turntable / as the table turns

Well, what do you know? Another of my predictions for 2007 is just now coming to the surface…

Internet advertising works best when anyone can produce a simple ad. This was first shown with Doubleclick ceding ad prominence to Google and now it will be shown in internet video with blip.tv’s new DIY ad program.

It doesn’t appear to be as advanced as what I proposed – bidding for ad placement, different ads served to different users, with green screened product placement ala in-game ads. However, that will emerge. Count on it.

Our holiday up north was perfect. In addition to all the other fun things we did, we also managed to squeeze in some fishing, sailing and snorkeling in the Bay of Islands. It truly is paradise up that way (except this week).

On the drive back, Hadley and the kids dropped me off at Kiwi Foo Camp in the delightful town of Warkworth. It was a bit of a shock going straight from holiday to the non-stop uber geek fest shop talk marathon.

Highlights for me were:

• Lobbying Telecommunications Minister David Cunliffe to make peering a priority. The point came across loud and clear.
• Getting the low down on Firefox 3 (scroll down to items 3.5 and 3.6). Lots of goodness in the works, but most importantly is the offline caching for web apps. I think it strongly supports my prediction that in 2007 the browser is more important than the OS.
• Good design discussions on faceted navigation and ambient signifiers.
• Seeing the OLPC in the flesh. It’s the type of device that makes you wish you were a kid again. Nevertheless, I’m still highly dubious about the UI. As Che noted, “That’s what you get when you have Flash designers create an OS”.
• Most of all, meeting and spending time chatting with some super smart, super nice people. Old friends and new friends alike.

Oh yeah…being able to show Xero was thrilling and scary. Fortunately, the response was awesome! Foo represents a very tough crowd. Seeing their excitement over Xero makes me really proud. I wish more people showed their projects. I happen to know quite a few people who have some very interesting developments in the works that didn’t get shared. Foo Camp seems like a great place to get extremely valuable feedback.

When Foo ended I caught a ride in Rod’s Maserati down to Auckland to join up with the family. They were staying at the Quest Ponsonby, which I highly recommend – great accomodations in an ideal location. We even ate real Northern California quality burritos at Taqueria (I’m wiping saliva off the keyboard as I write). It was actually quite strange being in Auckland, almost like being in another country. It caused me to question the much bandied slogan “nothing beats Wellington on a nice day”.

Having said that, it was nice to come home to such an easy going city on such a beautiful day.

The What’s UP 2007 event was good fun. I met some really nice, well clued-up people. Here are the slides from my predictions (use the < > keys to navigate). The day after UP, I headed out on our family summer holiday.

As I write, I’m in the exquisite Northland region of NZ (in Oakura Bay to be precise). It’s been ideal in every way. Swimming, kayaking, bbq-ing, reading and sleeping. It’s warm here day and night, and there’s no wind. It’s really been making us question why people (us included) live in Wellington.

At the holiday house I perused the book shelf and noticed The Google Story. I tend to have a strong aversion to business books. However, I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s a good piece of storytelling. The thing that’s sticking out for me is how Larry and Sergey have always had the tenacity to do things their way, along with the perseverance to execute first and foremost. Ultimately, it’s really about having the conviction to relentlessly pursue what you believe is best and have fun doing it.

At the UP event, I noted that several of my predicted future platforms could easily be generated out of NZ. Foo Camp is coming up this weekend and I’m really hoping to see strong evidence of that same type of tenacity, conviction, guts, plus the ambition to build something big and important and useful from this beautiful country, something that the world needs and NZ can deliver. Peter Jackson did that for the film industry. Who will do it for ICT?

UPDATE: I sincerely appreciate all the comments people have left. I’m shocked anybody found this blog, but good on ya. I’m not going to argue against anybody. You’re all right. I think it boils down to two things:

• It just didn’t feel right…for me. I wanted to love it, but I didn’t. It felt wrong, to me. It’s different, but not different enough to blow my mind. It’s different enough to annoy me.
• I wasn’t unhappy with my existing system. I wasn’t unhappy or unsatisfied with my experience in Windows. Therefore, I had no real motivation to switch. The fact that I have a lot of work to get done is a motivation for me not to switch.

Ultimately, my experience lead me to stick with XP until Google OS or something similar comes along.

And now back to the original post…

You know those popular Apple ads featuring a smug, partronising Mac boy? The computer itself even comes shrink wrapped in that same smug, partonising state.

I found the Mac OSX experience to still be incredibly flawed. Despite so many top designers gushing over it, I have to say that it is a really poorly designed product – both the hardware and software. I am truly baffled how anyone can tolerate it, let alone gush over it and pay a premium, to boot. Then again, label whores do that. They love to suffer, as long as they are making a fashion statement.

The fundamental flaw was the nose dive in my productivity. I completely acknowledge that there’s a necessary learning curve when making such a conceptual leap. There’s a period of adjustment. I recently switched from Photoshop to Fireworks, which is widely acknowledged to be a relatively significant mental switch. So it’s not that I can’t switch, or that I’m not willing to switch.

So why do I dislike the Mac so much?

• Expose looks sexy, but it’s worse than a schizophrenic girlfriend. Once you start using it, you quickly realize that it seriously disrupts your workflow, often inadvertently. A simple flick of the mouse and you’re suddenly thrown into an unwanted screen warp. It’s like getting tangled up in a fishing net. On the other hand, when you actually do want to quickly jump to another document, then the travel time to get your mouse over to the opposite corner of the screen takes forever, at which point you need to bring it all the way back again. That’s when the real fun begins: it’s time to start guessing which of the puzzle pieces is the one you want. It’s like doing a jigsaw. Is this it? No. Is that it? No. It’s not just a first timer issue – I’ve seen Mac zealots doing the same head twirling jigsaw hunt. In Windows, I can instantly locate my document in the task bar; it takes a fraction of a second to jump to the proper place.
• All of the Macromedia and Adobe apps are dogs on the Mac. They look twice as ugly and they run half as fast. I spend a large portion of my life working in those apps. That alone is a deal breaker.
• iPhoto is pitiful. I rely on Picasa, not only for my personal photos, but more so for my screenshot collection. I have 4500+ screenshots that I’ve collected over the years. When I grab a screenshot in SnagIt the image instantly shows up in Picasa, automagically. On the Mac, Snapz is the closest thing to SnagIt, and it can’t grab a scrolling window. That in itself is a serious problem. I wound up installing the ScreenGrab Firefox extension – which partially solved things. Then with iPhoto I needed to import the images manually, so more wasted time and effort – assuming I could even remember everything I captured. It also meant that I had two copies of every image, archived in different places, in different ways. My blood was boiling.
• Welcome to the Micky Mouse Club. The Mac is a computer that begrudgingly has a keyboard attached to it. Apple would love to ship with just a mouse. The only reason they provide a keyboard is so people have a way to activate the right-button keyboard combo (yes, I do know that the clit mouse does have right button functionality).
• ClearType? Is that supposed to be a joke? Design wankers love to point out the typographic superiority of the Mac’s font rendering. The simple truth is that computer screens cannot render small type sizes properly. Blurring fonts to render them more “accurately” only makes it more obvious that screens are still low resolution. Most importantly it’s harder to read. I don’t care how theoretically accurate it is.

Shall I go on? I could, but I’d rather not. I am a little ashamed that I made a stink to get the Mac, only to give it up so quickly. In the end, I just wasn’t able to get things done on it. And I did sincerely try. After I made the final call to end the abusive relationship, I was overcome with a powerful sense of relief to get back on my Vaio. I immediately started getting things done once again.

I’m pretty confident that my next platform is not going to be Vista or OSX. I’m holding out for Google OS. I love Gmail, calendar, docs, spreadsheets, Picasa, maps, Earth, etc etc. Bring on Google OS.

I am a Google.