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Friday, 23 August 2002 |
Tim O’Reilly has some things to say about Switchers, this time from Linux and other Unixen to Mac OS X. When Mac OS X was on the horizon, the people who were most excited about it, and understood what the real implications were, were the kinds of geeks who read SlashDot.
The non-geeks, let’s call them freaks as they are the ones on the artier end of the equation, either failed to understand what X was at all, or could not see what all the fuss was about, and still have not made the switch from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X.
This article also has a number of stories from people who have switched to the Mac from Windows and various Unixen. Here are quotes from two of them.
“I quit having fun with computers. Windows 2000? No fun. Windows ME? No fun. Windows 98, Windows XP? No fun. Then I got a new job, where I had to support Macs. So I got a used PowerBook G3. OS 9 was OK. But OS X? Shiiineeeeey. And fun! Computing was fun! A computer, was fun. Laughing at the viruses that tried to infect my computer, was satisfying… and fun!”
“Like a lot of my pals (and tons of other folks as well), I switched from fighting linux on the desktop to OSX and I never want to go back (I never ever want to touch another windows box, as well). linux is a great server platform, no question, but I look back at the last couple of years of literally fighting with the linux desktop as a waste of my time.”
The common thread to these readers’ responses is that OS X just works compared to Linux. O’Reilly’s conclusion: “Apple may be wise to target Unix/Linux rather than Windows in their switch campaign.”
10:41:17 AM 
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Jeffery Zeldman has some thoughts about the Opera web browser and its coming support for the W3C DOM.
Opera is a pretty good web browser, in either its free version wiuth banner ads or the paid one where the banner ads are no longer there in the interface. But its lack of support for the DOM has been a real deal breaker, and has meant it has been of little value for most users. I use Internet Exploder for testing my web page designs, not Opera, because of this nonexistent DOM support.
Incidentally, now that I am using CSS more now than ever before, the failings of DreamWeaver MX’s design view are very apparent. It cannot display most CSS. You have to view the page in your web browser to see what is going on.
There was a report a while back that Macromedia had made a deal of some kind with the Opera people to incorporate their browser into future versions of Macromedia products. DreamWeaver MX would really benefit from that.
10:27:44 AM
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Goddamn! The Opera web browser that I use in writing this weblog just quit. Opera is developing the same bad habits that Internet Exploder exhibits all the time.
10:09:21 AM
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The biggest thing in this update is that “Type layers are no longer rasterized unnecessarily.”
One of the big benefits promised for version 7 was that type not be rasterized if you did not want it to be, but that it would stay as an outline. Instead PS7.0 has been rasterizing it automatically.
10:03:21 AM
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I was visiting the Miramax website this morning, in order to learn more about a movie that a local indy cinema mailing list informed me is playing here early next month.
Miramax makes and distributes many major and minor films that are passed over by the big distributors and studios and yet which may well have major artistic merit. Remember Birthday Girl, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Princess Mononoke, In The Bedroom, Amelie, Iris, The Others and many more?
There are two things about about Miramax’s website that I find wholly objectionable, besides an annoying lack of information or a trailer about the imminent movie—the pages are JavaScripted to fill the screen regardless of what you want. And its designers have resorted to the old habit of making huge Flash movies that must fully download before starting to play. Loading, loading, loading…
Neither of these things are necessary, and they simply serve to insult the site’s readers. Maximizing the browser window by force says to me that the other things I am doing on my computer at the same time are of no importance compared to reading the Miramax web page. Forcing me to wait while a huge Flash movie loads before playing tells me my time is of no value.
9:48:21 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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