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-
