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Did Steve Jobs just take over the world?
Steve's got a plan for worldwide conquest, and Mac users are just along for the ride.

Whew, and I thought it was a good time to be a Mac user before Apple redefined the music industry for us today. Everything about being a Mac user changes starting today, but probably not in the way that you were expecting. Sure, Apple's new iTunes Music Store is open exclusively to Mac users. That alone will arm us with sufficient bragging rights to embarrass even more of our PC-using friends when we show off what we can do and they can't. But enjoy it while you can, because Steve Jobs made as clear a signal as possible today that the days of tiptoeing around the issue of just how much of a taste of the Mac experience Windows users should be allowed to have are over. He's going after the other ninety-five percent by turning them into willing, drooling, credit-card wielding Apple customers long before they're ready to take the plunge and buy their first Mac. I still don't know that I like it, but it's gutsy and in the end, it should work. One thing's for sure though, the era of all of Apple's innovations being Mac-only and staying Mac-only has drawn to a rather loud close. Starting today, Windows users have all been invited to the Steve Jobs ultimate house party. They'll be second-class citizens until they wise up and get a Mac, but it's such better treatment than they're used to that they probably won't even know the difference.

When Apple first introduced the iPod eighteen months ago without a clear indication of when or if there would be a Windows version, I knew that Apple had reached a crossroads. Having stated its intention of digging into the Windows majority and unearthing the potential Mac users, Apple could either make Windows a laughingstock by building the Mac platform into the perfect experience and shutting out the other 95% entirely until they wake up and buy a Mac, or it could use its arsenal of innovation to lure Windows users into becoming minor Apple customers in the hopes of building up that relationship to the point of an eventual Mac purchase. Being a purist at heart, I was always rooting for Apple to go with the former, because the latter sounded too much like giving away the Mac's best features and taking away the reasons for switching altogether.

But then Steve Jobs went and broke my heart last summer when he announced that the iPod would be available for any Windows user with a FireWire card. At the time, I wrote it off as a compromise to boost revenue during this economic mess, at the potential detriment to future Mac sales. If a PC user can buy an iPod and use it with his existing PC, where is the motivation to switch to a Mac? I thought it was one of Steve's silliest and most short-sighted moves since he's been back at Apple, but I should have known better than to think that this was just about selling a few more iPods. Although he's made some rather large mistakes in his time, none of them has involved sitting on the fence. Right or wrong, Steve picks his direction and goes all out, usually leading to spectacular failure or spectacular success. The Windows iPod was just an early hint that there was so much more going on here than any of us sitting at home and speculating could ever have predicted.

The first obvious sign that Steve had something up his sleeve with the Windows iPod was when he inked the deal to start selling iPods at Target. This isn't the kind of retailer that Apple has ever had success selling its wares at in the past. Steve decided he was going to try to sell digital music players to PC users in an unfancy department store, and somehow it worked. Budget-conscious PC users who shopped at Target really were willing to lay out three hundred dollars or more for an Apple product. Who would ever have guessed? But the sure-fire sign that there was oh so much more going on than we were seeing was when Steve made a deal with the devil, literally, as Dell signed on to sell iPods through its own online store. If you're Steve Jobs, you just don't make a move that bizarre unless you've got larger reasons for doing so. The Dell announcement was the first point at which I began to wonder if I was wrong for thinking that Apple should keep the iPod Mac-only. There had to be more to this, and it was beginning to look like Steve was carving out a path that no one had previously taken -- at least not successfully.

When the rumors began to surface that Apple was going to launch an online music download service, I imagined a nice little novelty service in which Mac users would have access to a few dozen songs from popular artists. Then the rumors expanded to include the tidbit that all five major record labels had signed on, and it became clear that this was no little niche service -- and it was no Mac-only service either. When you're the very first company to bring a new product to market, and it has the potential to someday bring in as much or more revenue than your core business all by itself, you don't limit yourself to selling it only to the five percent of your potential market who happen to either currently own or be willing to buy your core product. You just can't pass up an opportunity of that size. The existing customers of your core product can certainly benefit more from the fact that you've doubled your revenues than it can from the fact that you've lured a few new users to the platform.

Unlike with the iPod introduction, there was no question at today's event as to if or when Windows users would get a taste of the action. The if was "yes", and the when was "by the end of the year". Note for the record that it doesn't mean that Apple will actually wait until the end of the year, only that it reserves the right to do so. Every new Apple innovation seems to bring a new batch of switchers on board, so the Music Store, being as groundbreaking as it is, should bring in more than its fair share of Windows deserters. But sometime during 2003, Apple will swoop down and gobble up a good-size chunk of the money being spent on popular music -- not just from its own five percent of the population, but from everyone. And unlike the computer market, in which a consumer buys one product every few years, this new model for the music market will have some consumers buying one product every few hours. Like a turkey gone out of control, Apple will be gobbling up that money non-stop, resulting in a consistent influx of revenue that will make it so much easier to introduce innovative new Mac-related products without worrying about the temporary impact of the transition on the bottom line. The profits from the Music Store will fund future Macintosh innovation and products that will make current offerings look primitive in comparison.

I should have known that Steve was working his way up to this day all along. It was a day in which he declared that the music industry belonged to Apple, and the music industry nodded its collective head in agreement. I knew the man had guts, but I didn't think that even he would take it this far. But the floodgates are all the way open, so now that Steve has chosen this path, I trust he'll go all the way with it. I fully expect to see iTunes released for Windows by the end of the year, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the rumors of iTunes becoming the embedded music player in America Online are true as well. At this point, I would be a supporter of both moves, and Steve might as well ink deals with Amazon and anyone else who wants to play ball. While the thought of millions of Windows users using iTunes to download music from Apple without ever needing to touch a Mac might seem repulsive at first, it's got so many dollar signs on it, and so much potential to turn them into down-the-road Mac users by sheer force of total immersion in the Apple way of doing things, that I say bring it on.

The kicker is that he's just getting started. Music isn't even Steve's specialty. The relative simplicity of music in comparison to the other forms of multimedia just happens to make music what Apple's board likes to refer to as "low-hanging fruit". You go after it first because it's an easier target, before moving on to the hard work of scoring what you really want. Too often we forget that Steve Jobs is the majority-owner of a movie studio called Pixar. Perhaps he'll take control of music this year, movies the next, and no one might dare to imagine what the landscape might look like by 2005. I do know this, though: Apple is going to be a heck of a lot larger company at that time, and as a result of Apple's new-found power, there will be tens of millions more Apple lovers, if not actual Mac users, by then as well. While that almost seems like spoiling the party by inviting too many people for all the wrong reasons, keep in mind that if Apple at its current size and strength can accomplish what it already has with MacOS X so far, just dream of how much more Apple can do for us Mac users once Apple has grown into its now-inevitable role as the giant ball of glue that links artists, executives, and customers together (and takes money from all three) as they all cling to Apple for guidance on how to successfully move into the online digital era.

Macintosh users, you've never had it this good -- and this time it's not even close. From here on in, we're riding shotgun on Steve Jobs' world domination tour, and right now, the view is looking mighty pretty. Feel free to share your own thoughts from the VIP seat that we've all suddenly realized we're sitting in.

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Only twelve more hours until I'm allowed to pay for my music

I found myself sitting on the fence Sunday afternoon. No really, I was actually sitting on a fence, or at least the unassembled pieces of one, as I took a break from helping someone assemble those pieces. The moment of respite gave me the chance to sit back and consider how Apple's new music download service will affect me personally. In previous columns I've reflected on how it will affect Apple, how it will affect Mac users in general, and how it will affect the music industry. I suppose I could wait one more day and find out the facts before assessing the impact on my own music purchasing, downloading, and listening habits, but once the news breaks tomorrow, I imagine my attention will turn back toward the big picture. So now might be the best time to examine how Apple might be changing my own music experience. Why should you care? Because you just might be in the same situation, whether you realize it or not.

Back in the day, I loved Napster and I frequently used it to download music -- I'll go ahead and say that up front. I've since graduated, as so many have, to underground copycats such as LimeWire and Acquisition, without missing a beat. Now, before a thousand readers get ready to fire off an email calling me a thief, I'll also point out that I usually buy about one music CD per week, which amounts to several hundred dollars per year. Combined with the sheer volume of concerts that I attend, I probably throw more of my money at the music industry each year than ninety percent of the people reading this. So if I'm stealing from the music industry, I'm doing a pretty lousy job of it. But why is it, then, that I still find the need to resort to downloading so much music from lousy services like LimeWire?

Before answering that, I should explain just what is so lousy about these services. Since no one's getting paid and the software is therefore written in people's spare time, you never can quite seem to get your hands on a version that's satisfactorily bug-free. The interface is re-designed constantly, but rarely improves. When you search for a song, there is no guarantee that you'll find it, because you're relying on the hope that someone else on your same subnet will happen to be offering the song you're looking for at the time you're looking for it. If the person you're downloading from happens to sign off before you get the whole song, too bad. And even if you do obtain the entire song, there's a good chance that it will be clipped, distorted, or otherwise mangled, or even the wrong song altogether. I suppose if we were Windows users, we might even have to worry about viruses being transmitted along with the songs. But hey, we're fortunate enough to be Mac users, so at least that's not really an issue. Still, there are fewer things I less enjoy doing on a computer than the act of hunting down a song on LimeWire because the record industry has put me in the position of having no other acceptable way of obtaining it. That's right, this is all the record companies' fault. I'll take full responsibility for what my actions, but none of this mess would have happened if the record execs hadn't gone into the digital era with their eyes wide shut. Even those of us who wish to do the right thing when it comes to paying for our music are not allowed to do it.

My criteria for buying a CD is simple: If I'm a fan of the artist's past work and I expect that the new CD will be equally worthy, I buy it. If I hear one song from a new artist, and from that one song, I can determine that I will probably like other songs by that same artist, I buy the CD. If someone who is familiar with my musical tastes recommends an album to me, I lay out the money for it. But if I hear a new song on the radio and I like it and want to acquire just that song so that I can listen to it more often before deciding whether purchasing the entire CD would be wise, how am I supposed to do this? What legitimate avenue has been provided by the record companies that allows me to ease my way into liking a new artist by buying one song at a time? Astonishingly, the answer is "none".

I could buy the whole CD in order to obtain my one song, but I refuse to go out and pay fifteen dollars (or more) for one song I want and ten that I don't. No other industry practices this kind of lunacy. When I buy a doughnut, does the bakery require me to buy ten other doughnuts of less-popular flavors along with it? If I buy a new Ford Explorer, does the dealership force me to accept a Pinto as part of the deal? If I buy a 12 inch PowerBook, does Apple make me take home a bundle that includes a bunch of flaming PowerBook 5300's just because it would be impossible for Apple to sell the 5300's on their own merit? Of course not. So why does the music industry get away with making me buy all these 5300's and Pinto's when all I wanted was a glazed doughnut? Alright, so the metaphor may have escaped me, but the message is clear enough: rather than work to improve the quality of the music being offered, the record labels expend their efforts trying to find ways to get us to pay for what we don't want.

I suppose the music industry's answer is that I should buy the single. Back in the 1980's, when you could buy a cassette-tape single for $1.99, this made sense. But when the transition to CD's happened, singles suddenly became ten-dollar items. I can just picture the record execs sitting around the boardroom table saying, "Hey, let's make the single nearly as expensive as the whole CD so the kids will just spring for the whole thing." Well, something certainly sprung, but it had nothing to do with money. I don't know how they couldn't have seen it coming. Give any human a lack of reasonable options, and improvisation will rule the day. And ever since the day that two kids, somewhere, realized that they could pass music to each other one song at a time over the Internet, it's become the de facto new method of releasing a single, with or without the record companies' participation. As soon as a CD is released, the music is immediately available worldwide, any time of day or night, to anyone who has a computer and an Internet connection.

If you ignore the legalities, it was actually a heck of an improvisation. It was the kind of innovative idea that comes along so rarely that it allows even a marginal player in the existing paradigm to be the dominant force in the next paradigm, simply by being the first to use the new idea to its own advantage. But rather than seizing the opportunity to launch their own download services before the renegade companies like Napster were ever conceived, the record companies chose to respond, well, like children. They filed lawsuits, they prosecuted everyone they could find, they got entire corporations shut down. Their collective temper tantrum even went so far as threatening to file suit against everyone whom they could prove had ever downloaded a copyrighted song from the internet. Somewhere along the line, their marketing departments forgot to tell them that suing your customers is probably not the best way to gain their future business. Perhaps they're assuming that anyone who downloads music for free isn't one of their paying customers anyway. But in my case at least, they're dead wrong.

Unlike some file-swappers, I've never once downloaded an burned an entire CD. If I'm so confident that I'll want to hear the whole record, I'll just go out and buy it. Ten good songs for fifteen dollars sound fair enough to me. But the record companies still want to label me a crook along with everyone else. Which is a shame, considering how many times I've ended up buying a CD only because I "stole" one song and liked it so much that I was persuaded to go out and buy the whole thing. When I do download a song and don't end up buying the record, I detest the fact that I can't get any money to the artist. Creators of original content should be allowed to profit from it, and I imagine that the vast majority of famous musicians (Lars Ulrich notwithstanding) have been aching for their bosses to offer the public some way of being allowed to pay for a song when downloading it. But the record execs have never allowed anyone other than PressPlay and a few other pathetic companies to even try to give us the chance to pay up for our tunes.

It looks like Apple is going to do for these artists what their own labels never could. For us Mac users, it's just our good luck that it happens to be Apple that's doing this. If it were some other respectable (and respectably powerful) company, like Sony, I'd still be excited. The fact that it is Apple ensures a whole heap of bonuses for us, everything from the fact that Mac users will presumably get the service first, to the fact that it will be so integrated with iTunes and the iPod, right down to the fact that Steve Jobs can go out and personally convince dissenting artists to participate in the service. More than anything, I love the fact that some of the money I spend will be going back to Apple, which will then be used to bring even more innovations to life.

Once the service is online, I'll be a downloading fool. If every song from every label really is available, I doubt I'll ever use LimeWire again. The hassle of using the free method to obtain one song was worth saving the fifteen dollars I would have spent on the CD, but it's not worth the single dollar that I'll now have the privilege of paying. Privilege, you say? How is giving up my money considered a privilege? Because it's well worth a dollar to not have to trudge through the entirely taxing experience of getting the song for "free". My time is worth more than that. Any society will always have freeloaders who will never pass up a chance to get something they didn't pay for, no matter the quality or the fairness of it all. But I believe that there are a sufficient number of people out there like me who, while not saints when it comes to obtaining their music, are honest enough to pay a fair price now that one is finally being offered.

I don't want to spend any more time speculating at this late date as to whether Apple will also announce tomorrow that it has purchased Universal Music, or as to what the new iPods might look like. Actually, some of the rumors have been quite hilarious. The iPod/mouse combination theory is perhaps my favorite insane Apple-related rumor to come along in some time. But even as the rumors continue to fly, I'm going to call it a night. I'll sleep soundly knowing that starting tomorrow, I'll be allowed to pay for all my music. All eyes will be on the newswire tomorrow to see just what's really going to happen, and then I'll take a crack at examining how it all will impact everyone else. But I think I already know how it's going to impact me: my music-listening experience will only get better, my Macintosh experience will only get better, and in the end, the record companies will probably end up with even more of my money than before. I wish I had some way of knowing if any of that increased revenue will actually find its way to the artists themselves, which is something that Apple could make better if they did in fact buy Universal Music...but I won't go there. At least not until after we get the real story on Monday.

Are you like me in thinking that you'll end up spending more money on music once Apple launches its download service? Are you excited by the fact that your money will go to a company, like Apple, that actually spends its profits on research and development and constantly brings us innovative new products? Or will you just keep using "free" services because the price is right? Feel free to service me.

If you enjoy this site and would like to see it grow, you can also feel free to make a donation via PayPal. In the spirit of Apple's new service, I'm only asking for one dollar. Think of it as only paying for one article, without having to pay for the ones you don't want. All you have to do is click here:

Thanks in advance.

Sherlock 3: Stiv Dzhobs it gives out autographs

One of the neatest things about the Internet is how it can bring the four corners of the earth together in unexpected ways. Just when I thought I'd seen it all, I came across a Russian website that featured a translated version of my recent attempt at humor, "The Five Stages of Macintosh User". Just to see what would happen, I ran the Russian version of my article through Sherlock 3's Russian-to-English translator. I wanted to see just how much would be lost in the "double" translation of having gone from English to Russian, and then back to English again.

As far as I'm concerned, Sherlock's version is much funnier than what I oringally wrote -- so much so that I wanted to pass it along to those readers who, like me, find humor in the unintentionally absurd. Click here to compare it to the original article. Oh, and if you're wondering who "Stiv Dzhobs" is, just say it out loud a few times and you'll get it. Here's the translation:

Five stages in the life any poppy -hzera

The technicals

Stage 1. User uses word combinations "there that piece" for describing different parts it dipped.
Stage 2. User knows several technicals, but it is pronounced them incorrectly.
Stage 3. User is described its poppy, using maksimamal'no a possible quantity of technicals, but it does not know the value of majority of them.
Stage 4. User is returned to the use of a word combination "there that piece" for describing different parts it dipped, because he does not want, that its vosprinimali as expert in the region of technical support because of the fear conducted the remainder of life, giving out free consultations.
Stage 5. User thoroughly knows thousands of terms, but most frequently calls its poppy simply "my wheelbarrow".

He worked with the text documents

Stage 1. User uses AppleWorks, because this application already bylo is established on its poppy.
Stage 2. User continues he used AppleWorks, but it thinks that would acquire Microsoft Word, since application for $400 it apparently must was properly good.
Stage 3. User uses Microsoft Word, since the mass of supplemental possibilities, but thus far does not know in this application, as it worked with them.
Stage 4. User to the perfection manages Micorsoft Word, and greatly it survives from the fact that earlier he did not know all possibilities of application and lost much time.
Stage 5. User again uses AppleWorks, because in the assault was angry it removed Microsoft Word.

He worked with the electronic mail

Stage 1. User accomplishes telephone calls so that it would verify poluchili people of the letters, which it to them sent.
Stage 2. User prints out each obtained letter so that stage 3 would be confident in its safety. User ceases it checked mail at three P.M., on the path into the tank.
Stage 4. User sends the letters to its associates, who sit after the adjacent computers - it is simple because to eat this possibility.
Stage 5. User sends to itself letter so that would verify how rapidly they it was returned.

The first iMac

Stage 1. User buys to itself the first iMac, because it appears very attractively.
Stage 2. User is hated its iMac, because several years pierced, and it to these was attractive.
Stage 3. User buys four different models iMac and it gives nickname to each of them.
Stage 4. User is converted its iMac into the present aquarium.
Stage 5. To user annoys aquarium, and it alters it again into the the original iMac

iBook

Stage 1. User is acquired iBook, but it is afraid was taken it with itself
Stage 2. User beret iBook with itself into the leave, but never does not take out its bag.
Stage 3. User beret iBook into the aircraft and during the flight redaktiruyet video.
Stage 4. User beret iBook into the aircraft, is indicated that it - Stiv Dzhobs it gives out autographs.
Stage 5. To user beret iBook into the aircraft, but only in that case, if in flight anything it was happened of its PowerMac G4 and display Apple Cinema

Determination Of "megahertz"

Stage 1. the "velocity of computer"
Stage 2. "millions of cycles per second"
Stage 3. "the very simplified and most frequently
inaccurate attempt measured the general productivity of system"
Stage 4. "myth created so that it would force the users PC would be replaced its terrible computers by the same, but are more rapid"
Stage 5. User silently beats on it faced PC-hzerov with each reference of the word
of "megahertz"

Outlying devices

The stage of y.Pol'zovatel' buys printer for $30 and is experienced confusion apropos of that how can it adapted other ports USB
Stage 2. User buys scanner (after the half year comparison of prices in the different firms), scanner is used one time, after which
Stage 3. stands that covered by the pile of papers.
Purchase iPod, disappointment with the fact that iPod does not lose vinyls.
Stage 4. User buys portable digital video camera and so frequently it it is used that it begin it took in as the part of face of user
stage 5. User knows that USB- tire supports to 127 devices, because personally it was convinced of this

Visit of the Poppy- sites

Stage 1. User reads wash- articles with Apple.com and is believed to each word.
Stage 2. User attends sites with different gossips and it is believed to each word.
Stage 3. User attends MacCentral, but reads only news isolated in boldface
Stage 4. User attends all possible news sites and reads all news, in which is mentioned Apple
Stage 5. User creates its own Poppy- site, because it chuvstvuyet, that in this there is urgent need

Readers, does anyone have any ideas on how "refers to his car as a 'thingy'" managed to become "most frequently calls its poppy simply 'my wheelbarrow'"? Has Sherlock lost its mind, or is it too much to expect anything to survive two translations and still be of any value beyond making us laugh? And has anyone actually gotten an autograph from Stiv Dzhobs? Go ahead and translate your thoughts.

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Bill Palmer

Flecktones.com has posted my Bela Fleck interview

I wanted to say thank you to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones not only for taking the time to grant me an interview about their Macintosh use, but for recently publishing it prominently on their website, in their "Cosmic Quarterly" newletter. The Flecktones continue to be one of the most fan-accessible world-famous bands, and their music is delightfully unique. To view the interview on their site, go here, choose Flash interface, click on the "Cosmic Quarterly" button, scroll down just a bit, and you'll see it. For those of you who want it all and want it now, here's a repost of the interview:

"Ten Questions with Béla Fleck & The Flecktones"

1. The Flecktones feature a banjo, a saxophone, a bass guitar, and something called a "synth-axe drumitar". There is no lead guitarist, no traditional drummer, and no vocalist. How is it that a band so different from any standard band formula can be so popular?

Béla - Beats us!

Richard - We've been lucky enough for so many folks to give this band a listen. Once that happens, folks are hooked. The music is different enough for music lovers to take notice. It's intelligent and has humor. It's a change of pace from the normal stuff, so people get into it very easily.

2. Which Mac models are you sporting these days? Why do you choose to use Macs as opposed to some other kind of computer?

Béla - I have always loved Mac's. Richard and my brother Louie have always recommended them.

Richard - Both Béla and I have Titanium G4's, a must for road travel. In the studio, we each have G4 towers for ProTools use. I had been exposed to DOS computers back in the early 80's. I understood the concept and saw the need for them, but I couldn't get over the green screen and the non sensical commands needed to make use of the computer. So I waited. One day in July of 1984, a good friend of mine sat me in front of a 128 Mac. The screen was white, the letters were black and point and click environment made all the sense in the world. By August, I had my very own 128. I still have it. It's got all the signatures inside! I jumped feet first into the Mac because it worked the way I wanted to use a computer. I could draw pictures (stage plots were the first thing I made), the black and white screen was easy on the eyes. I was hooked.

3. What role do Macs play in the Flecktones recording process?

Béla - We record with ProTools on a Mac.

Richard - In 1995 some friends of ours approached us with a recording platform that was Mac based. It was the Nu-Bus ProTools System. The pitch to Béla was that he could edit to his heart's content. We were on the verge of working on our first live album, which would become "Live Art". We had recordings of shows from different nights and Béla wanted to take the best of the shows and put together a great live show. ProTools was the answer and the Mac was the only game in town. The rest is history.

4. In what ways do you use your Macs while touring?

Béla - We make our set lists, merchandise reports, itineraries. Also I do some editing and occasional sequencing on the bus.

Richard - I use my Mac for everything. I do all the advance work, which means I keep track of Promoters, Venues, hotels, sound companies, lighting companies, schedules, directions...that was the first program I bought, a data base. I use drawing programs to do stage plots, word processing to create Riders, write letters. Now, logging on to check e-mail, get info from the Internet. I also have a good sound analyzer program (Spectrafoo) that I use during every show. I use spread sheets for keeping track of merchandise.

5. The iPod currently has a 27% share of the digital music player market on a monetary basis. When Apple released the iPod, did you think that it would be able to make that much of an impact in the music world so quickly? Do you have an iPod? If so, what music are you listening to?

Béla - Richard has one and loves it. I don't yet.

Richard - I got an iPod as a gift from my wife for Christmas. I didn't realize how much I would love this unit. I have about 50 albums of every kind of music - old stuff to new stuff - Poco to Joni to Radio Head to Peter Gabriel to the new Flecktones album!

6. Apple has stated that it intends to release a slew of new software this year. What software would you most like to see Apple come out with next?

Béla - Don't know

FutureMan - I would like Apple to develop software to support my newest concepts innovations - hopefully you will soon learn of it.

Richard - that's a hard one, those folks are so ahead of the curve that they will think of new directions to go long before I could imagine them!

7. Are you beta-testing Safari along with the rest of us? If so, what do you think of it so far? If not, which is your web browser of choice?

Béla - not I.

Richard - I have downloaded Safari, but I have not used it yet. I don't know why.

8. What new capabilities or innovations would you like to see Apple come out with on a future model? Is there any feature that you've been longing for?

Béla - No it just keeps improving.

FutureMan - I have developed some new concepts and features that is a "think different" type of approach and innovation for the computer -- I cant say more right now.

Richard - same as #6

9. Is it true that [Flecktones bass guitarist] Victor Wooten uses a PC? What's going on there? When are you going to convince him to switch?

Béla - We tried, but he is an iconoclast! The more you try, the more he wants to do it his own way. Actually he has so much PC software, it would cost a mint to get back to where he is.

Richard - Actually, Victor now has a Mac in his studio. He's been using ProTools for about a year now. I guess he is ambidextrous!

10. The Flecktones have a new studio album coming out this year. I can't wait to hear it. What can you tell us about it?

Béla - Lots of music, three CDs worth! Lots of guests and we are very happy with it. We feel that we used the studio in deeper ways then ever before.

Richard - we've accomplished things that were hardly possible 10 years ago. We had a ball making the most of the capabilities of ProTools.

"Does it perform better on a Mac?"

In the name of college research, Lisa has written in with several questions for me. I suppose this technically amounts to my first interview. That's got me a little nervous, but I'll do my best to oblige.

Lisa: What various software does Mac support that's important to many users, and does it perform better on a Mac?

Bill: Apple provides its users with the iLife multimedia suite, which includes consumer-level software titles geared toward digital music (iTunes), digital photography (iPhoto), digital video (iMovie), and DVD authoring (iDVD). Apple has even gone so far as to give Mac users three of those applications for free. None of these apps has any legitimate equivalent in the Windows world, meaning that if you want the best multimedia experience, you'll have to achieve it on a Mac.

In other areas, Apple has created its own Mac-only applications that exist alongside the standard apps from the PC world. Keynote competes with PowerPoint, Safari challenges Internet Explorer, AppleWorks coexists with MS Office. This provides Mac users with their choice of using either Apple's software titles or those from Microsoft. When I make a presentation, sometimes I'll use Keynote and sometimes I'll use PowerPoint, since they both have certain strengths. If I were a Windows user, I wouldn't have that choice. It would be PowerPoint or nothing.

Lisa: What is compatible with Mac (i.e. iTunes, iDVD, various design software, etc.)

Bill: Nearly all of the most popular software titles exist for the Mac platform. While Windows does still have a larger number of software titles overall, there are very few aspects of computing in which a high-quality application for the Macintosh doesn't exist. For example, there is no Mac version of Visio, but a Mac-friendly program called Omnigraffle does the exact same thing. Some applications, such as PowerPoint, even have features on the Mac version that don't exist on the Windows side. All of the major professional publishing, web, imaging, and design apps exist on the Mac (Photoshop, DreamWeaver, InDesign, etc.). And of course, most of Apple's enticing and innovative software is Mac-only, and I believe that more than makes up for the fact that Windows might have twenty-five more versions of solitaire than the Mac does.

Lisa: What type of memory protection does Mac OS X have and how is that extraordinary?

Bill: MacOS X's UNIX foundation provides a protected memory foundation. This means that if one application does decide to crash, the rest of the software you're using will keep on going with no harm done. You just have to re-open the app that crashed, and you're back in business. Anyone who has gone through the old days of restarting the whole computer anytime one app crashed would probably be willing to refer to it as "extraordinary". If you sense that an app is about to go down, you no longer have to race to all your other apps and try to save your work before the system locks up. You just force-quit the offending app and there's no need to restart.

Lisa: Is it difficult to use various features on a Mac like programs, e-mail, downloading software, etc.?

Bill: These features generally work as well on a Mac as they do on any other computer, but Apple has managed to give its users some extra advantages. One is that Apple's mail program, simply called "Mail", does an excellent job of identifying and filtering out junk mail before the user even has to see it. Another is that Apple's new web browser, Safari, can identify what type of file you're downloading and act accordingly. For example, if you're downloading software that comes on a compressed disk image file, Safari automatically unstuffs it, mounts the image, copies the software to your desktop, unmounts the image, and moves the disk image file to the trash. It does all of this in the background without the user having to do anything, which is the way it should be. The fewer tedious steps for the user, the better.

Lisa: Is Mac recommended for home use of more for business use? What type of people prefer it better than Windows?

Bill: Most businesses still use Windows PC's, but this is not always the case. Publishers, print houses, graphic design firms, music studios, newspapers, magazines, movie makers, photographers, and various other industries tend to be very Mac-centric, so the notion that "businesses use PC's" is not necessarily true. Apple has just begun selling powerful Macintosh-based servers to businesses, so this might cause some of those businesses to later decide that they want to buy more Macs to go with their new Apple server.

Musicians, artists, educators, writers, designers, free thinkers, and all kinds of creative types have traditionally preferred the Macintosh over Windows. Now that the Macintosh is a UNIX system, which is what a lot of colleges use, more computer "geeks" are warming up to the Mac as well. Biotechnology firms are also showing new interest in the Mac platform. These days there seems to be new interest in the Mac from yet another surprising source every time you turn around. Apple Executive Fred Anderson said yesterday that Apple's marketshare among consumers has "doubled", so that would mean that more and more home users are preferring the Mac. It's true that most of the world still uses Windows, but the Mac platform is getting so far ahead of the game in so many aspects that I believe we'll see even more people switching to the Mac in the next few years.

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Whew, I guess that wasn't so bad after all. Anyone else out there want to interview me?

The Five Stages of Macintosh User

Norb writes in to ask, "What could possibly consist of a beginner, an intermediate or a proficient user?". I know that Norb is looking for a serious answer, and I promise I will provide one soon. But for some odd reason Norb's question brought to mind one of my favorite comedy routines of all time, Larry Miller's "The Five Stages of Drinking". So in that sprit, I thought I'd have a little fun with it. Call this, if you will, "The Five Stages of Macintosh User".

A user at "Stage 1" probably just bought his first Mac and is still settling in, while a Mac user who's reached "Stage 5" has seen it all and done it all to the point that he probably needs to participate in a few of Larry Miller's stages of drinking:

Technical Terms

Stage 1: uses words like "thingy" to describe the various parts of his computer.
Stage 2: knows a few technical words but spells them all phonetically.
Stage 3: always describes his computer in the most technical terms possible, but doesn't know what most of those terms mean.
Stage 4: has gone back to using words like "thingy" to describe the various parts of his computer, because he doesn't want people to realize that he's an expert user, for fear that he'll spend the rest of his life giving them free technical support.
Stage 5: is familiar with of thousands of technical computer terms, but refers to his car as a "thingy".

Internet usage

Stage 1: uses America Online for Internet access and thinks that everyone else does too.
Stage 2: has heard rumors of a "real" Internet out there, but doesn't believe it.
Stage 3: wants to get rid of AOL, but doesn't know of any other Internet providers.
Stage 4: would rather give up computing than use AOL.
Stage 5: went back to using AOL because he felt he needed a challenge.

Word processing

Stage 1: uses AppleWorks for word processing because it came with his computer.
Stage 2: uses AppleWorks but considers buying Microsoft Word because he figures any $400 word processor must be really good.
Stage 3: uses Microsoft Word because it has more features, but can't make any of them work.
Stage 4: has learned how to use every last feature of Micorsoft Word, then mourns the fact that he could have achieved world peace in less time.
Stage 5: uses AppleWorks because he just deleted Microsoft Word from his computer in a fit of rage.

Email habits

Stage 1: calls people on the phone to see if they received the email he just sent to them.
Stage 2: prints every email he receives, just to be on the safe side.
Stage 3: stops to check his email on the way to the bathroom at three in the morning.
Stage 4: sends email to the coworker in the next cubicle, just because he can.
Stage 5: sends email to himself just to see how long it takes before it shows up in his own inbox.

Thoughts on the original iMac

Stage 1: bought himself an original iMac, because it was cute.
Stage 2: now hates his original iMac, because it's still cute.
Stage 3: has four iMacs of varying ages, and has nicknames for each one.
Stage 4: turned his original iMac into a real live fishtank.
Stage 5: turned his original iMac into a fishtank, got bored with it, turned it back into a computer.

"Road Warrior" status

Stage 1: has an iBook but is afraid to take it out of the house.
Stage 2: takes his iBook with him on vacation, but keeps it in his suitcase the whole time.
Stage 3: takes his iBook on the airplane with him, and uses it to edit video.
Stage 4: takes his iBook on the airplane with him, tells people he's Steve Jobs, and signs autographs.
Stage 5: takes his iBook on the airplane with him, but only as a backup for the PowerMac G4 and Cinema Display that he also takes on the airplane with him.

Thoughts on Mac versus Windows

Stage 1: Coke versus Pepsi.
Stage 2: Coke versus Chek Cola.
Stage 3: Coke versus piss-water.
Stage 4: Coke versus being hit over the head with a Coke bottle.
Stage 5: Coke versus, well, Coke, because there are no other soft drinks, are there?

Definition of "Megahertz"

Stage 1: "the speed of a computer"
Stage 2: "millions of cycles per second"
Stage 3: "a simplistic and largely inaccurate attempt to measure the overall speed of a computer"
Stage 4: "a scam to get PC users to upgrade so they can have the same old crap, but faster"
Stage 5: he's likely to decapitate a PC user just for mentioning the word "Megahertz".

Peripheral collection

Stage 1: a $29 printer, and he wonders what the other USB ports could possibly be used for.
Stage 2: a scanner that he spent six months researching before he bought it, and so far he's used once, and now it lies under a stack of paper...somewhere.
Stage 3: an iPod, but he's disappointed that it doesn't "do" vinyl.
Stage 4: a digital video camcorder that he uses so often that his kids think it's an actual part of his face.
Stage 5: knows that the maximum number USB devices that can simultaneously be connected to one computer is 127, because he's reached it himself.

Mac websites frequented

Stage 1: reads apple.com's promotional material and believes every word of it.
Stage 2: reads the macintosh rumor sites and believes every word of it.
Stage 3: glances at MacCentral but only reads the headlines if they're in bold type.
Stage 4: always reads any article listed on MacSurfer, even if the article's only mention of "apple" is in reference to a fruitstand.
Stage 5: starts his own Mac website because he doesn't think there's enough of them out there already.

Alright, so I'm no comedian. But at least I gave you "The Five Stages of Drinking", so don't say I never did anything for you!

Ten more simple tips for enjoying Jaguar

In the spirit of Monday's "Ten simple tips for enjoying Jaguar", here's ten more. Tips number 11 and 12 were submitted by Macintosh Consultant Bruce McLaughlin. The rest come from deep in the recesses of the mind of yours truly. As I said before, sometimes there's nothing more enlightening for an advanced user than discovering that one little trick that makes the whole experience more enjoyable:

11. Put your Home folder in the Dock: You can either click on it to open your home folder in a window, or click-and-hold (control-click) on it to reveal a pop-up menu that will allow you to navigate several layers deep without even opening a window.

12. Put the Applications folder in the Dock: Again, this will allow you either to open your apps folder with one click, or to click-and-hold for a menu that gives you full access to all of your applications. Keep in mind that because the Home folder and the Applications folder are folders, you can only place them on the right side of the Dock's dividing bar.

13. Customize your toolbar icons in Finder windows: Open any Finder window, choose "Customize Toolbar" from the View menu, and your windows will morph into a customizing tool that gives you about two dozen various icons that you can drag into the toolbar. Each icon represents a different action or task that you might want to have one click away at all times. To make more room in your toolbar, drag existing icons out and they will vanish. When your toolbar looks the way you want it, click the "Done" button, and the contents of your window will be restored.

14. Set Mail to automatically check for new email every few minutes: If you find yourself having to click the "Get Mail" button in Mail every time you want to check for new mail, set mail to check automatically. Select "Preferences" from the Mail menu, and next to "Check for new mail", select "every five minutes". Now, as long as you've got Mail running in the background and you're connected to the Internet, Mail will do your checking for you and notify you if anything new comes in.

15. Put your Print Center in the Dock: When you print something, it goes to your Print Center and is then fed to your printer. If you accidentally hit the print button for, say, all fifty pages of a document when you only wanted the first page, you might be able to cancel the job harmlessly if you can reach it while it's still in the Print Center. Unfortunately, Print Center is buried in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder, and getting to it is not a quick task. You can change that by dragging Print Center into the Dock.

16. Choose the correct font smoothing setting: Open System Preferences, click on the General pane, and next to "Font smoothing style", make sure that the option selected matches your monitor. The eMac and classic iMac are CRT's; the new iMac, all laptops, and Apple's Studio and Cinema Displays are flat panels.

17. Decide whether you want your scroll arrows together or at top and bottom: While you've got the General pane open in System Prefs, take a look at your "Place scroll arrows" settings to make sure it's set the way you want it to be. This refers to position of the up and down arrows that you use to navigate upward and downward in any window.

18. Adjust the size of your desktop icons: Close all your Finder windows and choose "Show View Options" from the View menu. Drag the "icon size" slider up or down to make your desktop icons larger or smaller. Thanks to Jaguar's Quartz graphics rendering, icons look really good even at huge sizes. You can make them bigger in order to see them more clearly, or smaller if you're running out of space on your desktop.

19. Minimize your windows using the Scale Effect: Even though I love the visual feedback of the "swoosh" of the genie effect when I minimize windows into the Dock, it makes some people seasick. In System Preferences, click on the Dock pane, and where it says "Minimize using", select "Scale Effect". Now, your windows will simply shrink to scale when you minimize them. If you can't visualize what this effect looks like, just try it. It also comes in handy if you're on a slower computer and the Genie Effect is burdening your system.

20. Just for fun, check your uptime: Most users don't dare open the Terminal application, Jaguar's UNIX command line. While it's true that you can cause yourself problems by typing in random commands if you don't know what they mean or what they do, here's one command that's absolutely harmless: uptime. Look for Terminal in your Utilities folder inside your Applications folder. Launch it, and when you get your first prompt, simply type "uptime" and press return. You will then be told precisely how long your computer has been running since your last restart. This is handy when you want to prove to your friends that Jaguar really doesn't crash -- ever. If you don't know how to use the Terminal, be sure to quit the program before you get tempted to press your luck any further.

Do you have a simple tip or two that might go a long way toward ensuring that Macintosh users really never have had it so good? Feel free to contribute to the greater good of the user base.

Tips number 1 through 10 can be found by clicking here.

AppleWorks to go home in every student's backpack?

Just when I thought it was safe to write "The Last AppleWorks 6 Review", eWeek reports that Apple is set to release yet another AppleWorks 6 update this week. The new version 6.2.7 will feature "improvements to AppleWorks' presentation and spreadsheet modules" and "several international spelling dictionaries". It's always nice when Apple takes the time to release one more update for an aging application, and everyone should install it, but it's hardly headline-grabbing. On first blush, the biggest news here appears to be that the packaging has been re-designed. If nothing else, I now know that I need to block out some time next week to install this on all three hundred Macs at work. Big deal. Time-consuming, for sure. Perhaps even a crucial update, might even fix a long-standing bug or two. Certainly not interesting.

But down around the eighth paragraph, the eWeek article includes the following tidbit: "Apple plans to usher in a new purchasing option for education buyers, dubbed 'home use licensing.' Through this program, schools will be able to let their students install AppleWorks on their home computers."

Wow. Now that is a big deal. This is the first I've heard of it. Although I have no knowledge of whether my district intends to participate in this program, my mind races at the possibilities. If I had use of such licensing, I could send the AppleWorks 6 installer home with each and every one of my students. Wait a minute, you say, what about the fact that the majority of them have PC's at home? One of Apple's least-publicized forays into cross-platform software development is the fact that "AppleWorks 6 for Windows" does in fact exist. Well, maybe not for you consumers at home, it doesn't. You have to be logged into the Education portion of the Apple online store just to bring up the SKU for the Windows version, but it's there. In fact, it's been there for awhile.

Presumably under the theory that cross-platform schools would be able to keep their standard software arsenal consistent across the two platforms without resorting to putting Microsoft Office on every Mac and PC, Apple quietly released both Mac and Windows versions of AppleWorks 6. Since I have the infinite privilege of working at a 100 percent Macintosh school, I've never needed to resort to installing, using, or even thinking much about the Windows version. But with this new "take-home" licensing deal, I would theoretically be able to ensure that all of my students would have access to AppleWorks 6 at home if they have a computer there, regardless of which platform it might be. What this would mean is they would be able to go home and work some of the same computing magic that they currently work while at school. I should explain that I'm not talking about compatibility here. This is about the appropriateness of various software applications and their resulting potential in the hands of young children.

We're an elementary school, and we don't teach pure computing skills unless they are going to directly enhance existing curriculum areas. The students acquire the skills along the way. While the students generally enjoy using the computers in an educational manner while at school, they do so because it's a school setting. When they get home, they usually want to use their home computers for games and little else. It's entirely up to the parents as to whether any real-time guidance on what to use the home computer for is provided. I often try to encourage students to spend at least a little time with their productivity tools at home, but when they do so they find themselves staring either the overly complicated and cumbersome MS Office or the horrid and limited MS Works. It's not easy to motivate students to do something educational at home when the only productivity tools they have there don't suit their needs. We're talking about nine and ten year olds here, and while they can wade through the complexities of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it doesn't mean that they are willing to. It's not realistic for me to think that every single student will ever have their own Mac at home (unless I move to Maine, America's new iBook captial), but I've long wished for a way to at least get AppleWorks into the hands of every student. This way they would finally have an adequate and appropriate tool at home that would allow them to easily be creative and productive, rather than just going straight for the latest skating game from Tony Hawk (a Mac user himself, ironically). Now, if this home-licensing deal really is what I think it is, one day I just might get the chance to throw a cross-platform copy of AppleWorks 6 into every student's backpack as they head out the door.

When you see what third graders can accompish with the AppleWorks Slide Show module, or Database module, or simply the Word Processing module in terms of using it to enhance and expand their understanding of core subject areas, and then you realize that most of them don't have access to this software on their home computer, you realize that it's almost criminal for parents to buy their children anything but a Macintosh. Some of my students who have Macs at home are so computer-proficient that they've taught me things about iPhoto that I never knew. I've never seen any data on this, but in my observations, kids who have a Macintosh at home tend to use their home computers in more of an educational fashion. Kids in general can do more with computers of any kind than most adults can, even if the tools provided are not what they should be, but it kills me to see so many of them hampered by an unfortunate mistake in platform choice by their parents.

As an educator, there's little I can really do about the purchases that my students' parents make. If they've chosen to limit their kids' potential by buying them a PC instead of a Mac, it's just something that I have to accept. But perhaps now, I can get education's most crucial software application in the hands of all of my students anyway. This is the kind of move that Apple needs to continue to make in order to gain marketshare not only in schools, but in homes with young children as well. If parents see that it took a product called "AppleWorks" to inspire their kids to finally do something useful and educational on their home Windows PC, it could go a long way toward getting parents to go out and obtain the right computer for their kids after all.

Do your children really know how to go to town on your Macintosh? Do you believe, as I do, that Apple should give away AppleWorks 6 for free to anyone who has a child living with them? I'd love to hear about it.

Apple's game of musical chairs is afoot

MacCentral is reporting that Apple will hold a special invitation-only event next Monday in San Francisco. According to MacCentral, "The invitation says that Apple will have 'announcements that will be music to your ears.'" This will be sure to get the rumors circulating once again over whether or not Apple is in fact in talks to buy Universal Music.

At this point nearly everyone is in agreement that Apple will announce some sort of digital music download service. The big question now is what else will be announced. The invitation does say "announcements" (plural), but that could be anything: the download service, the buyout of Universal, new iPods, a new acoustic record from Jobs and Wozniak...anything, really.

The one thing that strikes me as odd is the location. Apple has historically made these announcements at the Flint Center near its headquarters in Cupertino. What's in San Francisco that would make Apple want to make the announcement there? Universal Music's headquarters are in Santa Monica, so no leads there. I know Apple has plans for a gigantic MegaStore in downtown San Francisco, but I didn't think it was ready to open yet. Well, I suppose this will be a fun week of speculation and anticipation for anyone who has a stake in the future of the Macintosh, the future of Apple, or the future of the record industry.

This morning I just happened to read this quote from Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament: "We wanna work with a record company that's excited about technology and working with the technology - downloading, those sorts of things. That's what's screwing up the business - they don't know how to deal with it." Regardless of whether Apple is buying Universal or simply launching the download service, something tells me that Apple is making their move at precisely the right time. The music industry needs Apple more than ever.

The last time Apple held an "Apple Event" such as this one, it was for the surprise introduction of the iPod. Here's hoping that this time around, whatever Apple gives us has as large of a positive impact as it did the last time.

Think you got this whole thing figured out? Sing to me.

Visual guide for installing iBook memory

Andrew Smith writes in:

"Found your blog via Google. Very interesting! Do you know of any online tutorials that show you how to upgrade the Clamshell ibook with more memory? Preferably with pictures?"

Actually, Apple itself provides both a PDF manual and a QuickTime visual guide that show you how to install various parts yourself. The QuickTime movie shows you the installation step by step, allowing you to see exactly what's supposed to be happening, so you can ensure that your experience matches the official one. The iBook installation page can be found here. In addition to memory, the page also has guides for installing AirPort cards, keyboards, and batteries.

Apple's support site has similar pages for each of the other Macintosh models. Just go to Apple's support site and search for "install [your Mac model] memory".

Ten simple tips for enjoying Jaguar

In the spirit of keeping things simple this Monday morning, here are ten tips to make your Jaguar experience easier and to allow you to begin to customize your interface to your heart’s content. Most of you are probably already familiar with some of these, but hopefully everyone can get something out of these ten tips of varying degrees of simplicity. Sometimes there's nothing more useful to an advanced user than uncovering that one basic concept or trick that you'd somehow been missing all this time:

1. Make the Dock automatically hide and reveal itself: Click on the Apple Menu (upper left-hand corner), go to “Dock” and on the submenu, choose “Turn Hiding On”. Your Dock will disappear off the bottom of the screen, and will only reappear when your cursor touches the bottom edge of the screen. This gives you more screen space to work with. It can be quite useful when working on a laptop.

2. Move the Dock to the left or right side of the screen: Click on the Apple Menu (upper left-hand corner), go to “Dock” and on the submenu, choose “Position on Left” or “Position on Right”. It brings a whole new meaning to the concept of "left-brained" and "right-brained".

3. Adjust the Dock’s size: On the right end of the Dock, just to the left of the trash can, there is a black dividing line. Click-and-hold on the black line, and drag it up or down to adjust the size of the Dock.

4. Change the order of your Dock icons: To change the order of your existing Dock icons, just drag them around until they’re in the order you want them to be in. The one and only rule is that applications go on the left side of the black dividing bar, and everything else goes on the right. If this seems simple, it is. The ordering of the Dock is not restrained by alphabetical order, application type, or anything else. Other than the fact that the Finder stays on the far left and the trash stays on the far right, you're the boss.
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5. Know what application you’re in at all times: In the upper left-hand corner of the screen, next to the blue apple, you will always find the name of the application you’re using in bold letters. Although you can have as many applications running or active at one time as you want, you are only “using” the one in the foreground -- you are considered to be “in” this application. The menus across the top of the screen change based on what application you’re in, so it’s good to be aware of which app you’re in at any given time. The bold name of the app is also a menu that allows you to access the preferences and settings for that application, as well as to quit it.

6. Know what the “Finder” is: The Finder basically the name of your desktop. Anytime you are looking through the hard drive, locating a file, or moving items around the desktop, you are using the Finder. The Macintosh has had the Finder since the very beginning, but few users have been consciously aware of its existence. The Finder is always running and is represented by the blue happy-face at the bottom left of the screen. When you are in the Finder, the word “Finder” will appear in bold in the upper left-hand corner of the screen (since this is the application you are using at that time). If someone tells you to “go to the Finder” and you don’t know what this means, just check the upper left-hand corner of the screen. If it doesn’t say “Finder”, just click on the blue happy face in the Dock and it will take you there..

7. Make your hard drive icon invisible: Because there is already a happy-face icon in the Dock that gives you access to the hard drive, the hard drive icon on the desktop is unnecessary unless you prefer using it. To make it disappear, go to the Finder (see #5 above), click on the Finder menu, choose Preferences, and a window will open. Uncheck the box next to “Hard Disks” if you want the hard drive icon to disappear from the desktop.

8. Know what applications are running: In MacOS X, you can have as many applications running at one time as you wish. Supposed you are typing a document (AppleWorks) while surfing the web (Safari), listening to music (iTunes), sorting your digital pictures (iPhoto), looking up a movie time (Sherlock), and sending instant messages (iChat). You can easily switch among these applications without having to quit any of them or close any windows. The biggest difficulty most users have when working with multiple applications is that they think they have to close one window in order to open another. This is not the case. Looking at your Dock, every active application has a black triangle underneath it. To switch to another active app, just single-click on its Dock icon. For example, if you are using Safari and someone sends you an instant message and you want iChat to come to the front of the screen, just single-click on the iChat Dock icon. When you want to go back to Safari, just single-click on its Dock icon. There is no need to close any windows in the process.

9. Shrink your menu bar clock: In the menu bar in the upper right-hand corner of the screen you will find the clock, and icons for volume, displays, battery life (if on a laptop), internet connection (if configured for dial-up internet), and AirPort (if wireless). Especially on a laptop screen, there is barely enough room for everything! To make more space, you can turn your clock into a small analog clockface by clicking on the time and choosing “View as Icon” from the menu.

10. Move your menu icons around: Hold down the Apple key while you drag the clock, volume, etc. around in the upper right-hand corner, and they will change places. You can put your most valuable icons on the right side, to ensure that they are always visible.


I know these are fairly basic, but sometimes it's a good idea to make sure all your bases are covered. If you already knew all of these, send in a more challenging one!

Snood 3.0 beta 3 for MacOS X

For awhile, it seemed as if Snood and Quark XPress were going to battle it out for the dubious distinction of being the last remaining vital Macintosh application without a native MacOS X version. Well the race isn't over yet, but with this month's new beta release, Snood has pulled comfortably ahead of XPress in achieving native OS X compatibility, proving that even a lone college professor who writes games in his spare time can accomplish more than the developers at Quark.

I'm no fan of video games, largely because I'm lousy at them. Any game that features a time limit, or the potential for your character to die instantly, is usually beyond my reach. Even harmless games like Tetris have invariably led to my undoing; by the time I reach the upper levels, the ever-increasing speed of the game has me on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So when I first discovered Snood, I found a game that reminded me of Tetris, but with no time limits, no clock, and no speed increases. In other words, it was just my kind of game. But when the big migration to MacOS X began, Snood didn't come along for the ride. I waited, and waited, until finally I gave up and accepted the fact that Snood would be one of those apps that kept me using the Classic environment much more often than I really wanted to.

A little while back, a ray of hope emitted from Snood land. Creator Dave Dobson released Snood 3.0 beta 1 for MacOS X, which proved that at least he was working on it. Beta 1 was nearly unplayable. It was too slow even for my tastes. Strange errors showed that unlike some other software we know, this one really did deserve the "beta" tag. Still, it meant that Snood for OS X would someday be a reality. When Beta 2 was released, it filled in a big piece of the puzzle. Although not all of Snood's features were yet in place, and some bugs persisted, the speed was there. Occasionally, I would lose the ability to turn my launcher all the way to the right, or lose my game entirely, but that could be forgiven; it was once again Snood time on the Mac platform. But Dave threw in one crippling limitation, which was that you could only play seventy-five games on each difficulty level before you got locked out. It was as if the developer was reminding us, "hey, this isn't finished yet, so don't get too comfy".

This month, Snood 3.0 beta 3 for MacOS X came into existence. After a few days of playing it, I can say this version does indeed seem mostly ready for prime time. The seventy-five game limitation has been nearly doubled, and although there are undoubtedly bugs, none have unveiled themselves to me yet. There are always going to be bugs faults in any ongoing software development project, but at least Dave is allowing us to help him find them, and to feed our Snood addiction in the process.

This leads to the question: what is Snood, anyway? Well, imagine a sort of upside-down Tetris in which instead of blocks falling vertically, you launch animated items (called, fittingly, Snoods) upward at any angle you wish. At the outset, there are several rows of random Snoods attached to the ceiling, and your job is to get rid of them all. You only have a certain amount of headroom, so you must use your Snoods wisely. When you connect three of the same Snood, all three disappear. The law of gravity applies here, so if additional Snoods were only hanging on by one of the three Snoods you just obliterated, they fall away harmlessly. Although there is no time limit, the ceiling does have a nasty way of lowering itself row by row after a certain number of Snoods have been fired. Subtle complexities of the game allow you to delay the fall of the ceiling by eliminating your Snoods in certain ways, and you generally learn these tricks by playing it more and observing the ways in which you lose.

To say that Snood is addictive is to say that Apple is innovative -- neither adjective does its subject justice. The fact that you don't have to play the game with any more speed than you wish to ironically often leads me to play faster, sometimes missing the easiest of shots because I was so overexcited by the fact that such an easy shot had revealed itself to me. Snood even has a menu option called "Just One More Game" that automatically quits Snood when your next game ends, filling you with the hope of freeing you from your addiction long enough to use the restroom, go to the store, or perhaps even go to work, before rushing back to your computer to start up again. The game will ruin your life, and you won't care.

Snood is not a free product, and I would urge you not to treat it like one. Like all shareware, you can download it and play it with most of its features intact without ever sending a dime in the direction of the developer. While tempting, this is not the way to encourage small-time independent developers to take the time to write OS X-native versions of their software. The fifteen dollar price tag is much less than most off-the-shelf video games, few of which provide the kind of nearly-unending enjoyment and frustration that Snood can generate. Several cool features only become available once you pay and register. If you don't want to pay for the beta, then at least consider paying up when the final release sees the light of day. In the mean time, go get that beta. There's even a message board, often frequented by the developer himself, upon which you can post comments about any bugs you find. You'll also find a mighty fine version of Snood for the Palm, as well as a few other platforms that I see no reason to name here.

Snood allows you to choose among several levels of varying difficulty, including a "Puzzle" level for those in need of variation, and there's even a "Child" level for the younger ones. But you'll soon realize that the only way to achieve a higher score in Snood is to play on the "Evil" level, which rarely allows you to win. Well, it rarely allows me to win. As I said, video games just aren't my thing.

Are you a fellow Snood addict? Trying to kick the habit? Ready to start the addiction all over again, now that you can do it natively on MacOS X? Got another game that readers need to know about? Play me.

The Jaguar Experience on an original iMac

In response to my "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" column, Todd Betterley writes in:

"Wow, did I do a double take when I read about your epiphany over doing all the great stuff in OS X, but on a '5 year old machine'. That's because my mac at home is that same model, the original revision A bondi iMac (233 Mhz/tray loading CD). But I'm still running OS 9 on that machine and waiting until I can scrape the bucks together to get a new PowerBook, because I was under the impression that you couldn't run OS X on a Rev-A Bondi iMac. Did you do any upgrading to it to be able to run Jaguar? Any info would be greatly appreciated."

Well Todd, MacOS X certainly runs on the original iMac, but it runs with the kinds of limitations you'd expect from a five year old computer. I'll lay out the upgrade process, the limitations, and the best ways for making the most of what you've got, for you and anyone else who might be in your situation.

I've made two hardware upgrades over the years. The first was to boost the video-RAM from the original two megabytes up to six. These days, this'll cost you around five dollars, and I'd recommend it even if you're sticking with OS 9. This is something that only rev. A iMac owners need to do; starting with rev. B, Apple included the extra VRAM itself. Readers who are unsure of whether their iMac needs the extra VRAM should refer to their Apple System Profiler.

The second, vital hardware upgrade is the RAM memory. The first four revisions of the iMac came with a now-paltry 32 Megabytes, barely enough to even so much as boot up OS 9, let alone OS X. I buy my RAM from these guys but you can do your own comparison shopping here. You can boost yourself all the way up to 256 Megabytes (128 in each slot) for around forty dollars, and that's plenty of RAM to run MacOS X. Apple says that the rev. A iMac can't be upgraded past 256 MB, and my experiences have told me the same, but if anyone out there has found a way to take the rev. A any further, please let me know. The rev. B, C, and D models can officially hold up to 512 MB, which equates to more speed under OS X. And with computers this old and slow, you'll want all the speed boosts you can get.

Although I've often been tempted to rip the original four gigabyte hard drive out of my old iMac and replace it with an off-the-shelf 40 or 80 GB model, I've always ended up deciding not to. While RAM upgrades on an original iMac can be done rather harmlessly in ten minutes or less, hard drives are a whole different ballgame. First, you have the unenviable task of moving all your data from the old hard drive to the new one, then reinstalling all your apps, getting all your iLife libraries back where they belong, and so on. Secondly, although at four and a half years old there's no warranty left to void, replacing the hard drive requires taking apart quite a bit of the inside assembly, which exposes you to the possibility that your iMac might not want to boot up anymore once you put it back together. I once had to remove a hard drive from a fully vandalized iMac, and that was difficult enough, even knowing that I wasn't going to have to put the computer back together again once I was done. But for those who enjoy a challenge, Macintouch has several reader descriptions of the process. One word of caution: although I don't normally recommend partitioning your hard drive, if you upgrade your iMac to a drive larger than eight gigabytes, you must create a first partition no larger than eight gigabytes and install your OS X system on that partition. Otherwise, OS X is guaranteed not to work. The good news is that if you think you can live within the confines of the original four gigabytes, you don't have to worry about any of the above technobabble.

If you have decided to stick with your original hard drive, when installing Jaguar, choose the "Custom Install" and uncheck any foreign languages and printer drivers you know you won't need. Sure, the novelty of being able to boot your computer with menus in the Ubamban language might be tempting, but you're going to need that hard drive space for more important things -- trust me on this. By going the Jaguar route on your tiny hard drive, you're volunteering to enter a world in which you obsess over hard drive space the way you once obsessed over wall space in your college dorm room. Especially if you plan to do anything with pictures or music, you don't want to waste any of your precious four gigs on stuff you'll never use.

Installing Jaguar on your rev. A iMac from CD-ROM will take at least a few hours, much longer than the typical Jaguar install, because of the inherent slowness of the computer upon which you're installing it. Once you get Jaguar up and running, you'll want to install the 10.2.5 update immediately. It provides a modest speed boost over 10.2, and you're going to need all the speed you can get. While you're at it, download and install Safari v.73, iPhoto 2, and the AppleWorks 6.2.4 update. Run Software Update (in System Preferences) to what else you're missing in the way of security updates, etc. But be frugal here: if Software Update offers a new version of AirPort software, or iMovie 3, skip it. Your computer doesn't have AirPort or FireWire anyway, so don't waste your precious hard drive space on software you can't even use.

Once you've got your software fully updated, go to your Displays pane in System Preferences and set your colors down to "Thousands". If this sounds like a compromise, it is. It will make your screen look just a bit less perfect, but it will also boost the speed of your computer by what I might ballpark at twenty percent. If you're afraid that you might be missing something by not running at Millions of colors, check the box that places a "Displays" menu on the right-hand side of your toolbar, which allows for one-click toggling of color and resolution settings. This way, you can jump back to Millions of colors if you ever need to. You'll also notice the 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution settings. Ironically, 800x600 is the setting that makes everything larger, despite the smaller numbers. Even if you always ran your iMac in 800x600 mode under OS 9, you might consider trying 1024x768 under OS X to accommodate the larger icons and eye candy of OS X's Aqua interface. Sure, you'll have to sit a little closer to the screen, but if you can adjust to it, you'll be rewarded with the equivalent of having a larger screen.

Double-click your hard drive and take a look at the window's toolbar to see how much hard drive space is available. This will be crucial going forward. In order to keep OS X humming along, you'll need to find a way to keep at least a gigabyte (one thousand megabytes) of space empty so that OS X can use it for virtual memory. If you've already got a gigabyte or more free, you've got nothing to worry about. If you've got less free space than that, you'll need to go on a scavenger hunt looking for things that you don't need. Keep in mind that simple word processing documents take up almost no space at all, and throwing away ten thousand of them still wouldn't make a dent. The following are the kinds of offending items you're looking for, and what you choose to throw away is your business:

Applications you never use: We've all got an old 46 Megabyte demo of a game we'll never play, or an application we were sure we would use every day but haven't launched in years, buried somewhere on our hard drive. Find them and trash them.

Full-screen video files: QuickTime and RealPlayer video clips take up quite a bit of space if they last more than a few seconds or take up a large chunk of the screen. Unless it's footage of your grandchildren, you might want to part with it. That old cartoon of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Love Rollercoaster" could be taking up 20 or 30 Megabytes easily.

Uncompressed music files: If you've imported music from CD in native AIFF format, it's taking up ten times the space it needs to. Use iTunes to compress it to mp3 and then toss the original AIFF file. The only time you would need the AIFF is if you were burning a music CD, and I doubt you're doing much of that with your old rev. A iMac.

There are also a variety of OS X-specific files that you can find and delete using the Terminal which will recover even more hard drive space for you, and I've dabbled in this, but it's dangerous and I'm not necessarily going to recommend it to anyone. I don't want to be the guy who sent your Jaguar experience to an early grave just because you tried to chase down a few more megabytes of free space and ended up trashing a required file. For the seasoned and the daring, Macintouch and other help sites, and perhaps a good book or two, will send you on your way to UNIX Terminal proficiency.

Even after you've secured a gigabyte (or more) of free space, your Jaguar experience on your vintage iMac is not going to be a speedy one. Many functions will run even more slowly than they did in OS 9, although not necessarily to the point of being unusable. If you're looking for speed, a five year old computer is not the best place to look. Because the rev. A iMac is unique in having a Rage IIc graphics card, the interface will run considerably more slowly than even on a rev. B iMac, the first to sport the then-trendy Rage Pro graphics card. And no, the graphics card in an iMac is not upgradeable.

Although most of the latest and greatest OS X apps will run, each comes with its own limitations. While iPhoto 2's enhance and crop tools are usable, the retouch brush is a disaster -- you'll see more spinning beach balls than if you had opted for an afternoon at the pool. You can forget about running the latest graphics-intense video games suitably, but then you weren't exactly able to run them well under OS 9 either. Keynote will not even install because it needs at least eight megabytes of video-RAM, and you can't get past six. And don't even think you're going to get away with running pro titles like Maya and DreamWeaver MX.

But don't despair: AppleWorks, Internet Explorer, Safari, Sherlock 3, Mail, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Microsoft Office, Quicken, and low-intensity games like Solitaire and Snood all work under Jaguar, at varying degrees of slowness. Many of these apps are completely unavailable under OS 9, and that alone should fuel your desire to migrate to MacOS X on your vintage rev. A iMac while you save up for a new eMac, or continue to wait for the next great thing from Apple. If you find you can't live with OS X's limitations on your "slowmobile", you can always boot back to OS 9 with only three clicks of the mouse. But everyone using this particular rev. A iMac found so little use for the days of OS 9 that after awhile, we shut off the Classic environment, and eventually deleted it entirely. For what reason? To save hard drive space, of course. What else?

Have you upgraded your original iMac to MacOS X? Did you find it worthwhile, or did you end up back in the land of OS 9? Have you gone beyond upgrading just the RAM? Have you been as surprised as I was that a computer made back in 1998 can run so much modern software? Update me.

Safari tabbed browsing guide: for the newbies, by the newbie

In response to my "The new Safari: if this is still beta, then I'm a giraffe" article, David Ziff writes:

"Great article, I'm bookmarking your page. Keep up the good work. For the rest of us...could you give a brief tutorial on how to use tabbed browsing and what it is good for."

Well, David, I'm new to tabbed browsing myself, but I'll give it a shot. Since my initial experience with Safari's tabs is still fresh in my head, I'll lay it out for you and anyone else who prior to this week thought that "tabbed browsing" had something to do with window-shopping on the soda aisle in a 1980's grocery store (you'll get that joke on the way home...I hope).

First off, Safari v.73 doesn't have tabbed browsing turned on by default. To turn it on, choose Preferences from the Safari menu, click on Tabs, and check "enable tabbed browsing". It helped me to also check "always show tab bar" so that I could see what was going on at all times. Now that you've got tabbed browsing turned on, what is it? Tabbed browsing adds an extra bar on your browser window that allows you to load several web pages in the same window, and choose among them by clicking on the appropriate tab. The concept is similar to the layout of apple.com, amazon.com, and MacOS 9's Appearance Control Panel.

If you only have one web page open, the user experience is the same with or without tabs. It's when you open that second simultaneous web page that things begin to change dramatically. I struggled for years with trying to position multiple browser windows on the screen so that I could make them as large as possible while still exposing enough of each window so that I could select it and bring it to the front. Alternatively, I would make all my browser windows full-size and rotate among them with a keyboard shortcut. The keyboard shortcut a combination of the Apple key and the "backwards apostrophe" that can be found to the left of the "1" key. I often went back and forth between these two strategies, because neither was ideal. Glancing at the screen, I had no sure-fire way of knowing how many, if any, browser windows were open behind the front one, let alone what might be displayed on each of them.

Tabbed browsing changes all that. When you go to open your second website, instead of pressing Apple-N for a new window, you press Apple-T for a new tab. In your tab bar, a second, blank tab appears. Your first website isn't gone, it's just hidden behind the new tab you've opened. To load a website in your new tab, you bring it up the same way you normally would (type it in, choose a bookmark, etc.). To view your original page, now hidden, you simply click on its tab to bring it to the front. Unlike with the old multiple-windows method, one glance at the tab bar will tell you that you've got two websites open, and the first few words of the title of each site will appear on its tab so that you can easily see which tab is which.

The fun doesn't stop with two tabs. The question then arises: "Why would I want more than one or two websites open at the same time?". Everyone's surfing experience is different, but I'll give a personal example. When I sit down to surf the web, I like to keep MacCentral and MacSurfer open at all times, because if new Apple-related news pops up, I want quick access to it. MacSurfer often lists over one hundred articles, so each time I see one I want to read, I prefer to load it in a new tab or window instead of the current one, so that I can continue to scan down the page looking for more articles. I also participate in a handful of message boards, and it's much easier to keep them open in the background than to bring them up from scratch every time I want to check for new posts. Needless to say, your browsing experience will take you to different places than mine, but there's nothing more liberating than freeing yourself from the limitations of only having one website open at a time.

At present, I've got eight tabs open. As I type this column in one tab, I can glance at the other seven, each of which has pages loaded that I intend to visit or revisit later. Some sites, such as MacCentral, automatically reload themselves periodically, and Safari denotes this by showing a black rotary wheel spinning on that tab while that page reloads. Each tab also sports a small "x" in a circle that allows me to close a tab without first having to bring it to the front. In addition, I can Control-click (or right-click) on any tab, and a menu will give me the option of reloading the tab, closing it, closing all other tabs, and more. Again, you can perform all these tasks without even bringing that tab to the front.

I was initially a bit disoriented to realize that when tabbed mode is active, pressing Apple-W only closes the front tab, not the whole browser window. I can't ever remember a time when pressing Apple-W on a Mac hasn't closed the active window. But in this case it's a good thing, since accidentally closing your lone browsing window would cause you to lose all your tabbed pages, lousing up your browsing experience entirely. The one exception is when you only have one tab open, in which case Apple-W goes ahead and closes the window. Once the dizziness wore off, I realized that this is yet another example of Safari's innovation: if you only have one tab left open, then you probably do want to close the window. It's as if Safari is thinking for you, and unlike other self-proclaimed mind readers such as Microsoft Word, Safari's line of thinking seems to be attuned with with what a real human would actually want.

My main complaint with Safari's current implementation of tabbed browsing is that the keyboard shortcut for rotating among tabs, Shift-Apple-right arrow (or left arrow to rotate backwards) requires two hands and is therefore somewhat of a hassle. My request to Apple is that while tabbed browsing is active, the keyboard shortcut that normally rotates among windows should instead rotate among tabs. But it's a small complaint, and since Apple has left beta season open for Safari, I'm hoping this will get resolved before we see the 1.0 release.

If you come across a link and you want to open it in a new tab, hold down the Apple key while clicking on the link. Whether it opens in a new tab behind the current one, or whether it immediately jumps to the front, depends on whether you checked the "select new tabs as they are created" option in Safari Preferences. I prefer to have my new tabs open in the background so that I can finish whatever I'm doing in my current tab before moving on to the new one. I often load several links in new tabs and don't get to them until much later on, leaving me with a slew of unread articles waiting patiently for my attention. Just how many tabs can you realistically have open at one time? As you open more and more tabs, their width automatically shrinks, a behavior borrowed from Apple's Dock. At some point the tabs stop shrinking and any new tabs you create will hang off the right side of the tab bar and must be accessed via a pop-up menu. Closing a few tabs will make them all visible again.

Olaf Rosendahl writes in from Germany to share that tabs were "developed by a Mozilla project called 'MultiZilla'". Credit should certainly go where it is due, in this case to the open-source developers who worked on the project. Safari just happens to be the first tab-sporting browser that also meets all my other browsing needs. I said in my earlier column that used to "hate" tabbed browsing, but this was primarily because I knew I couldn't have it. I knew that it had the potential to change the way I surf the web, and now, thanks to Apple, it finally has. If you find that tabbed browsing is not for you, you can simply turn it off. But give it a chance. Once you get past the initial disorientation, you might find that you like it as much as I do.

Are you a new devotee to tabbed browsing? Have you recently switched from Camino, Netscape, or Mozilla, because Safari finally has tabs? Is there even more goodness to tabbed browsing that I've missed because I'm so new to it? Browse me.

Macintosh users, you've never had it so good.

I've been using the title of this column as a tag line for this website for awhile, but it occurred to me today that I haven't taken a crack at explaining why I believe it's so true. I'll see what I can do to put into print what I so often preach not only to those who are on the fence over whether to join the Mac platform, but also to those Mac users who sometimes forget just how good they have it:

Earlier today, I found myself in a computing state of grace. I was staring at not one, not two, but nine simultaneously open websites, thanks to the goodness of Safari's tabbed browsing. Mail was running in the background and checking for new email every five minutes. I was listening to a live QuickTime audio stream of Apple's analyst conference. A fellow educator was bragging to me on iChat about how much she likes Jaguar. A Java-powered digichat conversation whirred by me as I tried to keep up. Sherlock 3 helped me figure out what movie I wanted to go see this evening. Snood was open in the background just in case I managed to get bored with everything else taking place on my screen. And it wasn't until I came back from a trip to the kitchen and glanced at the computer station that I realized the absurdity of my situation: I was doing all of this on a nearly five-year-old computer!

It's an original revision-A bondi blue iMac. It's not mine. It used to be, before I became a laptop lover and handed it over to the family. I pre-ordered it back in August 1998, before iMacs even started shipping, and I still remember the day it arrived on my doorstep. I also remember booting it up and running MacOS 8.1, doing most of my work in ClarisWorks 5, surfing the web with Netscape 4, and playing a video game called Nanosaur. And that was about it -- that was the extent of the user experience. I was satisfied with it at the time, but I knew that more was coming. MacOS X was on the horizon, and with it would come the promise of new kinds of applications that would literally change the way we use computers. At least that's what I told myself every time the little iMac decided to freeze up or slow to a crawl.

Fast-forward five years, and the Mac platform bears almost no resemblance to its former self. I still have trouble taking in the full scope of how vastly the user experience has expanded on this same old iMac. And of course, the user experience on the newer, more powerful Macs I'm accustomed to using is even more expansive and mind-boggling. When looking at the user experience that's available on the other side of the fence, I wonder how Windows users can even stand it. Most of it is because they just don't yet know what all they're missing. Another part is that they've wasted so many years learning the oddities of their platform that they hesitate to jump the fence, for fear that they'll have to spend several more years learning what they expect will amount to the same crap, only different. But when you break down the user experience feature by feature, app by app, the size of the disparity between platforms spells itself out all too clearly for anyone willing to listen. In various columns, I've touched on the goodness of this application, or the coolness of that one, but none of that captures the full scope of what all is going on here. Perhaps this will do the trick:

Internet: Up until a year or two ago, the Internet advantage of the Mac was limited to the fact that you could get up and running on the net more quickly and easily than on a PC. But with the release of OS 9's Sherlock 2, which allowed you to perform certain Internet tasks without first having to hunt down a website that would let you do it, that all began to change. With the onset of Jaguar's Sherlock 3, a host of previously tedious Internet procedures had been reduced to a click or two. Planning a movie theater trip, for example, used to require visiting four or five different websites: one to find out what movies are available and find info on them, another to see the times that the movie was playing at your local theater, a third to watch the movie trailer, a fourth to check the times at an alternate theater, perhaps a fifth to buy tickets online, and so on. Now, thanks to Sherlock 3, all of the above information and more can be gathered with all the effort it takes to click on the Movies button in the toolbar. What gets me, though, is the fact that Windows users still have to do this the old tedious way! Consequently, many Windows users just don't do it at all. They grab a newspaper, call the theater, and wait in line to buy tickets because their user experience isn't sufficient enough to convince them to do things digitally.

Sherlock aside, standard web browsing was long one of the few areas in which the Mac had no clear advantage over the PC: you were stuck with mediocre browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape, regardless your platform. But when MacOS X came along, nimble third-party browsers from small companies like OmniWeb, and developer communities like Chimera, started to spring up specifically for OS X. And if these small-time groups could produce browsers that in some ways outclassed Explorer, then it was surely only a matter of time before Apple released a browser that blew it away completely. When you show PC users some of Safari's innovations such as SnapBack, streamlined bookmark management, and now tabbed browsing, they begin to question why their platform has no such equivalent. The answer that they don't want to hear is that they're simply on the wrong platform. In the past three months, web browsing on the Mac has evolved so far beyond browsing on the PC that the gap between the two makes for two entirely different user experiences. It makes you wonder what the increasingly-widening gap will look like by the end of the year, when Safari is firmly past the 1.0 release.

Instant Messaging: Chatting used to be a simple proposition: you either had America Online or you didn't. But somewhere along the line, AOL decided to give Instant Messaging away to everyone, and as a result we all became familiar with the lingo of "BRB" and "LOL". It didn't matter whether you were on a Mac or a PC, chatting was the same experience, although many PC users were convinced that we Mac users were on some kind of alternative ghetto network which only allowed us to chat with each other (this was never, ever true). Along came messaging systems from Yahoo and MSN, and again, it didn't matter what kind of computer you were using. But last year, Apple, who back in the early nineties gave America Online its startup money (believe it or not), decided to partner with its old chum and create an enhanced version of Instant Messenger, called iChat, just for Jaguar users. You only have to use iChat once to realize how much you like it, and yes, you can still talk to everyone on the Instant Messenger network on both platforms, because iChat is Instant Messenger, just a cooler, more intuitive version -- with a few tricks up its sleeve you couldn't have expected.

If you're on a closed network, at work for example, iChat allows you to use something called Rendezvous to chat with directly with other iChatters on your network simply by signing on; you don't even have to be on the Internet. You don't configure anything, you just sign on. It's weird. It's cool. It's easy. It expands the possibilities of workplace communication. But for those Jaguar users who prefer the standard version of Instant Messenger, it's still around. In other words, you can do things the way PC users do it, or you can use enhanced stuff that's just for Mac users, or both. You have the best of both worlds, which means you've got twice the user experience that your neighbor on the PC does. And if you still prefer to use America Online as your overall internet provider, there exists what one of my former students tells me is an "awesome" version of AOL specifically for Jaguar.

Word processing: This involves typing words, seeing them appear on-screen, and letting a printer put them on paper. It should be the simplest, most straight-forward task you can do on a computer. Unfortunately, Microsoft Word is one of the most cumbersome, difficult, complex, annoying, self-righteous, arrogant, foolish, and pointless applications ever created, leaving users scratching their heads and wondering how it all can be so painful. More unfortunately, Microsoft used a variety of shady tactics to wipe out nearly every other word processor in existence, except for one: AppleWorks. So unlike their PC brethren, Mac users don't have to suffer through World War III when all they want to do is type up a document. Launch AppleWorks 6, type, print, smile. Several advanced features are there behind the scenes if you need them, but often many of us don't, and AppleWorks doesn't throw nineteen toolbars worth of confusing features at you unless you really want it to.

However, if you're a Mac user and you prefer to suffer along with Windows users and brave the morass that is Microsoft Word, you'll have no trouble doing so at all. Microsoft makes versions of Word native to both OS 9 and OS X, and often brags of features that the OS X version has and the Windows version doesn't. There's nothing more humorous than listening to a speech by a Microsoft General Manager in which he shows off feature after feature that he claims makes Microsoft Word a better product on the Mac than on the PC, while he nervously jokes that he's not very popular with his co-workers in Microsoft's Windows division. So, if you're a Mac user, you can either choose to take advantage of the ease of AppleWorks, or you can use what Microsoft says is a better version of Word. Again, it's the best of both worlds. The Windows user isn't nearly so fortunate.

Slide Show Presentations: This was always about PowerPoint and nothing else until Apple decided to release Keynote for Jaguar users. PowerPoint is already better on the Mac than on the PC (just take a look at those Mac-only QuickTime transitions), so Mac users had the advantage even before Apple released the breathtaking Keynote software, which embarrasses PowerPoint in ease of use, interface, and graphical quality. PowerPoint still trumps Keynote on some features, so Mac users have their choice of tools, depending on what type of presentation they wish to make. In addition, Mac users can create photo-only slide shows by literally only clicking one button in iPhoto, eliminating the need to move their photos into Keynote or PowerPoint just to show them off in a slide show. And for those who prefer to make a quick and easy presentation, AppleWorks even has a simple slide show tool built-in for good measure. So Mac users can have at least four viable slide show tools at their fingertips, all with different strengths, if they want to. Windows users have PowerPoint and, well, PowerPoint. So much for the notion that the Windows platform has all the software.

Multimedia: Here's where we Mac users really get to show off how smart we were for choosing the Mac platform. We've got iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD, and now they're all rolled into one interactive suite called iLife. There's nothing even close on the Windows side -- it even took copycats a year or more just to bring bad imitations to market. By the time Adobe PS Album and Picassa were released for Windows, both of which are lousy imitations of iPhoto 1.1, Apple had already released iPhoto 2.0, which put version 1.1 to shame. iPhoto is so intuitive, so empowering, it can turn even the most novice Mac user into a photo-editing maven. My mother taught me how to use it, after she taught herself. While iTunes deals with perhaps the simplest of the multimedia aspects, it stays well ahead of the competition with innovations such as smart playlists, a rating system, and the next version of iTunes will even allow you to play music that's stored on your friend's computer, using the same automatic Rendezvous sharing technology that powers iChat.

iMovie has gotten so good that Ken Burns, the premier documentary maker in America, was even willing to put his name on one of its innovations. iMovie's "Ken Burns Effect" allows you to not only grab your pictures from iPhoto (without even launching it) and drop them into your movie, but employ a pan-and-scan feature that lets you do in one click what poor old Ken probably had to have his professionals spend hours working on for his Civil War documentary. And it doesn't stop there: if you want one of your songs stored in iTunes as background music, it's also one click, also without launching iTunes. The same goes for using your music with your iPhoto slide shows. iDVD is so off-the-handle that I try to avoid using it at all costs on other people's Macs, because I'm so afraid it's going to cause me to go out and buy a new DVD-burning Mac just so I can make my own creations. If you create a DVD of your iMovies with iDVD, your Windows-using friends will scold you for stealing it from Blockbuster, because they will outright refuse to believe that you made it yourself. What's the learning curve for iDVD? From my one experience of creating my own DVD, I'd say there is none. It's fitting that the most potentially complex iLife task is the one that you can perhaps learn how to do the quickest. The more potentially complicated a task, the more Apple manages to simplify it.

So what do Windows users do when they see iLife? At first, they dismiss it as probably being too difficult to learn, until they see it in action. Then they proclaim that they're not interested in multimedia anyway, they just want to use their computer for the basics. But then they see a good deal on a digital camera and buy it on a whim, only to soon realize that they're clearly on the wrong platform. Find a Windows user with a digital camera, force them to plug their camera into your Mac, force them to upload, organize, and edit their pictures using iPhoto, and you've either got an instant Mac convert or one ticked-off Windows user, mad at the world for having unknowingly dropped a thousand dollars or more on a computer that won't let them do anything even close to what they just did on yours.

And that's part of the problem. In order to bail out of their PC and switch to the Mac, the Windows user often feels he or she must first admit to some degree of having made a mistake in buying the PC in the first place. Some would relate this to becoming a fan of another football team just because the other team is seemingly always having a better season. But what Windows users will want to consider is that the gap between platforms wasn't always this wide; the PC wasn't always this ridiculously far behind the Mac. I made the right choice when I first bought the old iMac in 1998 because the Mac indeed offered the better user experience, but not by nearly so much back then. Personal computing hadn't yet expanded to the point where all these new functions were even feasible on a consumer level. You could still get away with a PC for most computing tasks, if less productively or enjoyably. But just as sure as former San Diego Charger Junior Seau put on a Miami Dolphins uniform today, things inevitably change, and you have to make your own changes to make sure you're still in the position you want to be in. Junior says he came to Miami because he wants to win; he's tired of putting out his best effort in a losing cause. Windows users should consider the wisdom of his words.

To Windows users, I can only say this: there's never been a better time to upgrade to the Mac platform. Everything you can do on a PC, you can do it just as well on a Mac, usually better. And there are things you can do on a Mac that are either impossible on a PC or just not worth the aggravation. Switching to a Mac will turn you into a more authoritative and comfortable computer user, complete with more talents, skills, ambition, and bravery. You'll end up using your computer more, and enjoying it more, because you'll get more out of it. You'll realize that despite what you always thought, you really are a "computer person" -- you just didn't know it because you were stuck on the wrong platform all this time.

To Mac users, I'll say this: you've never had it so good. The Mac platform gets better seemingly every day, whether it's this week's new release of Safari that boosts web surfing to a whole new level, or the impending announcement of a music download service, the first legitimate one of its kind, directly from Apple itself. Next week or next month, Apple will release yet another innovative product that you never saw coming, but you will immediately know that you must have, because it just might change your life...again. Each and every time this happens, pinch yourself. Remind yourself that there's no question you're on the right platform -- and that you've never had it so good.

Recent switcher? Prospective one? Forgot how good you have it as a Mac user? Can't wait to see how it gets even better? Having way too much fun showing off the superiority of the Mac platform to your friends, in the hopes of bringing them on board, or perhaps just to taunt them? There's never been a better time to write me.