Monday, May 19, 2003

confessions of a Mac user who doesn't hate Microsoft + rant against brushed metal interfaces Maybe before I nervously start, I should say something about my Mac head credentials. Most of my computers have been Apples: starting with an Apple ][, a Mac classic, a colour Mac classic, and a PowerPC - an awful mid-1990s lemon which turned me off Apple for a few years. All was forgiven with OS X. I'm fortunate that I work at a place which allows me to bring in my iBook for my work. I can do 95% of my work on the iBook. I hardly ever need to turn on that noisy boring beige fan in a box that's disguised as a computer :) Mac users often feel like an oppressed minority, united by their stubborn resistance to the Wintel Borg. This is where I encounter difficulties. Although I'd never willingly buy the Windows operating system, I don't hate all things Microsoft. It's like being a very lonely minority within a minority. I'm not here to defend M$'s business practices, just to state the fact that sometimes they make decent software, including their software for the Mac. It's ironic that what's brought me to this point has been my move away from my Windows PC at work. One of the whole reasons for this transition is that I loathe the GroupWise email and personal information management (PIM) software that my university uses. I wanted to combine all of my stuff under the one roof - and the one thing that worked for me was MS Entourage - their Mac equivalent to Outlook. I felt very guilty about this. I so wanted to rely on iCal, iSynch and Apple's Mail programme like the rest of the Mac faithful. I wasted many an hour trying to find the proper solution, but I missed synchable notes and the symplicity of categories - the elegance of having multiple calendars was wasted on me. Since I've already sold my soul to Bill Gates, I might as well admit this: now that MSN for OS X has been released, I've decided that this works better for me than the traditionally more-Mac-friendly Earthlink. Sure it has added a few training wheels to get the AOLers, but I can ignore those. In true Microsoft style, the MSN email intregrates very nicely with Entourage - although not the address book or calendar, which is quite annoying. Something that MSN for OS X does - as well as AOL for OS X - is look very nice in the Mac's new operating system. I recently read an opinion - but cannot remember where so I cannot credit it - wondering why Apple made such an elegant and visually appealing operating system only to ignore it in all the software they produce for it. This is the beginning of my rant against brushed metal. It was a novelty in iTunes, but now it's also in iPhoto, iCal, iSync and now Safari!! Maybe it appeals to Steve Jobs' sparse aesthetics, but I think it looks cold & unfriendly. Microsoft did much a better job with its Office X suite and MSN browser. And so I'm torn between feeling unworthy to use my Mac - and reveling in my blasphemy. 11:38:23 PM     my first impressions of iBlog: Mac-only blogging software with a news aggregator Ever since I first heard about iBlog a few months ago, I've been wanting to take a look at it and write down my impressions. iBlog is Mac-only blogging software. It's built for OS X and sports the increasingly ubiquitous brushed metal interface. Because things have been kind of busy for me lately, I wasn't able to take a very detailed look at iBlog. I was half-afraid that the more I looked at it, the more likely I'd decide to dump my Salon/Radio blog for iBlog. I was very impressed. iBlog also has a built-in news aggregator. What struck me the most is how easy to understand the iBlog software is. I took a quick look at the various files that it created in my Mac's library and I could actually understand how it worked. I'm sure that this simplicity would make it that much easier to customize a blog. As much as I like the Radio Userland software, it's taken me a long time to understand how it works, and I've been blogging with it since last August. But on the other hand, iBlog is like Movable Type in that you need your own server to publish your blog on. But this could be a .Mac account, which is becoming an almost essential subscription for Mac users. Maybe it's because I'm a librarian, but I really liked the category feature in iBlog. It made assigning and organizing categories to be very easy. iBlog also generates an RSS feed - which is essential for blogging software, I think. I do have two negative things to say about iBlog. The first thing is that although I like its news aggregator, it provides no simple one-click method of posting items from the news aggregator to the blog. Radio Userland does this - and I thought that was the whole point of having blogging software integrated with a news reader. It is very likely that this omission will be fixed in future releases of iBlog, so this is not a huge problem. My other concern is more of a social rather than a technological issue, but it's real and is the major reason why I don't switch to iBlog tonight. It's that iBlog is so relatively new and has not yet established a community of users. I've talked about blogging communities before (see Digression2). Although I think one's blogging software is a very loose and less significant community, it does count for something. Maybe it's also because most of the time I feel quite at home in the Salon blog community. Anyway, I'll finish by recommending iBlog to anyone starting a new blog on a Mac (OS 10.2). Because it's on a Mac and the software is very Mac-like, you won't waste as much time figuring out the technology and can spend more time being creative. 10:02:47 PM

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