turntable / as the table turns

I’ve previously mentioned my antipathy for OSX. It’s been two years since I made a go at switching to a Mac. I can’t say anything major has changed with the Mac since then. What has changed?

• My Vaio has become unacceptably sluggish
• Adobe apps now run properly on the Mac
• There’s no way I’m going to use Vista
• Most of my work happens in a browser, so the OS is secondary

But perhaps the biggest factor: my iPhone. The iPhone has really made me lust for more. More luscious details. More speed. More fun.

It’s now been about 5 weeks since getting my hands on Darryl’s old iMac 24″. That’s 3 weeks more than I endured last go round! Many of my previous gripes still linger. Like the inability to maximize app windows. Font rendering. On the 160 dpi iPhone type is stunningly gorgeous. Font rendering on the 72 dpi Mac is a sad imitation, often resulting in butchered illegible type that makes my eyes bleed. I really don’t understand how type purists delude themselves so relentlessly.

Lucky for me, I have a couple Mac die-hards sitting nearby who have been showing me all the secret five fingered key commands, hidden settings and special software that makes working with a Mac tolerable.

So far, the best thing about being on the Mac is…

• The beautiful bright screen
• The beautiful visual design details like sublime: gradients, drop shadows, translucent windows, and animations
• The beautiful hardware
• Networking is finally acceptable
• It’s fast and stable, unlike my experience 2 years ago

Overall, I’m happy with the Mac experience. I certainly don’t think it’s flawless. But the speed, the lickable graphics (in spite of the type rendering) and the hardware win me over. I admit that it’s starting to make my eyes hurt whenever I go back to using Windows.

There does seem to be an interesting correlation between the increasing number of iPhones and Macs at Xero. Everyone seems to be switching. Even Grant switched.

With the abject failure of Vista, the mainstream switch-to-Apple tipping point is truly upon us. Jobs is well on his way to resurrecting Apple from the dead, while Microsoft have dug their own grave.

Fifty or a hundred years from now I suspect history will smile broadly on Jobs as a monumental business and cultural icon, while reflecting on Bill Gates as a one-time antagonist in the Steve Jobs story.

UPDATE: Thanks to Grant for this link to a video demo of Photosynth (the concept I refer to below). It doesn’t get sicker than this…

Two emails went flying around yesterday. One about Google Streetside and a follow up about Microsoft Surface.

My reaction to Surface

Kiosks 2.0 (because kiosks 1.0 were so great)

It was pretty easy to predict video billboards the day that LCD screens became available. Being able to get movie times from a movie billboard (note: not a concept I saw in the Surface demos) is something I’ve been waiting for, for a long time. This “vision” of “surface computing”, to me, seems like a very limited, one-trick gimmick. I think paper thin screens will be far more useful and ubiquitous. I seriously doubt that surface computing – in the sense of a dedicated table - will ever go mainstream. Some underlying concepts are likely to persist – ie, some types of gestural interactions, device synching, but those aspects of Surface are no any way revolutionary or unique to this product.

My reaction to Streetside

It’s stunning. Incredible implementation. Absolutely gobsmacking. I was able to look in the doorway (and window) of my old apartment in San Francisco!!

I went down the street where my old office was and I didn’t recognize it since I haven’t been there in 5 years and things have changed. Very trippy.

And it just works. Click around a few times and you know how to use it in all its glory. Yet, it’s quite sophisticated. Amazon did some streetside mapping that was kind of cool, but Google’s implementation is absolutely jaw dropping. The shear scale of data, the elegant game-like interaction, the speed, the depth, the dynamic contextual layers.

I worship Google.

The only thing I wonder about is the usefulness – whether it’s really worth the effort. It’s an extremely cool experience, I can see a few practical uses, lots of impractical uses, but compared to Gmail or even just street maps, I’m not sure there’s such a big pay off beyond bragging rights and cool factor.

However, combine it with a mobile phone and GPS – then I could see it being extremely powerful. Combine Streetside with Microsoft’s dynamic 3D stitching – then I could take a picture with my camera phone and in realtime it gets posted to Google and it’s a form of personal memory mapping and user generated real time mapping. Google could pinpoint where I was, when I was there, and even show me the photo. If, years later, I meet somebody who was at the same place at the same time then we could see how our paths literally crossed. Of course, there’s all the geo-tagging opportunities (this restaurant was rated by your friend Joe last week, there were 3 late night muggings in this alley in the past week).