This post reflects my first few hours on a brand new Intel Mac Mini.
I'll be writing, then, gradually about my new Mac and about the discoveries I make living with OS X Tiger (10.4.8) -- without running into the arms of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit ("MBU"). We already have a Mac in the house, so I'm hip; but having to cope with being productive I find forces me to learn a great deal more in a short time when there's no escape. After about 12 hours, I've already got three decent-sized epiphanies to report...below.
My intent is to show how easy or difficult an unplanned & unscientific individual migration can be -- data and all -- to a new Mac. These reports, you'll wager, will be worded to provide maximum pain to Microsoft, but they can aspire to nothing like the ascendant heights and internal truths, the hilarity, of "Cancel or Allow". My findings apply to individual migration: they will prove little in context of a workgroup or enterprise migration to Mac, but it's a start.
Y'all know I'm a Linux man -- high, wide & handsome -- and due to consulting clients working in Windows, I have spent 75% of my last 18 months in Windows XP. Skype, my killer app, is now largely caught up on Linux, but hardware config on Linux is just too hands-on still and remains a time-suck (for me).
I'll be in OS X now probably about 95% of the time and that means an experimental dip into a pure-Web 2.0 experience! Gmail and Google Docs & Spreadsheets will be my pallets for all document authoring outside of blogging.
Spotlight
I've always enjoyed the recent OS X's Dashboard, its smooth look, and the flexibility of Widgets for checking the air temperature before the dogwalk, checking my American Airlines flight status or checking the time o' day in Frankfurt at a quick glance.
Coming from XP and Linux I was ill-prepared for Tiger's useful desktop search tool called "Spotlight". It's an example of Apple competing head to head with Google on software tools that are intuitive, seamless and real time-savers.
Spotlight is hiding on the right extreme of the OS X taskbar -- a small blue sphere with a magnifying glass icon. Click it and the Spotlight textbox drops down for you to enter a keyword or phrase.
It looks like the Apple designers went back in their thinking to Eric Freeman's work under David Gelernter, his Lifestreams Project (a PhD thesis at Yale in the mid-1990's) and re-thought the fundamentals of the file-folder, file-system metaphor used on the desktop. They have put together something flexible and humane that works in the ad hoc way our minds work under the anxiety of frantically trying to find a lost piece of work of which we hardly remember the name or contents. (Eric has written some great -- truly great -- books for O'Reilly with Elisabeth Freeman under the Head First series. Filed with the rest of the book reviews.)
Upon search in Spotlight, we get the choice of either a list view of all relevant items as well as document icon view. Spotlight searches within the contents of PDF files, and not just the title or metadata.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets
I'm sorry but I'm just so over fat-client office suites. I so am. That includes OpenOffice.org. Sick of 'em! I need collaboration, redlining. I need outlining that works (it doesn't yet, anywhere). I need simple features, not too many. I need what Office 2.0 has but is only 25% ready. But I can't wait. Googbye, cruel shrinkwrapped software.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets (what I call "Gdocs") is getting there, and it gets there quietly, under your nose. Changes to the beta happen without fanfare and without notice.
Now, my friends at Google will probably disagree with me on this. One of the reasons they have been less than enthusiastic about ODF plugins is because they see the world through the lens of their metadata that they generate in their mission-critical Web Index. Document formats don't compute -- much -- against the value of the algorithms and the ad business. That lens explains almost everything Google has done since, and it is why an entire trade grew up around reading the index rather than arguing with it, which is what we now call search engine optimization.
[Ed. note: the fat-client complaint above turned out to be the small version of the argument. The suite moved to the browser, and now the intelligence is moving to somebody else's inference cluster, which is the story we follow at Generative AI as a Service. Same shape, bigger bill.]
Issues with Gdocs
Styles are still pretty much FUBAR.
More, as we go.
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