The Blog that Noone Reads

The other day, I bought a mac. That’s right, an Apple Computer. I bought one and I’ll tell ya why.

I spent the earlier days of my life professing the virtues of the PC over Apple’s inferior alternative. And they really were inferior. In highschool, I managed a lab with about 25 Macs. I hated it. They were insecure. They crashed. Good Lord did they crash. My problems with them were too numerous for this document, but it’s sufficiant to say, I hated the Mac.

At the same time, I’ve always been interested, even enticed by the culture. No other piece of technology had the kind of loyal following that the Mac had. You never saw a Microsoft sticker in the rear window of a Volkswagon. But how could such a monstrous application garner such respect. My option is this: it all has to do with one of the more brillant men of our time. Steve Jobs.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the guy. He runs Apple. He also has something to do with Pixar, though I’m not exactly sure what he does with them. This guy was with Apple in the beginning. Back in the glory days. Back when the computers Apple made were so good, their users remained loyal even while swallowing the shit Apple was spilling out in the 90’s. I don’t know exactly what happened, but Jobs got the boot when some other jamoke took over.

And so it went that the quality of the product fell steadily for several years. Apple went though a couple different dictators, but nobody seemed to be able to save the sinking ship. The products were crappy. The company was doing poorly. And then, it happened. Somehow, Jobs was returned to the helm.

Consumers were introduced to the iMac, the iPod, and glorious OSX. Someone realized that OS9 was a glimmering example of crappy software. They threw it out and started from scratch. Well, not completely from scratch. Apple wisely chose to leverage the power and adaptability of some open source software. They chose (correct me if I’m wrong) BSD, an open source Linux distribution, as the base for their new operating system. It’s fast. It’s stable. Its a programmers dream. It’s classy software. I love it.

Now, I plug my iPod into my Mac Mini and listen to some iTunes while I go about my work. The interface is attractive. The developer’s tools are plentiful and well documented. And at last I can understand the Mac culture. I imagine it is now, finally, as it was back then. The Mac is not about an overpriced Microsoft alternative. It’s about user-centric computing. The interface wants to operate the way I expect it to, instead of expecting me to operate it the way that’s convinient for the programmer. The UI element are lively and animated. The settings are where I’d expect to find them. The hardware looks great on my desk. And, there’s Tiger.

Tiger is Apple’s latest revision to OSX. It’s a bunch of upgrades the the already superintelligent system. Spotlight is, in my opinion, the golden child of Tiger. It’s a system-wide search utility built right into the UI. It’s extensible to be able to index any file type. It’s search features can be built right into any application. And, it’s accessable at any point with only a click of the mouse. I just type in what I’m looking for and Spotlight finds it for me. I’m not just talking about searching filenames, either. I’m talking about searching within text documents, web pages, and PDFs. Spotlight searches in the ID3 info of MP3s and the EXIF data in photos. I can even apply custom comments to any file on the computer specifically for spotlight. The whole thing works magically. I never thought I’d be a Mac guy. But iAm.