UnixPoet

Apple is going head to head with Sony and Microsoft. Sony has had crap execution in the last few years, Microsoft has mediocre design and Apple has not yet released the iPhone. It may skip having a dedicated digital camera (Nokia is the biggest camera maker in the world) but I don’t think Apple can do without a console leveraging the iPod.

If Apple were to release OSX for Intel the only loser would be Linux.
Microsofties won’t know/care about it and the Linux groupies would have a new, very shiny toy to play with. Most of the /. crowd would definetly try it out and most of these would switch.

Personally, I blame it on Gnome/KDE.

writing this on a mac

Oracle is smart in buying out InnoDB. They would be even smarter if: they hand it out for free or very cheap, which would undercut MS SQLServer, and the increasingly ambitious MySQL. They would be even smarter if they give it a decent UI and made it quick to setup and use. That means no crappy Java UIs.

Adobe are dumb. It would be ok, for Adobe, if the world had stopped a couple of years ago. Unfortunately for Adobe it has not. Microsoft are out to get PDF with Metro. It surely must be one of the ironies of nature that one of the best applications in the world, i.e. Photoshop, happens to be made by the same company that gave birth to the steaming pile of crap that is Reader. Kill it. I’ve been using the free Foxit Reader. It works great and downloads quickly.

and I was hooked. I’ve had a Mac mini for the last couple of weeks and I love it. Tiger is so polished; its a wonderful experience after prosaic XP and workman-like Linux. Attention to detail, polished interface, etc all been said before and all true.

A word of warning to the Linux crowd: forget it on the desktop. Not until Linux standardizes on as polished, relatively lightweight (Gnome is bloated) desktop as OSX will it gain a chance. The polish in an OS rubs off on the applications made for it. Most Linux applications have inconsistent UIs made by programmers. Most Windows apps have decent UIs but the Apple apps I’ve tried so far are well designed. A simple comparison: most people use Mirc on Windows. The IRC client I use on the Mac is Conversation and the difference between the two is like that between night and day. I really should put screens shots up so that people appreciate the difference.

I’ve tried the betas of Vista and I like it: its more polished and tries harder at looking cool. It tries too hard: at every turn it asks for meta data and every feature has a cacaphony of options. Why does Microsoft have to over engineer everything? Why the 42 buttons when 6 are enough? Yes, I’m sure the gold version of Vista will be awesome/cool/etc as Scoble keeps promising. But I don’t think Apple will have stayed still either.

Dvorak complains that Apple garners more favourable press then Microsoft and Scoble noticed that a significant percentage, 60%, use Macs at the blogging conferences he attends. Isn’t it suggestive that the well-informed turn to Apple?