Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Luxology, The Daily Show, Chicago, and coffee: the Macintosh round trip
My uncle, the man who first exposed me to the Macintosh many years ago, is undergoing open-heart surgery tomorrow. If that doesn't put things into perspective, nothing else will. In the mean time, here are the suddenly seemingly less important Mac-related thoughts that are currently swimming through my head:
- How stable is Safari 1.0? During a recent reckless bout of websurfing, I paused to realize that I had not five, not ten, but twenty-eight separate web pages open. The beauty of tabbed browsing is that if you have too many tabs open in one browser window, you can always open another window and fill that one with more tabs. It's like expanding your browsing experience exponentially. I'd like to see how Internet Explorer runs with twenty-eight browsing windows open. No, on second thought, I wouldn't. In fact, I could care less about the fact that Microsoft cancelled IE for OS X. The browsing experience on the Mac has evolved so far beyond the PC that IE is no longer relevant. Going forward, web browsing is something that we'll be doing more and more from within other applications (iTunes, Sherlock), and less and less from a stand-alone browser. Turns out Microsoft might have been right about the potential for embedding a web browser within an operating system after all -- but who knew they were referrring to Apple's future plans, and not their own?
- I completely understand the three-computer limit for songs you've purchased through the iTunes Music Store, but when they said "unlimited iPods", I figured this would include when you plug your iPod into someone else's Mac simply to take advantage of its speakers or demonstrate your iPod to another user. I was wrong. Even though I was simply trying to play the music that was on my iPod while my iPod was connected to a computer, iTunes dutifully asked me if I wanted to authorize the computer to play my music. Making things worse, the Mac I was plugging into was behind a legendarily powerful firewall that prevented me from even being able to authorize the computer as one of my anointed three. I was waiting to see at what point the iTunes Music Store protection scheme would break down and prevent me from getting to my own music, and I've finally found it. This wasn't part of the bargain, and needs to be corrected -- soon. Don't get me wrong; every other aspect of digital music on the Mac, I'm ecstatic about.
- I've become so accustomed to buying my music digitally and dropping it into my iPod that when I recently bought a physical CD that wasn't available from the iTunes Music Store, it totally threw me for a loop. Not only did I have import the music from the CD into the computer (a several-minute process), I had to get that awful plastic wrap off the jewel case first. What a waste of time. In fact, I have such little use these days for physical CD's that the moment I finished importing the music and got it safely into my iPod, I actually gave the CD away to someone. OK, so it was a heat-of-the-moment thing, and it wasn't until afterwards that I realized that legally you're not really supposed to do what I did. But I just don't have room in my life (or my apartment) for CD's anymore, which is ironic considering how many hundreds of CD's I've bought over the years. What a difference a few months can make.
- Luxology, the company whose President showed how much faster his company's 3D animation software during last week's WWDC conference, is apparently being considered part of the "great conspiracy" that all of the presenters are accused of having participated in when they showed how much faster the G5 Mac is than the fastest PC. In a response posted to his company's website, Luxology President Brad Peebler points out that two-thirds of his company's customers are PC users, and for that matter, three-fourths of his company's employees have PC's on their desks. How anyone could stretch their imagination to believe that this company is just a mouthpiece for Apple, is beyond me. On the other hand, these are usually the kinds of innovative companies that Apple ends up buying outright. Thanks to the reader who pointed out the posting on luxology.net.
- A Chicago-area reader writes in about the "artistic layout and spaciousness" of the newest Apple Store, and also points out that the Internet Cafe is in fact not a coffee bar after all. Turns out it's simply a series of Internet stations, apparently designed to keep surfers from tying up all the demo machines. I was wondering how Apple was going to handle things when customers started spilling coffee on iMacs every fifteen minutes. All this talk of new Apple Stores has me really juiced for this week's Grand Opening in Boca Raton. If you're going to be there, let's meet up. The 6:00 pm opening, the day before a national holiday, makes me wonder whether circumstances will produce a smaller crowd, or a larger one. That portion of Town Center Mall typically has so much foot traffic that time of day as it is, that I'm leaning toward the latter.
- Did anyone else catch the rerun of The Daily Show this evening, that featured a skit that mocked digital cameras? Everything that was said about battery life, the cost of printing, etc., was right on target. But the joke about needing to install camera software and then still getting a "camera recogntion error"? The computer being used in the skit was an iBook. Come on guys, there is no software needed, and there are no camera recognition errors -- not on a Mac, anyway, It's difficult enough to get the PC-using public to understand that on a Mac, iPhoto takes care of all your digital photography needs, with no software installs needed, and doesn't have the kinds of problems that PC users have with their digital cameras, without these kinds of skits making the pisperceptions even worse. Digital photography may suck on a PC, but it most certainly does not suck on a Mac. Perhaps you're thinking, "Bill, lighten up, it's a parody show". But if they're going to make fun of a crappy digital camera experience, at least do it with the kind of computer that actually provides a crappy digital camera experience. If the guy had been using a Dell laptop for his skit, it would have been funny, because it would have been accurate. Technically, The Daily Show slandered an Apple product when it claimed that you needed to install software on an iBook in order to interface with a digital camera. Not that I'm looking for Apple Legal to rev up its mighty engines by any means, but Apple might want to think twice about loaning products to The Daily Show for future skits. Or even worse, if instead of being a loaner, that iBook actually belonged to someone involved with the show, and that person actually allowed that skit to take place unchecked, big-time shame on him or her for allowing it to happen. Alright, let me step down off this soapbox before it collapses. The Daily Show is, most of the time, one of the dead-on funniest shows on TV, so I guess I should just look past the occasional lapse in judgment or brainpower.
- One reader pointed out that Jaguar, with its $129 price tag and approximate twelve-month shelf life, will have ended up costing him a diminutive 35 cents per day. Or, as he puts it, for that price "you might be able to get a cup of bad joe". Maybe Apple should start giving the OS away for free, and charging for coffee instead? It would take a full fifteen minutes for a Best Buy salesman to proclaim that Apple's coffee was a special "Mac coffee" that wasn't compatible with PC users' stomachs.
My uncle, the man who first exposed me to the Macintosh many years ago, is undergoing open-heart surgery tomorrow. If that doesn't put things into perspective, nothing else will. In the mean time, here are the suddenly seemingly less important Mac-related thoughts that are currently swimming through my head:
- How stable is Safari 1.0? During a recent reckless bout of websurfing, I paused to realize that I had not five, not ten, but twenty-eight separate web pages open. The beauty of tabbed browsing is that if you have too many tabs open in one browser window, you can always open another window and fill that one with more tabs. It's like expanding your browsing experience exponentially. I'd like to see how Internet Explorer runs with twenty-eight browsing windows open. No, on second thought, I wouldn't. In fact, I could care less about the fact that Microsoft cancelled IE for OS X. The browsing experience on the Mac has evolved so far beyond the PC that IE is no longer relevant. Going forward, web browsing is something that we'll be doing more and more from within other applications (iTunes, Sherlock), and less and less from a stand-alone browser. Turns out Microsoft might have been right about the potential for embedding a web browser within an operating system after all -- but who knew they were referrring to Apple's future plans, and not their own?
- I completely understand the three-computer limit for songs you've purchased through the iTunes Music Store, but when they said "unlimited iPods", I figured this would include when you plug your iPod into someone else's Mac simply to take advantage of its speakers or demonstrate your iPod to another user. I was wrong. Even though I was simply trying to play the music that was on my iPod while my iPod was connected to a computer, iTunes dutifully asked me if I wanted to authorize the computer to play my music. Making things worse, the Mac I was plugging into was behind a legendarily powerful firewall that prevented me from even being able to authorize the computer as one of my anointed three. I was waiting to see at what point the iTunes Music Store protection scheme would break down and prevent me from getting to my own music, and I've finally found it. This wasn't part of the bargain, and needs to be corrected -- soon. Don't get me wrong; every other aspect of digital music on the Mac, I'm ecstatic about.
- I've become so accustomed to buying my music digitally and dropping it into my iPod that when I recently bought a physical CD that wasn't available from the iTunes Music Store, it totally threw me for a loop. Not only did I have import the music from the CD into the computer (a several-minute process), I had to get that awful plastic wrap off the jewel case first. What a waste of time. In fact, I have such little use these days for physical CD's that the moment I finished importing the music and got it safely into my iPod, I actually gave the CD away to someone. OK, so it was a heat-of-the-moment thing, and it wasn't until afterwards that I realized that legally you're not really supposed to do what I did. But I just don't have room in my life (or my apartment) for CD's anymore, which is ironic considering how many hundreds of CD's I've bought over the years. What a difference a few months can make.
- Luxology, the company whose President showed how much faster his company's 3D animation software during last week's WWDC conference, is apparently being considered part of the "great conspiracy" that all of the presenters are accused of having participated in when they showed how much faster the G5 Mac is than the fastest PC. In a response posted to his company's website, Luxology President Brad Peebler points out that two-thirds of his company's customers are PC users, and for that matter, three-fourths of his company's employees have PC's on their desks. How anyone could stretch their imagination to believe that this company is just a mouthpiece for Apple, is beyond me. On the other hand, these are usually the kinds of innovative companies that Apple ends up buying outright. Thanks to the reader who pointed out the posting on luxology.net.
- A Chicago-area reader writes in about the "artistic layout and spaciousness" of the newest Apple Store, and also points out that the Internet Cafe is in fact not a coffee bar after all. Turns out it's simply a series of Internet stations, apparently designed to keep surfers from tying up all the demo machines. I was wondering how Apple was going to handle things when customers started spilling coffee on iMacs every fifteen minutes. All this talk of new Apple Stores has me really juiced for this week's Grand Opening in Boca Raton. If you're going to be there, let's meet up. The 6:00 pm opening, the day before a national holiday, makes me wonder whether circumstances will produce a smaller crowd, or a larger one. That portion of Town Center Mall typically has so much foot traffic that time of day as it is, that I'm leaning toward the latter.
- Did anyone else catch the rerun of The Daily Show this evening, that featured a skit that mocked digital cameras? Everything that was said about battery life, the cost of printing, etc., was right on target. But the joke about needing to install camera software and then still getting a "camera recogntion error"? The computer being used in the skit was an iBook. Come on guys, there is no software needed, and there are no camera recognition errors -- not on a Mac, anyway, It's difficult enough to get the PC-using public to understand that on a Mac, iPhoto takes care of all your digital photography needs, with no software installs needed, and doesn't have the kinds of problems that PC users have with their digital cameras, without these kinds of skits making the pisperceptions even worse. Digital photography may suck on a PC, but it most certainly does not suck on a Mac. Perhaps you're thinking, "Bill, lighten up, it's a parody show". But if they're going to make fun of a crappy digital camera experience, at least do it with the kind of computer that actually provides a crappy digital camera experience. If the guy had been using a Dell laptop for his skit, it would have been funny, because it would have been accurate. Technically, The Daily Show slandered an Apple product when it claimed that you needed to install software on an iBook in order to interface with a digital camera. Not that I'm looking for Apple Legal to rev up its mighty engines by any means, but Apple might want to think twice about loaning products to The Daily Show for future skits. Or even worse, if instead of being a loaner, that iBook actually belonged to someone involved with the show, and that person actually allowed that skit to take place unchecked, big-time shame on him or her for allowing it to happen. Alright, let me step down off this soapbox before it collapses. The Daily Show is, most of the time, one of the dead-on funniest shows on TV, so I guess I should just look past the occasional lapse in judgment or brainpower.
- One reader pointed out that Jaguar, with its $129 price tag and approximate twelve-month shelf life, will have ended up costing him a diminutive 35 cents per day. Or, as he puts it, for that price "you might be able to get a cup of bad joe". Maybe Apple should start giving the OS away for free, and charging for coffee instead? It would take a full fifteen minutes for a Best Buy salesman to proclaim that Apple's coffee was a special "Mac coffee" that wasn't compatible with PC users' stomachs.
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