OS X – David Hughes

4 March 2008

It’s the Little Details

Apple has a deserved reputation for for producing beautifully designed and made hardware. The iMac, the MacBook Air, the iPhone all are simply wonderful to use and to look at. But their appeal is more than just the surface; yes they look lovely on the shelf but it’s when you start to use them you appreciate the thought that has gone into all aspects of their design.

I was struck by this yesterday when I spent 30 minutes and two password resets trying to log into the expenses system at work; a system so bad that once you are logged in you generally wish you weren’t but that’s another story.

It was only when I gave up and went to use another system that I realised I had caps lock switched on. You see on the cheesy Dell keyboard I have at work and in fact all PC keyboards I have used, the caps lock key is on the left but the dim indicator light is over on the top right – about as disconnected as you can get from the button itself. Who thought that was good interface design?

Now, on Apple keyboards the indicator light is on the caps lock button itself, even on the iPhone the button itself changes. Isn’t that just so much more sensible? All it took was for an designer to say “hang on, why is the light over there but the button over here? Let’s change it.” and they did.

It’s not that Apple “Think Different” but they actually just think think about the user experience and how it can be the best it can be. Clearly other manufacturers do not.

17 August 2007

Walt Mossberg Misses the Point?

Walt Mossberg, the respected Wall Street Journal personal technology columnist, has a “review” of Apple’s latest version of iWork over on All Things Digital.

I’m biased, but I feel he has missed the point in comparing iWork 08 with Microsoft Office for the Mac.

iWork is quite clearly targeted at a different audience to the full version of office; in fact I am the target audience.

I want a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package and nothing else.

I want those packages to have OS X like elegance and to enable me to carry the relatively basic writing and calculating that most users need to do. Numbers, the new spreadsheet application doesn’t do pivot tables apparently – what’s a pivot table?

Personally I couldn’t wait to remove Office from my Macs and to replace it with iWork and so far it does everything that I need and more.

15 August 2005

Improving My Memory

I’ve just upgraded the memory on my iMac from 512Mb to 1Gb. and it was amazingly easy.

Just undo three screws that hold the back of the iMac on, remove the back, pop out the old memory stick, pop in the new sticks, replace the back, do up the three screws, cross your fingers and switch on. It works.

Having built many PCs and seen teh insides of even more over the years the insides of the iMac are a work of art in comparison. No wires, none of those awful flat HDD cables – all very elegant.

Tiger works OK with 512Mb but with 1Gb it feels much smoother.

4 August 2005

I Heart iSync

I’ve just synced my 6680 with my Mac using iSync, and I’ve got to say how much I like iSync. Wan to know why I like iSync so much? It just works… each and every time I use it.

I recognise this may be part due to the 6680 also as I did have issues with the P910i syncing, but this is an updated version of iSync so…

Every PDA sync application I have used including Hotsync and Active Sync have all had issues especially Active Sync which was a nightmare.

Of course, knowing technology as well as I do I’m sure my next sync will probably be a horrible mess.

20 May 2005

Coolness in PowerPoint?

Whatever next? Working from home the other day, I had a PowerPoint presentation to write, so I decided to do so on my Mac Mini rather than my nasty Windows Stinkpad.

It reminded me how much better MS Office is on the Mac than on Windows and how much easier working on OS X is; I’m amazed how much more effective OS X is. This was confirmed yesterday by a colleague struggling to get an animated GIF into PowerPoint on XP – we just could not do it; on the Mac, we’d have just dragged it in.

Anyway, I was saving my presentation when I noticed an option in the menu: Save As Movie, so I tried it out. It saves your PowerPoint presentation as a QuickTime .mov movie, complete with animation, transitions, and music if used. Amazing.

This may be because I have QuickTime Pro, but even still, what a great piece of functionality.