Bootcamp and the future of the Mac OS

Bootcamp and the future of the Mac
Published originally on Typepad 4/29/06

A couple of weeks ago, Apple released the cleverly named BootCamp, a utility that makes it not only possible but fairly easy to run Windows (XP SP2) on a new Mac with an Intel chip. Like many of Apple’s moves in the last few years, this one has attracted a lot of attention from the computer press. We have to assume that BootCamp is part of an Apple strategy to make money. But how will it do so? This certainly looks like it has the potential to be a profound change in Apple's business model. But what, exactly, will the change be?

There are at least three possible answers to these questions. I’m borrowing the three answers from three computer pundits, all of whom I like and respect: John Gruber, Robert X. Cringely, and John Dvorak.

1. Apple is trying to lure Windows users over to Apple hardware. Macs will continue to come with the Mac OS, so if users install Windows, too, they'll be able to compare Windows and the Mac OS on the same computer, and when they do that, they'll see how superior the Mac OS is. This is John Gruber's take.

2. Apple plans to license the Mac OS to other OEMS like Dell and HP and cut into Microsoft's market share in a serious way. This is, as far as I can understand it, Robert X. Cringely's take.

3. Apple is experimenting with Windows on Apple hardware because at some point it plans to stop putting the Mac OS on its hardware and sell Macs specifically to run Windows. This is John Dvorak's take.

It’s hard to imagine three more distinct interpretations of the simple release of a piece of beta software. There's something to be said for all three positions, but I don’t think they’re equally likely. Let me discuss them one by one.

Gruber: "A move of supreme confidence"

John Gruber writes at DaringFireball.net (the best Mac blog):

Windows is so ubiquitous that the vast majority of Mac users are already quite familiar with it; I see no chance that Boot Camp is going to cause any Mac users to realize that they’ve been missing out on something better. But from the other side, Apple is confident that most Windows users who give Mac OS X a shot are going to prefer it — again, much in the same way that most long-time Mac users preferred Mac OS X to the old Mac OS.

Gruber goes on to say,

This is a move of supreme confidence — Apple relishes the comparison between Mac OS X and Windows XP, and Microsoft has shown enough of Vista via its widely-available beta seeds that Apple quite obviously isn’t afraid of that comparison, either.

But it is not enough for Apple not to be afraid of comparison with Windows. Apple had far less reason to be afraid of comparisons with Windows in the past, and the comparisons were frequently made—and Apple's share of the OS market today is smaller than Linux's. To grow, Apple doesn't have to be as good as Windows, it has to be so far superior that the comparison is spectacularly in its favor.

Gruber says that BootCamp doesn't constitute a frontal-assault on Microsoft, but does constitute a serious threat. He rightly points out that, if the Mac can increase its market share by just a couple percentage points, it will have been a major coup for Apple. I'm not sure how this constitutes a "serious threat" to Microsoft. After all, in order to compare the Mac OS and Windows, those Mac users had to buy a copy of Windows that they probably weren't planning to buy. Still, Apple has so little of the market right now that it has almost nowhere to go but up, so there's some room for optimism.

Some room for optimism—but not much. For BootCamp to work as Gruber expects, it has to get a lot of people to make the comparison, it has to convince an awful lot of those folks to switch from Windows to the Mac, and at the same time, it can’t work both ways, that is, the comparison cannot lead any Mac user to switching from the Mac to Windows. Is this plausible? Nope.

Gruber thinks that BootCamp—that is to say, having two operating systems on the same computer, both of them running well—won't tempt Mac users to switch to Windows, because Mac users already know about the Mac, and they don't feel the temptation to switch. I think he's dead wrong about that, for several reasons. First, the vast majority of normal, non-computer-professional Mac users know very little about Windows. Some of them may use Macs at home and Windows at work, but it would be a gross mistake to assume that just because one uses an operating system every day, one “knows” it. Gruber is perhaps handicapped by his own expertise and the expertise of the folks (both colleagues and customers) with whom he used to work at Bare Bones. My tech support experience with both Macs and Windows in the last twenty years tells me that the vast majority of computer users, know just barely how to accomplish the tasks that they are asked to accomplish daily. This goes for Mac users almost as much as it goes for Windows users. Second, while one might resist temptation when one deals with someone attractive at work, having the attractive person move in with you is a different story. A Mac user whose previous experience with Windows comes only from VirtualPC can be counted on to despise Windows, because VirtualPC is virtually unusable. If you get rid of VirtualPC and instead, get real Windows running natively on good hardware, well, things may change—especially if all Mac software does not show up in UB versions very soon. You spend a little time in Windows, you might actually discover that it’s not as awful as you thought. Third, what most Mac users who know anything at all about Windows know is old news. I will stipulate that all versions of Windows prior to Windows XP, Service Pack 2, were stinkers. But the current version of Windows is not half bad. And Vista is going to be even better.

[Correction 4/30/2006: The three underlined words at the end of the previous paragraph were accidentally omitted from the original post. I like Windows XP, SP2, well enough. It's everything previous that stunk.]

Gruber also thinks Windows users don't know about the Mac. I think he's wrong about that, too. They know, but they don't care. Why should they?

Think about that question seriously for a second—and if you can, try to think about not as a Mac aficionado (if you are one, like Gruber), but as a normal Windows user. Normal users of Windows don't give a darn about operating systems, truth be told. They use Windows because they have to. If there's any choice at all involved, they use Windows because the programs they want to run happen to be available for Windows. Name me one application in common use in businesses and homes that is unmistakably, powerfully better on the Mac than on Windows. Note that I said “in common use.” I’m not talking about Final Cut Pro. I’m talking about business apps like word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software, databases, email clients, web browsers, accounting software, etc. Note also that I said “unmistakably, powerfully better.” iPhoto might be a little better than Google’s Picasa 2, but it’s not powerfully better. Remember, we’re not asking people just to cross the street here; this isn’t Bill’s Pizza Palace vs Steve’s Bistro Italiano. We’re talking about a difference that will motivate people to spend a lot of money and time. Switching from the Mac to Windows does feel a bit like a religious conversion – or perhaps like losing one’s faith completely—because the Mac OS has been, in good part, a religion. I don’t think very many people in the Windows world see Windows as a religion. Actually, many of them are simply indifferent to Microsoft, and curiously, many other PC users hate Microsoft almost as much as Mac users do. But these folks are practical. You aren’t going to get them to spend more on hardware, more on software (remember, they have to replace everything they have now), and invest huge amounts of time learning a new OS, without a good reason, a damn good reason.

If you are a Mac user, you have probably heard someone say (or have said yourself) that the advantage of the Mac as an applications platform, from the user's perspective, is not that it has more good software, but simply that it doesn't have as much bad software. That’s like boasting about the fact that your gourmet grocery store doesn't offer you a lot of choice and what they do have, costs more, but it’s all very good. Comfort yourself that way if you want. But remember, this isn’t about you. This is about the folks who are shopping at Kroger. How do you get them to abandon Kroger and go gourmet? You don’t. The truth is that, while there's a lot of crappy Windows software, Windows also has plenty of good software. And it's not that hard to find.

Apple has only 2 percent of the market, but, says Gruber, "it's 2 percent from the best part of the market," by which he means, "people who care about their computers, and who are willing to pay more for something better." So what? Apple's already got those folks. It's the 98% of the market that apparently doesn't care about their computers that have to be lured to the Mac. They haven't been lured so far. My guess is that the best chance Apple had to win folks over to the Mac was during the pathetic Switch campaign. At that time, Windows machines were especially vulnerable to malware, and the Mac wasn’t. But the Windows world has caught up. The biggest problems with Windows now have remedies. And at the same time, the Windows world has remained a bargain. I recently bought a pretty good, low-end Dell laptop with a 60 GB drive and 1 GB of RAM, for under $600. I have already installed a slew of high-quality free software on it (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org 2, etc.). And it came with Windows installed. Why would I have wanted to spend more than three times that amount for a MacBook, then spend even more for a copy of Windows to install on it—and deal with the grief of two operating systems?

Even if the economics were in Apple's favor—which they're not—I'm still at a loss to understand in what way Gruber thinks the Mac OS is clearly better, not as an example of user-interface design but as a platform for running programs that get things done. We're not talking about 1986 here or even 1996. We're talking about the start of the art as of 2006. Nobody in his right mind would start using a Mac today.

Cringely: Apple to license OS to Dell, etc.

Venerable pundit Robert X. Cringely has a comment that seems to speak to Gruber's take:

Boot Camp makes no revenue for Apple and never will. ... I doubt that its existence, especially as a beta product, is going to make some Fortune 500 company suddenly sanction the purchase of Macs because they can, with some effort and an extra $100, pretend to be Windows machines. While Boot Camp might help show prospective purchasers the superiority of Apple hardware, those purchasers would have to buy their Macs first and then convince themselves that they had done the right thing, which is totally backwards.

Precisely. Cringely goes on to say that Apple and Microsoft will play nice for a bit, and then Apple’s real purpose will be revealed:

Microsoft and Apple are happy with each other for the moment, and rather than representing some Apple attack on Microsoft, Boot Camp just represents the state of their happy partnership. But this won't last for long. It never does.

I predict that Apple will settle on 64-bit Intel processors ASAP (with FireWire 800 please), and at that time will announce a product similar to Boot Camp to allow OS X to run on bog-standard 32-bit PC hardware, turning the Boot Camp relationship on its head and trying to sell $99 copies of OS X to 100 million or so Windows owners.

Let's try to sort this out. There are, oh, several gazillion computer users out there. Apple right now reaches about two percent of them. Another few percent are the propeller-heads who run Linux or Heaven knows what. The souls of the other 95% of users belong to Bill Gates personally. Apple would like to reach those folks in the same way Yahoo and Google want to reach the Chinese, in other words, very, very badly. Cringely thinks that Apple is going to jigger its operating system (with OS X.5?) so that it will run, um, on every PC out there that meets some basic current specs.

I doubt it. Heck, even Microsoft can't get Windows to be compatible with every piece of hardware out there, and it's been trying for years, has an army of testers, has the hardware companies themselves cooperating with it. Remember, for the Mac OS to be worth a damn on, say, a Lenovo laptop, it has to do more than boot up. It has to run well. It has to support the user's printer, and the user's wireless router, the user’s keyboard and mouse, the user’s external hard drive, the user’s scanner, etc.

The strength of John Gruber’s theory (that BootCamp is a no-risk gimmick designed to get people to try out the Mac OS) is that it’s pretty conservative. According to Gruber's theory, Apple really doesn't change its business model at all. It continues to spend a lot of money to develop software that only runs on its hardware, in order to sell the hardware, which is where it makes its money. On Cringely's theory, on the other hand, Apple, which has always made its money mainly from hardware, is thinking of making its money from software instead. That would be a radical change indeed, and a reckless one. The last time Apple tried this was when it licensed the Mac OS to the clone makers. That was an experiment where Apple controlled pretty much all the variables—and it was an abject failure. It’s hard to say whether Gruber’s theory or Cringely’s makes more sense. Cringely’s theory looks crazy, but in its favor, it makes use of Apple’s switch to Intel chips. Gruber’s theory is reasonable, but unrealistic.

Dvorak: Apple will abandon the Mac OS

Which brings us to John Dvorak's suggestion, that Apple is thinking ahead to the day when it stops selling the Mac OS and just sells hardware.

The idea that Apple would ditch its own OS for Microsoft Windows came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the process had already begun. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be right. This would be the most phenomenal turnabout in the history of desktop computing.

Epstein made four observations. The first was that the Apple Switch ad campaign was over, and nobody switched. The second was that the iPod lost its FireWire connector because the PC world was the new target audience. Also, although the iPod was designed to get people to move to the Mac, this didn't happen. And, of course, that Apple had switched to the Intel microprocessor.

It's not surprising that Mac users have reacted so strongly to this suggestion. Indeed, Dvorak says that the ire of Mac fanatics is the one obstacle to the success of this plan. But Dvorak's position makes simple and solid good sense and would appear to have all the hard evidence on its side. Apple switches its OS so it’s based on Unix (which runs on PCs). Then it switches away from PowerPC chips to Intel chips, the very same that are used by PCs running Windows. Then it makes it possible for users, in fact, to run Windows on Macs. I think you really have to be willfully blind not to see where this is going.

Apple has made really good hardware for a very long time, but its market share has been dwindling. Why? Because the only thing that ran on its very good hardware was the Mac OS. Now, the Mac OS was a very good OS, in many respects, but the vast majority of the market didn't care about its quality. Apple spent zillions of dollars developing and improving Mac OS X, and with each release its market share seemed to slide a little bit further. Why? Because nothing runs in the Mac OS that doesn’t run just about as well in Windows. And people don’t buy either the hardware or the operating system for its own sake.

It’s important to emphasize that, contrary to what many Mac users believe, the problem is not that people are afraid of the Apple brand. People love the Apple brand. Apparently it's the one of the most valuable and trusted brands in the world. People—most of them PC owners—can't buy iPods fast enough. They like Apple hardware. They think Apple is a company with sex appeal. So it's not at all unrealistic to say that, if Apple were to go head to head with Sony, Dell, HP, Acer, Alienware and the rest of the PC hardware makers, it could do so with some success. If Apple could retain its two percent of the market without spending any more money on R&D for its operating system, well, why wouldn't it? And if it could abandon the Mac OS completely and double its market share, why in heaven's name would it not do that? Because Steve Jobs has warm and fuzzy feelings about the Mac OS? Get real. This guy is the Alcibiades of the high-tech wars.

Even Cringely acknowledges the practicality of the idea that Apple might sell Macs with Windows pre-installed. He says,

One reason why Microsoft isn't surprised by Boot Camp is because Microsoft has been working with Apple to make sure that Windows Vista runs well on Intel Macs. Apple will support Vista dual boot, though I don't know if they will become a Vista OEM, but I can't imagine why they wouldn't if it will help sales.

I can't either.

If I had to place a bet, I'd bet on Dvorak's prediction. Let me tighten it up a bit and say that, by 2009, Apple will be out of the OS business entirely, or, if it stays in the OS business for its high-end niche market, Apple will nevertheless be shipping the majority of its units with something other than the Mac OS installed at the factory.

I'll say it again. Nobody should start using the Mac OS today.

Final notes

If I say, "Nobody should start using the Mac OS today," am I saying that it was a mistake to buy it in the past? Not at all. In the last twenty years, my wife and I have purchased somewhere between 30 and 40 Macs, for home and business. And I'll say it again: Previous versions of Windows stunk. If you needed Windows in the past, then you are probably already using it. If you did not, then there were excellent reasons in the past to buy a Mac. A handful of Mac customers needed those high-end apps or simply appreciated the fact that many design apps, for a long time at least, really did seem to work better and look better on the Mac OS. (I think a lot of that had to do with fonts, but never mind about that.) Many other Mac users didn't need to network with Windows users or anybody else. The Mac has, through most of its history at least, been easier to use in good part because it offered you fewer options, and there's nothing wrong with that, if the few options are pretty good. But things change. I'm inclined to say that Windows has matured in just the last year or so, with improvements in ClearType, and major improvements in the business of protecting computers from malware. Perhaps I'm wrong about that and Windows has been a reasonable alternative to the Mac for longer than the last twelve months. But not much longer than that.

What about buying a Mac in the future? Sure, why not? Please note that I'm not predicting that Apple is going out of business. On the contrary, while I have no intention of buying another Mac any time soon, I'm more inclined than I have been for years to buy some stock in Apple Inc. I'm not going to buy a Mac because my budget is too tight and I no longer personally have to have the OS. But if Apple does become an OEM for Vista, and if my budget will allow it, I'd be delighted to buy another Mac.

Let me point out also that, while I've framed the argument above as all or nothing, it doesn't have to play out that way. I am persuaded that Apple will be selling Macs with Windows installed, and sooner rather than later. And I can't personally see why Apple would continue to spend millions of dollars working on its own OS when it's going to make more money selling Microsoft's. (Besides, how many big cats are left after Leopard? Ocelot? Bobcat?) But, as Dvorak points out, Apple could sell hardware along with its own enhancements to Vista. And I assume that it could continue to sell Final Cut Pro, Logic, and the other high-end apps that are so closely tied with the Mac.

Finally, I'd like to point out to Mac fans who find Dvorak's scenario unthinkable, that the unthinkable has already happened, and more than once. In the early '80s, Apple—under the leadership of Steve Jobs—dumped the Apple II OS and basically abandoned millions of users. Some of those users eventually bought Macs. Many did not. In the 90s, Apple abandoned the Mac OS for--get this--Unix! I was flabbergasted. The only thing that could have seemed a greater betrayal would have been for Apple to have built OS X on top of MS-DOS. I don't know whether the switch from PowerPC to Intel chips constitutes a "betrayal" in quite the same way. And if you want to, you're welcome to believe that Apple is interested in Intel chips only because IBM couldn't produce a G5 chip that would run cool in a PowerBook.

So, is this the future? Who knows. Insofar as we can see the future right now, Dvorak's scenario seems to me to make the most sense for Apple and everybody else, and by a wide margin. But it's worth remembering here that the future is unknowable. Are the desktop computer operating systems of today really going to remain in vogue much longer? Google could announce something in 2008 that would make the end of the Mac OS seem unimportant.

(Originally published on Typepad 4/29/2006)

Installing Microsoft Office

Yesterday, in the early afternoon, I broke down and bought the latest version of Microsoft Office 2003, Professional Edition, for Windows XP. I need Excel for some FileMaker work, and I finally got tired of using OpenOffice. Unfortunately, the installation process has been very difficult.

Around 2:00, I logged out of my normal (limited-privileges) user account, logged into my administrator account, and did a complete installation of Office. This tied my computer up for a while but I expected that. When I was finished, the apps opened okay in the administrator account and I thought everything was fine. Logged out, logged back in as normal user, tried to open the apps that I'm interested in - Excel, Word, Outlook - and every one had a problem of some sort. Every time I launched an app, I got a dialog telling me to wait while Office configured something. This dialog showed a progress bar that would move, indicate completion - and then the dialog would reappear. I saw this dialog hundreds of times in the next twelve hours. Each of the apps also complained that some small file was invalid or missing. I logged out, logged back in as administrator, removed Office, reinstalled - same problem. This killed much of the afternoon.

After dinner, I called Microsoft Support. I got a guy who was certainly committed to helping me, but like any tech support agent, he's not in front of my computer, and not being an expert, he's not inclined to be intuitive and take a guess. So we work methodically through a number of things. I was on the phone with him for a couple of hours. When we finally got cut off - not sure how that happened - we'd reinstalled Office two more times and done a bunch of other things, but I was experiencing the same problem.

My "research" on the Web finds references to the files that are being complained about. For example, Excel complains about a file named "stdole32.tlb". Perhaps there is a problem with my installer, or with that file.

But the problems did not appear in the administrator account where I did the installations - only in the normal user (limited privileges) account that I, um, normally use. Eventually, since I have work to do, I decided to do something radical: I reconfigured my normal user account so that it has administrator privileges. The problems with Office have disappeared. So it would appear that it's not even a problem wth paths to files. It's got something to do with permissions or access privileges, either to these few files or to the registry.

This is the first time I've encountered a really serious problem using a limited privileges account. I've run into a few other minor problems - apps that won't let me change my preferences in the user account (FileZille; As-U-Type; a few others). But so far, none that simply don't work well at all outside the admin environment. Very annoying.

(Originally published 4/28/2006)

Grand Canyon

Just sharing my desktop picture. I've tweaked it very gently in Picasa. Boy, I wish I could step away from my computer and go back to where I was standing on the North Rim in August when I took this shot.

And stay there. 

Switching

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I may be losing my faith. No, not in the important way. I'm sticking with Rome on that score. I'm simply referring to my faith in Apple. Ten days ago I bought a Dell laptop running Windows XP Professional. I've used it all day every day since then. And I like it.

It's not (very) ugly (anymore)!

I have mixed feelings about XP blue. But the real problem with Windows - especially compared to the Mac - used to be that the fonts were ugly. I couldn't understand how anybody could write in front of a Windows machine.

Well, Clear Type has substantially fixed that problem. It took me a while to get Clear Type, my default resolution, and the fonts used as defaults in various apps to synchronize with one another, but I think the text I see in my word processor, on my FileMaker layouts, and in web browsers, is satisfactory. Looks different from Mac text; I'd have no trouble recognizing a Windows screen from the fonts alone, in an instant. And I still don't think fonts render quite as "realistically" on the PC as they do on a Mac, but the differences are relatively minor now.

And the other graphical elements of the UI - things like the taskbar, normal buttons and dialogs - are also satisfactorily attractive.

Windows XP Pro

I'm hardly prepared to write a review of Windows XP. I'll need to read at least a few pounds worth of the 74 lb Que book on XP Pro that I bought from Barnes and Noble the other day. But I have a few thoughts. There's no question that the first several versions of Windows were horrible. Windows 95/98 and whatever else I tried in the late '90s also sucked. But Windows XP Pro isn't half bad. And there are a few things about Windows that I think Apple should steal. I like the Windows Explorer much better than any of the views in Mac OS X. I work with the Explorer's folders view (a kind of outline) in a panel on the left; and I view the contents of folders in a list on the right. I find this a heck of a lot easier to use than the Mac's column view.

The "Start" menu is badly named and its organization is a bit curious, too. But I've gotten used to it. And I like the fact that I can hit the Windows key and select an app to run. I know Mac users who love a utility for the Mac that lets them do something similar.

Actually, I am rather fond of the fact that, in Windows, it's quite easy to select almost anything from the keyboard.

One thing I like about Windows a great deal: It's pretty easy to uninstall almost anything, because nearly all installers come with uninstallers, and also because there's a Control Panel for uninstalling software. Not always so easy to uninstall stuff on the Mac.

One gripe: I find the Windows XP task bar's listing of open windows worse than useless - it's downright confusing. But the other thing I loathe about Windows is the use of the window to hold the application as well as the documents. Applications should go into layers; documents go into windows.

Applications?

The software on my computer is pretty good. OpenOffice.org works extremely well in XP Pro. Doesn't work at all on the Mac. Ironic that, to get away from Microsoft, I have to buy and switch to a Windows machine.

Google Desktop is very nice and strikes me as more useful than Mac OS X's Spotlight. They're both iffy as search tools; both return more hits than I want. But Google Desktop also tells me what new mail I have and provides other handy utilities.

While I'm mentioning Google, I might mention also that Picasa seems to me every bit as good as iPhoto, and perhaps even better. The general UI is somewhat similar, but Picasa has more photo-fixing options.

FireFox for Windows is as good a browser as Safari.

Thunderbird, the Mozilla email client, is not as good an email client as Apple Mail, at least in some fairly basic ways. But it at least uses a standard file format for mail. I'm angry at Apple right now because getting my mail from Mail is proving to be a daunting task.

FileZilla is a freeware FTP program that works quite nicely, now that I've figured out how to get out through my firewall. Compared to Panic Software's Transmit, FileZilla is so ugly and so old-fashioned looking that I've actually come to regard it somewhat fondly.

What about utilities? Well, As-U-Type (from Fanix) is much better than TypeIt4Me. Don't mean to knock TypeIt4Me, which is one of my favorite all-time Mac programs. Just that As-U-Type combines all of TypeIt4Me's glossary expansion capability with a powerful spelling checker, multiple clipboards, and more. TextSOAP on the PC isn't anywhere near as useful as it is on the Mac but that might not be TextSOAP's fault. Apparently it's not as easy to tap into the contextual menus (or whatever you call what you get when you right-click) as it is on the Mac. SnagIt 7 strikes me as every bit as powerful as Snapz Pro.

The Dell

I bought a Dell Inspiron 6000. Pentium M processor at 2.something GHz, 1 GB of RAM, 60 GB hard drive. Performance is as good or better than performance on my PowerBook G4 (Aluminum, 1.5 GB RAM). The Dell is big and heavy and, with the PowerBook sitting beside it, would not be called sexy. Actually, I'd say that the Dell has a Made in Russia feel about it, except for the fact that it seems to work very well. And it cost less than half as much as I paid for the PowerBook ($1100 vs about $2400).

And there are some nice things about the Dell. I don't like using the trackpad left and right buttons. But I do like the fact that you can slide your finger vertically on the right side of the track pad and the document onscreen will scroll up or down; slide side to side on the trackpad and the document scrolls left to right. And I like the placement of the arrow keys on the Dell better than on the PowerBook.

I like it, but I don't love it

Windows does have some problems.

For starters, what I have to do to type non-standard English characters like an é (e + acute accent) or ñ (enya) is just nuts. The Mac has had this right since 1984. Why can't Microsoft figure this out?

It was much harder than it should have been to connect my new, inexpensive but very standard ViewSonic external monitor. Eventually I figured it out, but plug and play apparently still involves the occasional prayer. On the positive side, my La Cie mobile external hard drive plugged in and mounted just fine.

Practicing safe sex, er, computing

Of course I'm worried about spyware, etc. But I think I'm reasonably safe. I have a firewall. I work on a closed network. I don't use Internet Explorer or Outlook Express, at all. Don't have Microsoft Office installed, either. I have an admin account that I use just for installing software and I try to get in and out of it quickly when I need to install something. The rest of the time I work in a user account with limited privileges. My passwords are reasonably secure.

Still, I'm worried, in a way that I never was on the Mac. And for this reason, I can't recommend Windows to anybody else yet.

Has it been difficult to switch?

No, it has not been difficult to switch. I've had to learn a bit more about Windows than I knew already. My FileMaker developer friends have been a great resource there, but I know how to use online help, and I've answered a lot of my own questions. And, without meaning to pat myself on the back, I'm not an ordinary user.

Many of the things that are different about Windows from the Mac are simply that - different, and not necessarily worse. Actually, I think I've answered a question I've wondered about for a long time: the use of Alt-F4 as a shortcut for closing a window. Given the placement of the control key on a PC keyboard, Alt-F4 is easier to type than Control-Q. I understand now why so few of my clients use the nice keyboard shortcuts I give them in my databases. Typing control + number on a PC is awkward. On the other hand, using the Alt key to get into menus is brilliant.

I've moved all my FileMaker databases over to the Dell. My initial reason for switching to the Dell was so that I could work on my FileMaker databases on a Windows machine. I recently discovered that my databases do not look on Windows the way they look on the Mac, and that's not good. Working in FileMaker for Windows is 99% identical to working on a Mac. So no problems there.

The biggest problem with the switch has been - and remains - getting Apple Mail to let me have my mail back. I'm fairly angry about this. Google Desktop can search my mail in Thunderbird as quickly and thoroughly as Spotlight can search my messages in OS X, and Thunderbird doesn't seem to require that I store my mail in a non-standard format.

Role model?

In the immortal words of Sir Charles Barkley, I don't want to be a role model. I am in no way ready to suggest to my family and friends (many of whom are using Macs on my recommendation) that they chuck the Mac for a PC next time they're buying. But give me another week and ask me again.

Email in the 21st century

I have a dilemma that is driving me crazy, now that I'm using 2 computers pretty actively. The problem is, how to deal with email: move to the web or stick with the desktop?


Web mail's pros and cons

It seems to me that, other things being equal, storing my mail on a remote (Internet) server is superior to downloading it and storing it on a laptop and deleting the messages from the POP server after they've been downloaded. Internet storage is superior for a couple of reasons:

1. It allows me to access my mail from either my PowerBook OR my Dell laptop and see the same messages. For that matter, I could access my mail from any other computer in the world that has Internet access.

2. Both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail give me 2 GB of storage space. My Point in Space account, on the other hand, gives me a small fraction of this space for mail storage. (I think I get 20 MB.)

3. Of course I couldn't completely rely upon the folks at Gmail or Yahoo!, but as a practical matter, if I use a web mail service, then I probably can worry a little less about losing mail.

I might add that, if I stick with Gmail as my preferred web-mail service, there are some other advantages. Google Desktop is a very nifty utility that, among other things, tells me when new mail comes in, without requiring me to look at my web browser all the time.

There are serious problems with Internet mail, however. The most serious one is that composing messages in a web form is a pain in the butt. I stopped using Bare Bones' Mailsmith over a year ago, but boy, I still miss its editing tools, which are without parallel. Web mail is okay for writing quick, two-sentence replies. But if you want to write several paragraphs - which I do, fairly often - or if you want to edit the text that you are quoting - which I always do - well, the web clients stink. I don't like the width of the editing window, or its height, or the fonts used to display text, or the lack of a rewrap command, etc.

There is the problem in a nutshell. Internet-based email is better from the standpoint of accessibility and storage; but web-clients lack the nice features that a desktop client has.


Compromises?

There are only two ways to compromise here, and neither compromise is entirely satisfactory.

First, it's possible to access my web mail (whether Gmail or Yahoo! Mail) using a POP client on my computer. That allows me to get new mail and write replies using a real mail application. The problem with this approach is that the web mail services aren't good at handling multiple accounts. I get mail that is sent to about half a dozen different addresses. I can have all these messages forwarded from my polytrope.com POP box at Point in Space to my Gmail account. And if I stick with reading my messages in Gmail, I'm actually able to distinguish one from the other pretty well. But when the messages are all being downloaded from Gmail to my computer, it's not so easy for my desktop email client (say, Thunderbird or Apple Mail) to figure out which messages belong to which accounts originally and make sure that I reply from the correct address/account.

The second compromise is to forget about desktop clients, but use a text editor whenever I want to compose a message that's longer than a couple sentences. I have to copy the original message (the part I'm replying to), switch to my editor, paste, write my reply, copy or cut, switch back to the browser and paste. It's less of a hassle than it sounds, but it's still a hassle.


No alternatives

A completely different approach that's occurred to me is to forget about web mail, and simply use two desktop clients - one on the PowerBook, one on the Dell. I could configure Mail on the PowerBook and Thunderbird on the Dell so that both would leave messages on my server for, say, a week or ten days. During that time, I'd make sure I checked the mail with both programs and downloaded it. And Point in Space offers a pretty nice web mail service that I could use occasionally (say, when traveling without my own computer) to check new messages.

But this won't work. For one thing, it FEELS crazy. But on a more practical level, if I compose and mail a reply from Thunderbird, Apple Mail doesn't know about it, and vice versa. So it's actually rather difficult to have a single mail store that has everything in it. In other words, this is actually worse than just deciding to use one computer as my email computer and then dealing with the occasional inconvenience of being away from that computer.

As an aside, I must say that, at the moment, I'm very angry at Apple. Getting my messages out of Apple Mail is proving to be quite a challenge.

Mighty Mouse Indeed

I finally got my hands on the new Mighty Mouse from Apple. And I love it.

A lot of people are rather surprised that Apple would cave in and release a two-button mouse. Apple has never made a two button mouse before, and it's generally been understood that Apple (i.e. Steve Jobs) believes two-button mice are a bad UI/design concept.

But the Mighty Mouse is not a two-button mouse. It's a one-button mouse that is sensitive to whether you click it on one side or the other. I think it's an important distinction. Because of its design, the Mighty Mouse allows your hand to grip it and click it more comfortably and more flexibly.

I've owned and used quite a few conventional two-button mice over the years, from Microsoft and Logitech and other top makers. My personal take is that they all contribute to RSI. You end up having to use your index finger for left clicking and your middle or ring finger for right clicking. That's a lot of clicking, especially for the index finger, and it puts a lot of focused stress on the muscles those fingers are attached to. A year and a half ago I began to experience a fair bit of discomfort in my right hand and wrist. After trying several other remedies, I switched back from a two-button mouse to Apple's one-button Pro mouse a year ago, and within a month or so the discomfort in my right hand had more or less completely gone away. I do not expect that discomfort to come back now that I'm switching to the Mighty Mouse. I can easily click the right side of the mouse with several fingers spread comfortably over the entire right side of the mouse. And I can left click with three or four fingers, even with my entire hand, if I like. I am convinced the Mighty Mouse is the best designed and most ergonomic mouse in its weight class.

So I disagree with Walter Mossberg. I think the Mighty Mouse is a novel design, and a good one. My Mighty Mouse is not finicky at all. I don't have any problems getting it to right click. It is true (as noted in the Ars Technica review) that you have to keep your index finger off the left-size of the mouse while you right-click. But I figured this out pretty quickly. My guess is that whether you like it or not will depend on what mouse you were using before, and what you expect from a "two-button" mouse. If you expect this to work like a conventional two-button mouse, well, you will be disappointed. But if you come to the Mighty Mouse from the Apple Pro or Apple Bluetooth mouse, I bet you'll like the new mouse even better.

By the way, I absolutely love the little scroll nubbin (or "trackpea" as David Pogue calls it). I find it easier to use than a more conventional scroll wheel, and left-right (horizontal) scrolling is as easy as up-down (vertical) scrolling. I should perhaps also mention that, while you can use the mouse instantly simply by plugging it in, it seems that the drivers for the Mighty Mouse are not yet included in OS X.4 automatically, so to take full advantage of the M.M. you have to install the software on the included CD. But once you do, you can program the scroll nubbin and also the side (squeeze) buttons however you like. I've got the nubbin invoking Expose's reveal desktop function, and the side buttons showing me all open windows. Fab.

(Originally published on Typepad 8/17/2005)

Parental Controls (Mac OS)

Mac OS X.4 ("Tiger") gives parents some control over a young child's experience of the Internet. This is good.

I just gave Catherine, our ten-year old, her own email account, so she can communicate with her older sisters, who are away from home now, and so she can get some more experience reading and writing. I would like to exercise some control over her use of the email account and I don't want to have to sit and look over her shoulder all the time. What Tiger offers is just about perfect.
Of course, she doesn't have an admin account on the PowerBook she's allowed to use. I access the Accounts system preferences panel on that machine with admin privileges, click on her account, and indicate that I want to configure parental controls for Mail. I type in a list of addresses with which she may exchange mail - Mom, sisters, our family friend Xiao, uncles and aunts, a couple of friends. And I enter my own address as the gatekeeper. After that, when she receives a message from someone unauthorized, the message first comes to me for approval. Here is what I receive in my inbox:



If I grant permission, the message then automatically gets through to her.

And if she tries to send a message to someone not on her approved list, she sees a note that says, "You are not allowed to send mail to larry319@aol.com. Would you like to ask permission?" If she says yes, the message gets saved in her Drafts folder. I get a message similar to the one above and if I say yes, then the message in her drafts folder says, "You have been given permission to send this email. Click Send to send this email now."

I do not know if this cooperation between Mail and the OS is a unique result of the fact that Mail is Apple's baby and part of the operating system, or whether there's an API of some sort here that other email clients like Gyaz Mail or Mailsmith might be able to hook into in future versions. I did test her computer account with the current release version of Mailsmith and found that the parental controls were circumvented. Solution: Go back to the system preferences panel for Accounts and configure the Finder options for her account to deny her access to Mailsmith. No big deal there. Mailsmith is not a kids email program.

The Internet can be a nasty place. I have not yet restricted her web access - it's a bit burdensome to do so - but adding these parental controls to the email she can receive is pretty easy and provides a certain level of comfort to me.

(Originally published on Typepad 6/16/2005)

Showing Up

“Eighty percent of success in life is showing up.” Woody Allen

When I started blogging earlier this year, my goal was to post a new article at least once a week. I kept it up for a short while. Then I got busy. I stopped showing up.

I take no comfort in the thought, but I’m not alone. There are a lot of us “little” bloggers, like me and my friend Kirk Samuelson, who aren’t pressured by the thought that thousands of adoring fans will be disappointed if we don’t post something. But even the Big Guys put the ball down and walk away. Punditwatch hasn’t posted since March, when the recent campaign in Iraq began.

Things are a bit more difficult for me because these blogs are handmade. I don’t use an online blogging app like Movable Type or a desktop app like iBlog. Instead, I write these articles in BBedit as include files and mark them up “by hand.” I upload them “by hand.” I do this because I’m a perverse, do-it-myself-even-when-it-hurts kind of guy. I use my own app instead of Quicken to manage my bank accounts. I use my own app instead of one of the many excellent OS X contact management apps. For years I’ve been using my own app to manage my photos and create web galleries online. I’m struggling now to persuade myself that iPhoto really does have many advantages and I should start using it instead.

But I don’t mean to suggest that the technical difficulties I impose upon myself are an excuse. Whether I use iPhoto or my own FileMaker Pro system, the hard part of photography is not managing the photographs I’ve taken, it’s taking good pictures in the first place. The same goes for blogging. BBEdit is highly customizable and I have the process pretty streamlined. The hard part isn’t dealing with the technology, it’s dealing with the writing.

And by “dealing with the writing,” I don’t mean “thinking of things to say.” I don’t have any problems in that department. Content’s easy. As my friends often remark, I’m full of it. But it takes time to package the content in a manner that meets my standards. This blog, for example, says nothing at all, but it took me a full hour to write, edit and polish.

[Originally posted on my blog at polytrope.com in August 2003. Reposted January 2005 on Movable Type as a test article. Moved to Blogger 7/27/06.]