The OS war continues

Yesterday I was talking to 2 people that had completely different views on operating systems. The first person had just switched to a Mac and bought his wife one as well. He was extremely pleased and said that Vista actually caused him to switch as it was slow and then he had to upgrade his hardware to run it. He also thought that he'd need to run VMWare to run his old Windows apps, but found he only uses it for some media files (probably those with DRM) that don't play on the Mac. On the flip side, the other guy was completely anti-Mac because he said it confused him and he didn't like how iTunes arranged his music. Fair enough to not like iTunes as iTunes is designed for most users that don't care where iTunes actually puts the music; he is the exception.

I always say that you should use the tool that gets the job done; if you want to use Windows, that's your choice, but don't ask me for help. People have also said, buy a computer that the person you know who knows most about computers uses so that you can ask them questions. With that kind of thinking, please buy Windows so you don't ask me questions :-).

I think that most people that sit down with a Mac for awhile and get used to it, will find that it works well and may be less confusing than Windows. With all the software that ships with Macs, it makes it a no-brainer for many people.

The OS war will never end; however, these days with Intel based machines, it is much easier to convince people to move to the Mac.

Caught cheating

No, I didn't cheat in school, I cheated in failing to fix a ReceiptWallet feature. When I was working on ReceiptWallet to move it to document based, I didn't fix the AppleScript support. When ReceiptWallet was a single window application, the scripting support was global; with document based, the scripting had to be specific to a library. As anyone that has written AppleScript support, it is a royal pain in the you know what. I was hoping that no one would notice this, but even before the end of the ReceiptWallet beta, I had someone send me email about it. Damn, I guess I had to fix it.

So, I spent the last 2 days fixing the AppleScript support so that people can bulk load receipts and documents in ReceiptWallet. I'm quite pleased with it, but it was much harder to implement than I'd expect.

My power to offend and being a Mac snob

My comments in this blog seem to offend some. For better or for worse, I speak what is on my mind. It sometimes gets me in trouble, but most of the time helps me get stuff off my mind. I will admit that I'm a Mac snob and want applications to have a Mac user interface; I don't want some cross platform UI (if the app works well and the engine or behinds the scenes stuff is cross platform, that's fine).I received email about a recent post where I basically said that the app's UI was crap. I couldn't get past the UI to actually use the app, so it could be a fine app, but the UI was just awful. For me, pretty much anything done in REALBasic that isn't tuned to the Mac is not a Mac app. Should the author be offended? Sure, he has the right to be offended if he wants. I stand by what I said about the UI; I like using a Mac and if I wanted to use Windows, I'd accept half baked user interfaces and put up with what is shoved in my face. Mac apps are just more elegant and have more polish.

My first podcast interview

Today I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the T4 Show. I've never done an audio interview before (I was interviewed back in high school for the recycling project I started for the local paper), so I was a little nervous. I tried to focus and think before speaking. After a few false starts with Skype (I've never used Skype before), we switched to iChat and things worked well.

You can listen to the whole interview by downloading the podcast. If you like the podcast, you can subscribe via iTunes.

I've listened to the show once (I actually have a number of episodes on my iPod, but only got around to listening to it the other day). I had a lot more time to listen to podcasts last year when I was training for my second marathon; now that I just goto the gym a few times a week, I don't have as much time (I can't just listen to them when I'm working as it hurts my concentration).

I'm not sure how I did on the interview, but I enjoyed doing it. I hope it is the first of many interviews.

Thanks, Michael!