Apple's New Mass Appeal


I never purchased an Apple product before 2-1/2 years ago. Having started with homebrew 1802 machines, I upgraded through the years to CP/M, DOS, and finally Windows systems, and inadvertently wound up with a career writing software for Windows. Apple was different and unfamiliar, and the price of entry was just too high for a machine I wasn't sure I'd like. Starting today, the price of trying a Mac just fell through the floor with the introduction of the Mac mini...



Believe it or not, that little gadget above is the whole computer. Add your keyboard, mouse, and monitor and you're good to go.

While Steve Jobs introduced several new products and enhancements at today's MacWorld keynote, including a flash-based iPod, the Mac mini is the product that I think will turn some heads and have long-term impact.

My first step off the well-traveled Microsoft trail came when I was asked by my employer to investigate writing some software for a Palm handheld a few years ago. Though they decided against pursuing the project, I'd been through the process of evaluating both Palm hardware and some Windows CE clamshells. While those were early Windows CE efforts, I was stunned at how much more usable Palm OS was, and went on to write a little Palm OS app to pop the hood and see what was inside.

When I went on to write a Windows CE app for my employer, that Palm experience paid off. After designing a user interface for a 160x160 pixel screen and working with various Palm apps, I understood a great deal about minimizing a user interface. The revelation, as obvious as it seems now, was that working with a different platform had improved my design abilities.

Hungry for more, I tried Linux, and learned a little there, too. But the real leap of faith came when my machine was overdue for replacement and I decided on one of Apple's iBooks running their Unix-based OS X. If you haven't tried OS X, get a friend or a salesperson to give you a demo and pay attention to the UI details. Note the general lack of modal dialogs so prevalent in Windows, and the use of document-modal sheets. (A sheet is sort of a dialog that "scrolls" out of another window's caption and remains attached to that window; it's a UI element that Windows lacks. If you're doing a modal operation on one document, why should that operation block you from working with other documents? And isn't it intuitive to have the sheet attached to the document that needs your attention?)

What I'm saying here is that I believe experience on multiple platforms is beneficial to software developers regardless of the platform they're writing for. Good UI ideas can be implemented on any OS, after all. Learn all the best ideas and roll them into your next app.

With the new Mac mini starting at $499, I think the time's right for Windows developers to take a peek over the fence.

Posted: Tue - January 11, 2005 at 06:21 PM          

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