phase. No new developments. Except to learn that technological progress is inevitable, and that there are many important limitations to the Internet, namely, eye contact.
• 1996 - Upgraded the 386 to a 486 and Windows 95. I could finally surf the web from home.
• 1997 - With a newly minted English degree (and art minor), I needed to find a job. Went back to Ed to learn the basics of HTML. I wrote down about 10 tags on a sheet of paper, then went home and dissected dozens of web sites. Started working for a computing magazine doing HTML work.
• 1998 - Got a job as a web designer at a design studio.
• 1999 - First dot-com.
• 2000 - Second dot-com.
• 2001 - Third dot-com.
• 2002 - Married a woman I first communicated with online three years previously.
• 2003 - Started a blog.

Free access to articles on the New York Times web site used to expire after 30 days. After that time you were required to pay $2.95 to read an article if you used NYT’s search to find it. But if you had the original URL to the month-old content, the one that appeared in their index pages when the article was current, you could still access it freely for an unlimited period of time. This allowed sites to link to NYT articles without forcing those users to pay for the specific article referred, while people who used the NYT’s own search for research would have to pay the fee.

I often wanted to take another look at articles I’d read in the printed edition after their free period expired and would be irritated by the $2.95 fee after already paying them $46/month for the daily subscription. But I didn’t want to keep stacks of old newspapers lying around in the chance that I might want to read something again, so I duped the NYT by creating a daily cron job that would capture each day’s HTML of each major section of the newspaper. I also stripped out the advertisements and other repetitive junk to get each day’s HTML grab down to ~1MB. The cron’d Perl script would then save the HTML according to date/month/year/section so I could do a search for an article on the NYT web site and then access the original link from my archives with a few clicks.

But today I noticed the NYT shut down free access for ALL URLs! By denying those with original links access to the articles it means that linking to NY Times will be worthless after seven days (unless the casual reader wants to pony up $2.95), so they can expect an enormous drop in incoming traffic. They’ve even reeled back the free period from 30 days to 7 days, without providing any special leeway for daily subscribers.

I’m bummed that my favorite major newspaper is shutting out folks like me who subscribe to the daily newspaper but prefer to preserve articles in a digital format. I assume they’re getting pressure to make the web site financially sustainable and, since the amount of growth the free online edition has provided for the paid printed version is not quantifyable and disregarded, this was the knee-jerk reaction to increase revenue before management had a reasonable, thought-out plan for subscribers.

I’m not planning on further subverting the NYT by grabbing every single page of each day’s news—that seems a bit extreme and would gobble up more HD space than would be worth. Instead I’ve written to feedback@nytimes.com and am hoping they’ll come up with a better solution, especially for paid subscribers.

This NY Times article, With Wires in the Walls, the Cyberhome, talks about “smart” homes. I just bought a digital thermostat, and in addition to our lights-on-a-timer, we’re fairly with the times. Why would someone need to go online to adjust their thermostat from work? The only thing I’m really looking for is a device to hook my stereo up to my LAN to receive streaming music or play mp3s from my PC.

You can spend several hundered thousands dollars to create a fully produced experience:

They now have video screens in most rooms and a tiny camera over the crib in the baby’s room. If the baby cries, the music in the networked audio system fades and the video screen tunes in.

But why think about this when there’s a war going on?