blog.spathis.com

I have spent the last few days playing around with Mac OS X 10.3.8, its come along way since the 10.2 days. I can quickly summarize my thoughts in one word: stunning.

I cut my teeth on Macintosh programming way back in the heydays of the 80’s. I fondly remember all the old technologies that were going to take the world by storm but Apple could never quite put together the needed marketing muscle to make them really take flight. I remember when the first powerpc apps came off the assembly line and I spent weeks debugging the OS only to discover major flaws in the implementation of Quickdraw.
It is hard for some people to believe but it is quite true that even today the windows & unix/linux platforms aren’t anywhere near the sophistication and sheer elegance of what Apple had in its labs in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Not just in the lab, but within months of shipping in many cases. Hell there are people who would vehemently argue that the Newton is far better than any PDA available today and in certain respects they are quite right. The Newton had the notion of a soup that was a radical departure from the traditional file/folder paradigm. No one in PDA’s is doing anything nearly as elegant.
Back to the topic at hand, this latest version of Mac OS X is truly amazing. It gives me the same rush the Mac OS did when it first came out and I saw it in the old Byte magazine. If you haven’t sunk your teeth into 10.3 take the time and look at what the wizards from Cupertino have put together. They proved once again that no one understands user-interface design better than Apple.

SIDENOTE: <RANT>I am talking about real user interface design, based on a deep understanding of how humans interact with computers, how information is processed, not the BS stuff the internet user-interface guys (who are nothing more than glorified graphics designers who couldn’t cut it in traditional advertising, and no I don’t mean everyone, just most) try to shovel as user interface. Sorry guys, if you think pretty graphics are user interface you need to go back to school. If you spent more time cutting up your latest photoshop graphic than thinking about error conditions and UI dead-ends you need to go back to school. Ok, I have seen some really crappy UI design the past couple of weeks and just had to unload. I have some real good stuff for a future posting…</RANT>

Anyway, I for one am quite happy to see Apple alive and kicking. So happy I am switching to a mac as my primary desktop….