treefish

My son took me through his campus building (Architecture in Victoria University of Wellington, NZ) today. Lots of students hovering over their laptops. Probably 95% MacBooks of various kinds, even though the department recommends Windows (for the software packages they use). So students use VMs. The first year Design students had an exhibition in another room - full of iMac computers and iPads. I don't see Apple spiralling into doomed failure here sorry Diaz.

I love my iPad, I’m reading and writing about this article on one over breakfast. The ad is beautifully made, with clever little bits in the content. But I despaired to see those wonderful items destroyed. Items that were crafted to provide an interface between humans and their world, to express creativity and move people. TV might be a bit more controversial, but the content producers for TV also express their creativity - even if TV was once thought to drain the intelligence of watchers. 

a small mis-step in not understanding the creative audience of Apple, but as someone said, at least it’s being talked about. And maybe that’s the point. And maybe THAT’S the real point - be creative, go dust off that instrument in the closet, get your easel out, play some piano cords, mould that putty into a bust. Hopefully.

A couple three of things I've noticed on my first day:

1/ "Move to Trash" is now "Move to Bin". Probably a refinement of Regional Settings (New Zealand). I'm used to "Trash" as in "Trash Can" (American) but traditionally we call them "Rubbish Bins". Odd to be jarred back into my own regional dialect.
2/ Shared network devices now moved to a "Network" icon under the Locations heading on the Finder sidebar. I think I like this consolidation already. Always a bit confusing for some of my customers to see a semi-random subset of network devices in the sidebar and having to select All to see the rest. 
3/ An interesting carry-over from iOS is the Recent Applications on the Dock. I think we had that back in classic Mac OS too. 

Hoping not more of the UNIX guts has been ripped out. I really like the ability to move between command line hard core and slick GUI stuff.

Just as an aside, and way too late to boast prescience now, but I remember when Novell went Linux on the core side. And Apple too, with NeXT/Darwin. I thought, best thing Microsoft could do was ditch their kernel and put Linux in its place, and run the Windows GUI and libraries on top. Looks like that's indeed happening now slowly.

In New Zealand we call them kiwifruit. Kiwis can refer to the bird and a New Zealander. So reading this I’m thinking, is Oliver picking people on Friday, birds on Saturday and fruit on Sunday? Or any combination of those three choices. My point being, cultural/linguistic differences and word definitions where a word can refer to different things, even in the same sentence. Just thought of one… “a bolt of lightning bolts bolted out the unbolted door”.

What, no mention of getting the REALLY old Apple computers up to VGA? My Apple IIe luckily still has a monitor, but I also have a bunch of compact Macs needing capacitor work. It would be nice to see mention of them in this article, getting a video signal out to modern screens. But yes, good article.

on the case designs, yes, I do like my IIcx (needs a new PSU), but my favourite is my G4 tower. One latch and the whole thing opens like a clam. Can’t get any easier. And nice handles for lugging around.

This is a really great idea, everything organised and easily accessible. It would be nice to see even the really vintage stuff. I’m currently recapping some Macintosh Classics, and making all the service documents and even software from the pre-Intel days, including PowerPC and 68000 (and 6502!) would be just amazing. I know (or read anyway) that Steve Jobs hated looking backwards, but Apple have such a rich history and legacy many of us love.