For those of you who haven’t read Write Thinking very long, you missed my switch to what I affectionately call "the Mac Cult" in February of this year. Yes, my eyes start to glow with excitement when I talk about my Macs and their Tiger operating system. I have an iBook for travel or writing away from home and an iMac core-duo for my office.
I admit, there are some frustrations, some things I cannot do in the Apple OS, i.e. there is a web site that saves its Power Point presentations in some sort of Internet Explorer format. I cannot get the presentations and convert them to regular Power Point on my Macs. I have to have Windows to download in IE and then save as Power Point files. Another is that WordPerfect isn’t made for the Mac, and although WordPerfect can read Word files, Word can’t read WordPerfect files. I have hundreds upon hundreds of WordPerfect files which I don’t want or need to take the time to convert to Word. But I still need WordPerfect in case I do have to research something. I was using my old Windows machine for those occasional needs (which meant I had to go into another room where it is taking up space, fire it up, complete the task, and then return to my desk). But I finally screwed up the courage and installed Windows on a partition on my iMac’s hard drive, via the Boot Camp beta software and Intel processor. So far so good except that I partitioned off a far too large section for my Windows use. I overestimated the size of the software I wanted to install.
Yesterday Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard was previewed at their convention, and we Apple users could get our first looks at what some of the changes/additions will entail. I’ve already seen several things that make me excited. The bad news? Leopard doesn’t start shipping until spring 2007.
Steve Jobs (or someone with Apple) reportedly said that Microsoft’s new Vista
OS, also due to release next year, was only catching up with Tiger, Apple’s
current OS (see photo at left) while Leopard surges ahead. Jobs outlined ten new things in the Leopard operating system, but said that there were more that the company was not talking about yet.
And so this new Mac convert will just have to wait for the Leopard to reveal the rest of its spots. Spring 2007 seems a long ways off.
-rlh-
Robin–You mentioning the Mac convention brought back fun memories. Thirteen years ago, my husband’s business sent him to wherever the Mac convention was to be held. He invited our then 14-year-old son–already a bona fide Mac aficionado–to go with him.
That convention proved to me one of the highlights of Scott’s life! He’s not veered from the Mac cult since then. Doug and I strayed, but Scott brought us back around…
BTW, Scott’s first book comes out in December. It’s being published by O’Reilly, and yes, it’s a computer book. He’s become a recognized expert in a language called Ruby. If you search Amazon for Scott Raymond, the book is already up…
Man, I strayed from the subject, huh? Just a proud mom, I guess!
Like you, I’m impatient for Leopard to release, Robin. Especially after a look at the “Spaces” and the “Time Machine” features built into it.
I haven’t had the nerve yet to install Windows on my new MacBook, though. Even the thought makes me nervous. I’ve held onto my Windows machines, even though it’s been years since I “switched.” I’ll admit it would be convenient to have an all-in-one machine, but I wish we could just put the Mac OS on the Windows machine. That way if it broke down or got infested with the usual Windows bugs and demons, it wouldn’t be the Mac that was wrecked! Save the Mac for the “good stuff!”
BJ
My first computer was an Apple IIGS and I’ve been a Mac fan ever since. I installed Windows’ Office for the Mac on my computer. It has Excel, Power Point, and Word. It works fine. :^)
Penelope, just to be clear on this (in case there are readers who don’t understand the differences), the Office for Mac is from Microsoft and not Windows. I have the Microsoft Office for Mac installed on my Mac in the Apple OS X operating system. (Yes, the MS Office works fine, though I still miss WordPerfect!) But because I have an Intel Core Duo iMac, I was able to partition off a section of my harddrive and install the actual Windows XP operation system. So I now have two different operatig systems on my iMac. I have to restart to open into Windows, then restart again to return to the Mac, but it’s working for the reasons I wanted it.
Robin