I carried on reading about Apple and Macs. And I carried on using my iMac. When you have been a committed user and advocate of a platform for so long, your interest doesn't just vanish overnight. Market share had continued to decline, prices had continued to be high. Jobs had returned, however, and the company stabilized. I became increasingly aware, as the Jobs resurgence got under way, of a curious and disturbing phenomenon. It was hard to say exactly what was happening to Apple, but whatever it was, it made one deeply uneasy. Perhaps the first sign was the appearance of the LCD iMac. Why, one wondered, do we have a round base? How much did that cost? What real use is it? The Cube was another worry. A friend of mine, who had been a senior manager in Apple Europe, bought one. Then he found to his surprise and dismay that he couldn't use his screen with it, and had to buy a completely new screen. The connectors were not standard. Why? You had to wonder, was the inability to source hardware from anywhere but Apple great for the buyer and for Apple, or just great for Apple? Was it even all that good for Apple?
My wife bought me a new Apple keyboard and optical (one button) mouse as a present. The price was at least 4 or 5 times what comparable PC components would have cost, and for what? The new towers came out in pretty shades of pastel and perspex and sounded like jet engines taking off. We kept hearing about the superiority of the PPC; the advertising claims, which seemed incredible, became more strident, and finally were ruled to be false by the UK authorities. My friend's Cube looked elegant and different, but was underpowered and pretty soon was overheated.
It seemed that we had a combination of two things which may appear to have little to do with each other: a reliance on lifestyle marketing, and consequently lifestyle product design, and a continuing committment to locking the hardware and software together, and locking the customer into Apple hardware. The result was higher prices for less performance, but heavier marketing, and marketing of a different sort.
When you joined Internet forums on which Apple was discussed, you became aware of an even more disturbing but related phenomenon. I only later realised what it was. The symptom was an increasing rudeness and intolerance and hostility towards any other platforms. And it was couched in lifestyle terms. Windows machines were ridiculed for being boring beige boxes. Windows users were the subject of snobbish jibes. Contemptuous references to Walmart appeared. Macs kept being compared to high end designer brands, in particular to cars. If you chose differently, it was because you had no taste, no class.
BMWs appeared to have a particular fascination for the Mac aficionado. You didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The chorus of people who seemed to think that Macs were high class, and that buying them was a route to social mobility, was astounding. Could there really be so many people who were so naive about how social class really works in America? And could so many of them be Mac users? I shivered a bit at the thought. You could understand why Hypercard had withered, if this was now Apple's target market.
Finally at the end of the period, one would see flat out lies, and a chorus of abuse when they were refuted. Posters would assert that Macs were cheaper, peformed better, had better components, when it was clear that they were more expensive, performed worse on most benchmarks, and mostly had the identical components. In some ways, they had worse ones. Lifestyle marketing had entered the design process and corrupted it. We now had cases made of dysfunctional material, with interiors arranged for aesthetic appeal rather than cooling efficiency or noise reduction. We had wild and silly claims about productivity. We had a constant rewriting of history. For example, it was now admitted that OSX 10.0, which at the time had been greated with applause for its enormous superiority, had been a total dog. This was because the newest greatest thing was 10.2 or 10.3. Similarly, PPC had been the latest and greatest, but after the switch to Intel, it was admitted to have also barked and walked on all fours on occasion.
- "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 1/5"
- "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 2/5"
- "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 3/5"
- "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 4/5"
- "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 5/5"
It looks like a new "locally integrated menu" will make it into Unity, starting with version 5.6.0. There's basically no information about the new locally integrated menubar, except for two bug reports which link to some custom Unity, Compiz, Metacity and Light Themes branches so to see "LIM" in action, I've compiled all these branches and here's the result. The "locally integrated menubar" can be displayed on the panel (for maximized windows) as well as in the window decoration (unmaximized windows). But it's not displayed on both in the same time.
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Today Samsung AV product lead Chris Moseley had comments about Apple's rumored entrance into the television marketplace that sound eerily similar to that which Palm CEO Ed Colligan's said a few years back about how Apple's ability to simply walk into this market and figure it out like they had managed to do after years of research.
What your interface communicates to users can be just as important as what your software does, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister in discussing the latest edition of the 'Microsoft Manual of Style,' a style guide aimed at designers and developers who create Microsoft software, as well as those who write about it. 'The gist of much of Microsoft's advice is that a user's relationship with computer software is a unique one, and it's important to craft the language of software UIs accordingly,' McAllister writes. 'Occasionally, Microsoft's recommendations verge on the absurd. For example, you might not think it necessary to admonish developers to "not use slang that may be considered profane or derogatory, such as 'pimp' or 'bitch,'" but apparently it is.'
"It's tough being a journalist, especially if you're covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you're stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What's worse is that all these people who are getting rich don't seem to be any brighter than you are and in fact many of them don't seem very bright at all. So of course you get jealous. And then you start thinking maybe you could find a way to cash in on this gold rush. But how do you make gobs of money when your only marketable skill involves writing blog posts?" Absolutely brilliant down to the last letter. Coincidentally, I hold no shares, interests, or anything, in any company whatsoever. I'm a freelance translator by day. Not that anyone cares, but hey, full disclosure and all.
"A hybrid solution that takes the best parts of iOS's one-by-one acceptance and Android's expressed and obvious intents seems like a proper model here. In fact, Apple has many of the pieces in place elsewhere." This is a big issue. Nor Android's model (just list a bunch of confusing permissions), nor Apple's model (individual modal dialogs for each permission) is particularly workable - I doubt regular users check them on Android before installing an application, and in the case of iOS, Apple didn't think it was necessary to secure the address book, so every application has access to it without alerting users. Justin Williams proposes a hybrid solution.
"Although current discussion of the Linux desktop tends to focus on the disharmony around Unity and the GNOME shell, the true revolution on the desktop is taking place out of sight of users. The Wayland display server is expected to reach version 1.0 later this year, and is seen by many as the long term replacement for the X Window System, with real potential to improve and transform the performance of the desktop for Linux users."
Mozilla has announced plans to integrate its Firefox web browser with Metro for Windows 8 - including Gecko. "Windows 8 contains two application environments, 'Classic' and 'Metro'. Classic is very similar to the Windows 7 environment at this time, it requires a simple evolution of the current Firefox Windows product. Metro is an entirely new environment and requires a new Firefox front end and system integration points. The feature goal here is a new Gecko based browser built for and integrated with the Metro environment. Firefox on Metro, like all other Metro apps will be full screen, focused on touch interactions, and connected to the rest of the Metro environment through Windows 8 contracts." I haven't checked - does Microsoft allow different rendering engines?
"One of the things that the GNOME design crew have been focusing on recently is creating a new approach to application design for GNOME 3. We want GNOME applications to be thoroughly modern, and we want them to be attractive and a delight to use. That means that we have to do application design differently to how we've done it in the past.""This is the first real release of Wayland and Weston. Wayland is the protocol and IPC mechanism while Weston is the reference compositor implementation. The 0.85 branch in both repositories is going to be protocol and interface stable. We have a series of protocol changes on the table before 1.0 but this branch marks a stable point before we jump into that." Change is coming to the Linux world. And yes, I get the irony of using this particular icon, but it's the closest I could find.
Well, this is good news. "Germany will not sign an international anti-piracy treaty, despite having already agreed to it in principal, government sources in Berlin said Friday, February 10." with Germany on the side of reason - for now - we're a huge step closer to stopping ACTA.
