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Becoming obsessed with the idea of a mac
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 8, 2007 at 10:29 AM
Hi Graham!
Graham Smith wrote:
>prompted out my period of lurking (I’ve been ill and moved house, and not
>really had the time for a while)
Just a note to say that it’s nice to hear from you again and hope all is well in your life here on. My own presence in this forum has been rather off and on in the last year and a half. I’ve also moved house—to a place with very poor internet access- and started an online course.
Looking back I should say that I’ve discovered some excellent tools through the forum and also very much enjoyed discussions here. I find my heavy case of CRIMP is a small price to pay for the fun of it :-)
Cheers
Alexander
Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 8, 2007 at 11:04 AM
Alx,
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Hi Graham!
>Just a note to say that it’s
>nice to hear from you again and hope all is well in your life here on
Thanks for the welcome back, like you lots of things happening here. Very bad internet connection for a few months after moving house, Final stages in setting up a new Masters in Ecological Impact Assessment (now running with its first intake), and the book finally published Isbn 0387459677. Now half way through a new one on mixed modelling. We are also setting up a new company offering Applied Ecological Value and Risk Managment, (AeVRM) which is taking up time as well
But also I feel crimped out, and I have found that my current Mac setup (about 5 months old) has put me in a position of feeling contented with what I’ve got (after 20 years of crimping), so while I still look at other programs, I’m not inspired enough to try them. Which is good because I’m now putting my efforts into fully mastering the programs I have; rather than constantly re-learning new programs for only marginal benifts, which all too often prove to be less valuable than some of the features I gave up when ditching the program it replaced.
All the best.
Graham
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Dec 9, 2007 at 01:12 AM
Graham Smith wrote:
>
>>speculation as to why programming on the Mac seems more fertile than on Windows.
>Apple
>>has never had any concern with backward compatibility. Mac OS X left OS 9
>programs
>>completely unusable. The huge waste concerned Apple not in the least.
>Windows, on the
>>other hand, carries the burden of maintaining backward
>compatibility with Windows
>>98 - or is it 95? Anyway, it goes back through a number of
>major revisions. I imagine
>>backward compatibility imposes a considerable burden
>on programmers, who must
>>incorporate all the workarounds that allow the program to
>work on earlier versions of
>>Windows.
>
>I am not sure about this burden, I was forced
>to upgrade from Windows 98SE, to Windows 2000, and then to Windows XP, simply because
>several programs I use could not be run on the earlier versions. It is also reasonably
>common to see an older version of a Windows program still being available for download
>(but no longer supported) for people using older versions of Windows. Indeed
>something I have also seen with the Mac, where the OS9 version is still available but no
>longer being developed or supported.
>
>Graham
But the Windows programs _were_ available in an appropriate version that you could generally get at upgrade prices. It appears to be a far bigger deal to upgrade a program from OS9 to OS X than for the developer to do a Vista upgrade from XP. Most importantly, the programs currently being designed for Vista run on XP. I have never come across one that doesn’t. On the Mac OS 9 nothing that was being made for OSX ran on 9.
Now I can see that this could be partly artifactual. OSX was immediately accepted by most Mac users, whereas people question whether to leave XP for Vista. So part of the story might be there is more incentive for developers to write programs that run on XP than there was to write OS X programs that run on 9. But it’s hard to believe this is the main explanation. The difference is dramatic. As I said, I don’t come across programs just coming out that don’t run on XP, but NO programs that were developed after OSX came out could run on OS 9. If you were running OS 9 like I was a few years ago, you had NO new application or even versions coming out. Imagine a CRIMP sufferer in that situation! Apple, because of the lack much of a corporate presence—to give a charitable explanation—does not have MS’s concern with backward compatibility. (Some of us OS 9 users, whom Jobs had “promised” upgradability to OS X on our Macs, learned this promise was not to be kept when OS X finally came out.)
The other disadvantage of the Mac that is seldom mentioned technical support. Microsoft has a fantastic technical support network. You develop any Windows or Office problem, and you get an answer almost immediately from an MS “MVP,” who live on the MS public news groups. On a Mac—this again was OS 9 era—I had problems I could never resolve. I posted to the Mac groups, but they lacked numerous experts. The support from the MVP is better than any developer could supply, because of their numbers and the consequent breadth of their knowledge.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Dec 9, 2007 at 01:33 AM
Matty wrote:
>As for Maxthink… you
>can put me in the column of people who just don’t get it. For whatever reason I can’t get
>my head around the two-pane interface. For the kind of work it does I find brainstorm to
>be fantastically intuitive to use. BTW, the new update of brainstorm is nothing
>revolutionary, but they have added a couple of nice features. Especially welcome is
>the ability to mark 6 different locations to “throw” to.
I found that the key to becoming comfortable with the writing pane is to think about what it’s there for. Not a really obvious question. It doesn’t function as a pane in the 2-pane sense. You just input data there. So what’s the point? Why input data at a point other than your outline. That’s the question that I think confuses people, as it confused me. My operation of the program became smoother when I articulated the narrow purpose of the writing panel.
The writing panel allows you to see entire note entry you are working on, while having outline itself show only one line of each note. Why not expand only the note being worked on, while allowing editing in the main pane? Then the note you are working on might take the bulk of the space, and you couldn’t see the structure of the outline while working on the note.
I haven’t seen the new Brainstorm, but if I understand what you describe, Brainstorm seems to have implemented a version of binsort. That’s quite important.
Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 9, 2007 at 09:32 AM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>But the Windows programs _were_
>available in an appropriate version that you could generally get at upgrade prices.
>It appears to be a far bigger deal to upgrade a program from OS9 to OS X than for the
>developer to do a Vista upgrade from XP. Most importantly, the programs currently
>being designed for Vista run on XP. I have never come across one that doesn’t. On the Mac
>OS 9 nothing that was being made for OSX ran on 9.
I’m getting a bit lost here, Are you suggesting that no one who produced programs for OS9 now produce programs for OSx. And on the latter point, I have already said that because programs designed for XP wouldn’t run on WIN98, I was forced to upgrade to XP. I cannot see how this is any different from the OSx OS 9 situation.
>difference is dramatic. As I said, I don’t come across programs just coming out that
>don’t run on XP, but NO programs that were developed after OSX came out could run on OS 9.
>If you were running OS 9 like I was a few years ago, you had NO new application or even
>versions coming out. Imagine a CRIMP sufferer in that situation!
But again I remember a similar situation with Windows 98, apart from some of my main programs which had now become XP (or sometime 2000 and above) only, I became more concious while crimping that more and more programs were becoming Windows 2000 and above or even XP only (before Vista).
>the lack much of a corporate presence—to give a charitable explanation—does not
>have MS’s concern with backward compatibility. (Some of us OS 9 users, whom Jobs had
>“promised” upgradability to OS X on our Macs, learned this promise was not to be kept
>when OS X finally came out.)
I doubt whether MS or Apple feel any real responsibility to their customers (or developers). Although, I have concluded that my Mac is better to use than my Windows boxes, I haven’t seen anything to convince that Apple are a “better” company than Microsoft. I actually think that Apple made a brave and good choice with OSx.
As I understand it, OSx isn’t an update of OS9, but a completely new Operating System designed for the future from the ground up. So while this gives some short term grief, longer term you end up with a better product. And of course they have done the same thing with the switch to Intel processors, giving problems for developers and users because of the switch. But long term this opens up a much better future for Macs.
>
>The other disadvantage of the Mac that is seldom
>mentioned technical support.
Yes, there is a tremendous amount of support out there for MS, expertise, forums and third party books. So far, I have found the forums etc on Macs to be more than sufficient, but there are hardly any books available.
Graham