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Saturday, 13 July 2002 |
Alpha geeks, web designers and web developers are excited not only by Mac OS X but also the free developer tools that come on a separate CD with each new Mac, and X’s built-in versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Another article in Apple’s Developer website, PHP on Mac OS X, reveals that “Mac OS X provides a great environment for PHP development. The BSD underpinnings of Mac OS X allow PHP to run as an Apache module in its native Unix environment. Using Mac OS X, programmers will see the same stability and extensibility from PHP they have seen in their production servers that run BSD, Linux, Solaris, and other Unix variants.”
10:12:39 PM 
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You know an OS has really arrived when Tim O’Reilly and his company O’Reilly & Associates organize a conference on it.
“We make our living at O’Reilly watching the ‘alpha geeks’ and documenting what they do, since the early adopters tell us a lot about the shape of the future. One thing that’s been overwhelmingly clear this year is that the alpha geeks are choosing Mac OS X.
Why? Mac OS X is one of the most exciting things happening in the industry today. It’s the confluence of three great traditions—Unix/open source, Java, and the Mac—and the best of all worlds.
And lots of cool new stuff. Built-in 802.11 (WiFi) and intriguing new apps like iMovie and iPhoto are drawing both hackers and new users.”
Appeal to the alpha geeks and established users, as well as an army of potential switchers from the Dark Side—Mac OS X has a lot going for it. Just try it and you’ll know exactly what I mean.
In his note about the conference, Tim O’Reilly elaborates:
“Unix developers are excited by Mac OS X because they finally have a platform that gives them the best of both worlds—a fully-functional Unix environment plus full support for office applications—no more need to dual-boot, and no more need to feel like a fish out of water on the wrong side of that dual boot!
Almost all of the Perl 6 core team has switched to Mac OS X, as have many of the top Java and XML developers. Developers in new fields like bioinformatics and peer-to-peer networking are also climbing on board.”
8:55:37 PM
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Wired reports on a young New York fashionista who has built a successful business armed with little more than an iBook and an idea. Inspirational! Let this be a lesson to us all!
“Karin Spitzer is a young fashion entrepreneur who is building a business out of nothing but a copyrighted phrase.
Spitzer, 27, is a refined example of how little it takes to build a business in the information economy: Her tools consist only of a laptop and some imagination.
Spitzer lives in Brooklyn, New York, and manages her business completely from her 12-inch iBook.
The products are designed in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and Quark’s QuarkXPress layout tool. Spitzer designed her e-commerce site on a Mac and operates it from the iBook. All the accounting is done in MYOB’s AccountEdge.”
8:32:01 PM
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From News.Com comes a report wondering whether Mac users are smarter.
“Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings.
The study also said Mac users tend to be more Web savvy, with more than half having been online for at least five years. And the Mac faithful are 58 percent more likely than the overall online population to build their own Web page and also slightly more likely to buy goods online, according to the report.
“With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population presents a very attractive target for marketers, both online and offline,” the research group said.
TS Kelly, director and principal analyst at NetRatings, said that his company decided to publish the study after noticing the differences between the demographics of Mac owners compared with overall PC owners.”
Of course Mac owners are smarter—they took into account the facts and bought themselves a Mac. But does having a Mac also make you smarter again? Using a Mac instead of a Windows machine certainly makes your working life and leisure time a lot easier, much more fun and helps you get more done.
Happy, confident, efficient people probably do become smarter too.
8:00:50 PM
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I am looking forward to trying this out when an NFR copy arrives, to learn what the real advantages are to this new version, but for now there is plenty of data on the Filemaker Pro 6 website.
FileMaker Pro should still be your first choice for a personal database solution, whether you are using a Macintosh or a Windows computer. Look at it next to MS Access and there is simply no comparison—FileMaker wins hands down.
7:43:49 PM
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Having had my interest in CSS reignited by Eric Meyer’s new book, I went in search of more. One that is also getting good reviews is Cascading Style Sheets, written by
Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello, Matt Patterson, and published by Glasshaus. Glasshaus is a sister company of Friends of Ed and Wrox Press.
11:24:41 AM
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I wrote this downloadable PDF document about how to better look after your computer when I found that most people out there are not doing the simplest of things to ensure their machines continue to run OK.
Click to download 56K PDF.
10:18:37 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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