Red Hat Diaries/000e

Transitions II

It's a new mind-set and it's important and significant and a boon and not a hurdle - and yet to acclimate oneself properly, one must make it through this part of the transition. You have an appliance, not a junkware. You relax, you smile, you feel gratefully removed from the horrors of the Wintel world - hey life goes on! And all the stuff you wish you could have had time for or the mental compartments for is suddenly there and you're happier about a lot of things in general, not just computer stuff. Now what was it you wanted to use your box for? Surfing? Go ahead. Correspondence via email? Go ahead. Graphics work? You've found the premier platform. Movie work? Special effects? Digital video wizardry? George Lucas visited the Macworld in Moscone in January 2002 by video tape. So 'nuff said. An Apple is a tool - not a headache to take an escapist out of a horrible world. You have a job needs to be done? Here's your Mac - now do it.

And it's a pleasurable way of doing business too. The change is most remarkable if one has spent years weeping and screaming in the world of Wintel.

But Wintel boxes can appear to be intuitive in a way a Mac will not immediately appear to be. And Wintel boxes - surprisingly enough - will be capable of demonstrating a consistency in their approach to the user that a Mac is not - and this is a bit of a bone to pick for the Apple users out there. Why, for example, is not 'Enter' the same as a double click everywhere? When Cmd-O gives you a file open dialog, why should it open an object in a Finder folder as well? And Wintel does have a second mouse button - today fully implemented, fully functional. As Brian W. Kernighan once said to me, eons ago, seemingly right out of the blue, 'Personally I find the Macintosh mouse paraplegic.' Uh, ok Brian... But one can understand his point, and one can sympathise with Wintel users who want to be able to right click on things to cut copy and paste. Who want to be able to hit Home in an editor to get to the beginning of a line, who don't want to use Cmd-Left Arrow. For although a lot of this is more or less industry standard (try triple clicking on anything on a Mac and then doing it on a Wintel) some of this stuff is conspicuous in its absence on the Mac.

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