Exception to that rule:  My new drawing, which I believe is about on the same level as the rest of the work I’ve been doing lately and to me, that’s exciting.  The rest of this post pertains to consumer electronic products, which in this economic system, seem to be following the post title trend to various degrees.

Detail of New Drawing

New Drawing in Progress July, 2009

I’m typing this on my new IMac.  I’m not completely new to macs, I’ve used a G4 powerbook to practice on for over a year.  Right now however, I’m trying not to get my fingers stuck on this very flat IMac keyboard.

I’ve had the new machine for months, but have taken sweet time to let go of my Windows pc and officially cross over for daily work. It’s not easy to completely re-automate all your work processes.  One issue about the Mac OS that confounds me is switching between open applications and windows.  I’ve just begun playing with Expose and Spaces, and it shouldn’t be that hard.  I want a simple bar or thumbnail box showing all my open windows that I can click on to switch.  I only want to have to click once, is that so difficult?  I’m not fan of keyboard shortcuts.

(On edit here, making progress with Expose, and a third party utility to help switch, open, and quit apps. Now challenged with hiding the desktop behind Photoshop.)

There are other minor issues, only 3 USB ports and they’re in the back.  Why in this day and age are in they in the back?  I love how Apple cares about the aesthetic quality of their machines, that is important to me, but looking good at the expence of functionality, nope, that fails the test. Neither Mac has crashed however, something I can’t say for my Windows machine which  crashed on average once every couple of weeks with one issue or another.

I’m still getting used to the 20″ LCD screen.  In places the colors are too brilliant, from the side of course, the display is useless. I’ve tried adjusting the brightness as looking at the large screen has been tough on my eyes. I miss my CRT, now lonely, staring at me from its new corner.  Both monitors need serious calibration.

I got a new phone too.  I had to switch carriers.  The new phone isn’t as pretty, is more difficult to operate, and doesn’t have as many features.  New doesn’t mean better, it usually means more money for someone, no need to explain that, although I am paying $30 less per month on my bill.

So I was reading about Apple’s surprising 2nd quarter earnings, which led me to market analysis and prediction, which led to reading about Microsoft.  Windows 7 is set to relieve Vista of its resource taxing and user frustrating duties late this year or early next year.  I read an entire article about 7 and was slightly curious so I went to the Windows 7 page on the Microsoft site.

The page sure did look pretty at a quick glance. I’m a typical web site viewer/user, so I scan a page rather than read at first. I dragged my cursor over the headline that read “Take a Look”. Hmm, it’s not a hyperlink.  Then over the magnifying glass graphic, hmm, not a hyperlink.  I started to giggle.  I found the tiny text below the headline and blurb that redundantly says “See what’s new”.  Oh, there’s the hyperlink!  Were they trying to force me to read the blurb first? No such luck, however, they did annoy and then amuse me by breaking what is by now a well established web design pattern. This is expected boo-boo #1.

So I click on the link and it takes me to a page that apparently (apparently is my favorite word of late) lists the improvements of the OS over its predecessors.  There’s a nice graphic to illustrate a supposedly superior taskbar in the middle of the page.  My eyesight isn’t always so great anymore, so I drag my cursor over the pic hoping to click to a larger view, but no such luck.  I start to laugh out loud, as this is boo-boo #2, but I decide to give M the great Softie one more try.

I click back to the main page.  There’s a video at the top, it has a large play-me button right smack in the middle, just beckoning.  I think, oh, I’ll just watch the little video. I click on it, but you see, I’m a sinner.  I’m using a mac laptop and surfing with Firefox. Firefox gives me a yellow pop-up warning. I’m informed that the video can’t be viewed without downloading a plugin.  I’m thinking, no, they’re using Silverlight for this, proprietary, exclusive, Silverlight that will not run on a Mac?  Boo-boo#3! What idiot thought of that, aren’t they trying to redeem themselves, to win back some of Apple’s recent market share increases? Turns out it’s some other bit of software I’ve never heard of, “Flip4mac”. Not as bad, but still, I’m NOT downloading and installing software to watch an advertisement.  So my thoughts went thus: how on this green-grey earth do they expect to compete with Mac when… no how do they expect to sell a product by making users work to, no, how in**** could they ever design an efficient and usable OS when they can’t design a user friendly website? Then I laughed for a really long time, until I remembered how much money they’ve made and probably will make, regardless.