Josh's Profile

I am loathe to turn this into yet another PC vs. Mac debate, but reading through this interview I became increasingly motivated to post my own opinion on the matters at hand. There are some things which I should point out first: I dutifully make my daily trip Zeldman's site, and I never fail to be fascinated by his ideas and comments. I have used his techniques, and spent hours and days poring over his various examples and links to other sites with examples. That doesn't even begin to cover the time I've spent with A List Apart, which is (IMHO) the best resource for standards and design info I've ever used. I've been trying to order his latest book through Amazon for a couple weeks now, but every vendor seems to be out of stock. Anyway, my point is that I am a fan of this interview's subject even though I vehemently disagree with his stance and approach to many of the questions asked in the interview. For instance: --- "Mac OS provides the most elegant user experience and is the easiest and most intuitive operating system I've found. Text looks better on a Mac. Tools work better, file maintenance is easier, the look and feel is richer." --- This statement, aside from being entirely subjective, is not necessarily accurate. True, the default system settings of a Windows machine are comparatively ugly next to default OSX settings. However, with a minimum of time and effort, a PC can look superficially as good as a Mac (or in my opinion, much better). The typographical argument doesn't hold water either, with Cleartype settings enabled (and a simple font replacement if the user doesn't think the defaults look as "good" as a Mac's). I've had experience using OSX for video editing at my work. I will be the first to admit that Final Cut is a killer app for the Mac platform, one for which there is no comparison in the PC world... however, that is the only "tool" which I have come across that doesn't have a superior analog for windows. Mac users (Zeldman among them, apparently) are quick to spout their mantra of "quality over quantity," but the very fact that there is such a wealth of application creators for windows is a benefit as much as a detriment. It means that somewhere, somebody got it right, and it's just a matter of looking around a bit to find a superior program for almost every application a computer user would need; and more often than not free or close to it. I'll admit that there is a major drawback in the market today, in that inexperienced users are content to use an inferior program that "just came with the computer" rather than find a better tool. But that is a mentality which extends to any platform, and it's more visible among PC users simply because there are so many more of them. File maintenance... maybe I'm missing something here, but OSX file maintenance is a joke, in my opinion, even more so than OS9. The Finder is unintuitive and buggy (as Zeldman mentions later on, although I've never experienced the photoshop bug he talks about)... although I would certainly agree that there are certain parallels in the Windows world, most especially in the pre-XP days. --- An operating system that removes the abstraction between thought and action is one that lets you be more creative and more productive instead of wasting brain cells trying to remember how to perform tasks. --- Funny, if I read this out of context the first OS that comes to mind is OSX... I guess that just goes to show that the system that someone uses day in and day out is the one that they learn to use the best. Maybe that seems like a common sense sort of statement, but I think it's overlooked a lot in these obnoxious "who's got the better operating system" brawls. I know Windows inside and out, and it didn't take me very long to learn it. I have yet to use an OSX feature that actually makes my experience *easier*, or *better* than Windows in any way (Exposé looks really cool though, I must admit). So I would submit that this another subjective opinion that could be debated endlessly, and so it reads like mindless propaganda pervading the interview; by the time I got down to "Hell, no." I was snorting in exasperation at how useless the line of questioning had become. I resent being called a "mindless drone;" not the exact words of Zeldman, but a popular view of Mac users and one implicit in his comments. It also implies that in order to be "creative and independent" I must be rich and stylish, cause I'm gonna be paying out the ass to get that pretty new machine. Zeldman's comment that a comparable Dell costs the same as its Mac equivalent is completely innacurate; I won't even go in to how much cheaper build-your-own's are (mindless drones obviously wouldn't know much about that). This is almost my first ever post to the internet in any form. I have created web sites for others, but personally I've never made my own weblog because I wouldn't know what to say. I'm not a Windows evangelism freak by any means, and I certainly don't feel strongly anough about the issue to start posting to a weblog about it. However, I've grown weary of seeing all the press the Mac people get, because they're the "free and independent thinkers" of the world. It's an elitist attitude, and one which is in my mind totally unfounded. It's not the machine that makes the man, it's his own ideas and drive to make changes for the better in systems that are begging for those changes. In this arena there is no better example than Zeldman, and I suppose that is why I was so affected by reading an interview that seemed like little besides a condemnation of 90% of the people who so avidly follow his views. My two cents, for what it's worth.