Creative Friday

I use a corporate-supplied MacBook Pro in an environment that is almost exclusively Windows. It’s a challenge, to say the least. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked on a Mac in an all-Windows corporate environment and you quickly learn how to troubleshoot your own machine since many IT people do not have the slightest clue how to help you if a problem occurs. Luckily for me the lines between Mac and PC have blurred considerably since the old OS 9 days and working in a PC environment isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Most people I interact with who don’t know the computer I’m using will probably never know the computer I’m using. They assume I’m on a PC just like them.

If you’re ever concerned about moving to a Mac because you fear that the software will be different or you won’t be able to share files with PC users, I’m here to put that fear to rest. Here’s a list of software I use that keeps me working with PC users:

• Microsoft Office 2008 - Written specifically for the Mac and is completely interoperable with Microsoft Office for the PC. It has Entourage instead of Outlook but they are pretty much the same applications. I am on an exchange server, my calendar is in sync, I have access to the corporate directory, etc.
• Keynote 08 - This gem just kicks Powerpoint’s booty and there’s no sense in using Powerpoint. I do my own presentations anyway so I don’t need to share my files with someone else. On the rare occasion I do need to share my presentation with another person I just export my Keynote file as a .ppt file. I usually lose some of the nifty animations but the presentation is still better than anything you can produce with Powerpoint.
• Omnigraffle Pro 5 - Superior to Microsoft Visio 2007 in almost every way. The beauty of it is that I get to use such a great program for all of my diagrams and PC users never know the difference because I can open and save in the Visio format. I’ve shown other IA’s Omnigraffle and how you can quickly create a site map using the outline mode and they’re always blown away.
• OmniPlan 1.5 - I’ve never used Microsoft Project so I can’t make a direct comparison but OmniPlan does the job nicely and no one has any problems opening and viewing my files. The Omni Group is on the ball. They just make killer software with real-world business uses. I also use OmniOutliner (which is never closed) and OmniFocus to help me keep my thoughts and tasks in order.
• Adobe Creative Suite - No one outside of myself has any need to open a Photoshop document or Illustrator document but they could if they had the software. Just like Microsoft Office, Adobe created their software to be completely interoperable between Macs and PCs. Just don’t use PostScript fonts and you should be fine.
• Parallels - When push comes to shove and I have to use a PC because some business application requires Active X or I’m working with Sharepoint I can open Windows XP and work with Windows applications just like they were installed on my Mac. The move to Intel was one of the smartest moves Apple has made and the architecture allows me to use Windows at almost native speed in a virtual world. It works so much better than Virtual PC ever did.

In addition to these titles that allow me to work with PC users I also use Mac-only software that I couldn’t imagine living without. Programs like 1Password, Coda, CSSedit, Delicious Library, MarsEdit, Skitch, TextMate, and VisualHub. I use .Mac to keep my Address Book, Calendar, Bookmarks, Mail Accounts, and FTP sites in sync but that service has finally gotten a Windows counterpart with Microsoft’s announcement of the Live Mesh service. Even though .Mac has it’s problems (and it does) I still find it incredibly useful, especially the online disk space.

One of the biggest myths is that you don’t get good software on the Mac. There may not be as many applications produced for the Mac but the software that is produced is almost always superior to anything you can find on Windows. I’m trying to say that without sounding like a fanboy but I know I come across that way. I just think the Mac software developers take a lot of pride in their work and it shows.

The Mac is definitely making a comeback and it’ll be showing up in more and more businesses. There’s no reason it should be excluded anymore. I work on a Mac every day and I’m able to access our network, use Cisco VPN to log in remotely, share files, and open and save PC documents. It’s truly a business machine.

UPDATE: My friend Pat Charles pointed me to this article on InfoWorld that has real-world data to support my claim that Macs will be showing up in more and more businesses.

UPDATE 2: It looks like this is a timely blog post as there are many more articles coming out about this very subject. Check out Business Week’s The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit.

UPDATE 3: This will be my last update on this post but this has never happened to me before. Clearly I was on to something. Please check out MacUser’s “Macs in business: Making the case” for their perspective.

I went to ESPN to check out who won tonight’s men’s college basketball championship and I was led to this page where I was greeted with the graphic below.

I understand that both school’s primary color is a shade of blue. But it should have been instantly recognizable to the person creating this graphic that the 2 shades of blue were much, much too close together for this chart to be meaningful. My first thought would be to add each school’s secondary color and make each line thicker so the user could quickly see the difference between the blue/yellow line and the blue/white line. But the chart doesn’t only fail in its color presentation. It also crams a lot of data into a small column while keeping detail off of the chart. In order to get more detail the user needs to hover over the graphic which they would only know to do if they hovered over the graphic by chance. In this regard I think of the words of the great Edward Tufte when he says “to add clarity, add detail.”

I rent movies because I might watch them once. Maybe twice. I have about 40 DVDs of movies I know I’ll watch more than a few times. The way I consume movies is much different than the way I consume music so renting or subscribing to Netflix makes sense. Music matters to me. I have over 5000 tracks in iTunes, most of which are from my CD collection, and all of that music matters. The very idea of being able to listen to all the music ever made in exchange for a subscription sounds ridiculous. There’s only so much music a person can enjoy. And if you are the type of person that needs to hear the latest and greatest song by whatever hot teen the labels are pimping then you aren’t the kind of person that really likes music. You like synthetic garbage.

So I hope that this plan the Financial Times is reporting isn’t a mandatory thing. I hope they keep pushing for more songs to be in the non-DRM iTunes Plus format for purchase. I don’t ever want my music hijacked by a company because I don’t want to pay the monthly extortion for their subscription anymore.

UPDATED: 3/24/07: According to CNet, sources say it’s Universal who is putting this on the table. I seriously should have know that, after all Doug Morris would love nothing more than to put his hand in every music buyer’s pocket every month for the rest of their lives. Here’s my favorite quote:

“These guys at Universal,” said one music insider, “are so obsessed with this subscription thing…but there are publishing issues involved with bundling and I don’t think they make much money off it.”

Craig Hockenberry notes:

It takes several months of actual iPhone development before you eventually realize that the iPhone requires a completely different mindset. Until that happens, you’ll make assumptions based on desktop experience, and that in turn will lead to a lot of bad designs.

This sounds a lot like what I just wrote about the move from print to web design. People know what they know and until they experience something different, they’ll try to shoe-horn what they know into something else, even though it doesn’t work. I think a few developers will nail their applications for the iPhone. But I also think there will be more useless applications for the iPhone when the App Store launches. It’ll probably be a while before it’s full of really useful, iPhone-only applications. Anyone that trys to simply “port” their application to the iPhone will probably fail.

I was watching a video of the new gestures for the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pros and noticed that they are touting the ability to swipe from right-to-left to go “back” in a browser or go left-to-right to go “forward” in the browser. And that got me thinking, have I ever used the forward button? I started to think back on all the years I’ve used web browsers from Netscape to IE to Firefox to Safari and I can’t remember a time when I ever even thought to use the forward button. And that got me thinking about the behavior of other people and whether or not they use the forward button. If people do find that button useful, how do they use it? And what percentage of web users find the forward button useful? I’m very curious about this because ever since the introduction of tabbed browsing I barely even use the back button.

Do you use the forward button? How do you use it?