How Mac OS X is Changing the Mac Community

rgraham writes "Derrick Story (O'Reilly Network editor) has written a follow-up article to The New Mac User, titled The Changing Mac Community. He makes some interesting observations about how Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings have greatly 'broadened the landscape' of the Mac community beyond that of typical artists to now include hardcore Unix users and the like." I personally believe this is the single most important component to Apple's continued success for the near future.

Comments

Re:Me and a Mac

[tarkin]

I recently bought a second hand G3/400 Powerbook ( Firewire ) with 384Mb Ram and it runs OSX perfectly. You can feel that OSX demands alot more of your machine than for instance GNOME, but because you become much more productive on the platform that really isn't a problem.

If you compare Nautilus under YellowDogLinux on the same box to the finder ( and all that other aqua eyecandy ), OSX wins by a long shot.

I was a Linux86 user before , never even owned a mac before , but if you're talking pure User Experience and productivity ,MacOSX really does a great job. File Management is a lot easier, and all that Multimedia stuff we need works right out of the box. I can watch DVD's, use Dual Head out of the box, plug any usb/firewire peripheral into the thing and continue working. And you can run XFree,bash and GNU stuff with Fink ( I still user abiword for my small wordprocessing needs for instance.)

So just buy yourself a Logitech USB mouse and you're al set to enjoy MacosX.
And if you don't like it , you still can run Linux. YellowDog does a great job of supporting almost any feature of my powerbook ( sleep! ) so try that one out.

Re:Console Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? There are 1GHz G4s out there already. And using OSX, mounting to a Windows server is as easy as choosing 'Connect to Server' and typing the URL beginning with smb://

The iMac is a consumer appliance not a business box that is expandable.

>Final word: Appleworks. This is the last >competition to Office. But even Apple themselves >is pushing Office on the mac.

Shocking isn't it. Those bloody customers keep asking for Office.

Appleworks, BTW is bundled for free on the new Macs - That's what I call pushing

Re:Me and a Mac

[Graff]

However, my new employer uses mostly Macs with OS 9 (many of our apps don't work in OS X classic mode). I've found that if you're actually using Mac OS and you slap a nice 4 button USB mouse on there, the extra mouse buttons really don't do you much good, since the OS is more-or-less designed for only one button. Hence, there isn't anything for the extra buttons to do.

You can fix that easily. Go to VersionTracker and download USB Overdrive. The link is for the MacOS X version, but there is also one for MacOS 9 and earlier. The MacOS X version still in beta but it works very well and has no bugs that I know of. What it does is it allows you to set each button on a USB mouse or joystick to do one of many different actions such as double clicks, triple clicks, activating things, etc. It's a totally great utility.

That being said, there is really very little reason for non-power users to have more than one button on a Macintosh. You can do everything on the operating system with a one button mouse and even where a right-click would help you, all you have to do is to control-click instead. The main reason I have a different mouse is for the scroll wheel. If Apple came up with a one-button scroll mouse I would probably be very happy just using that.

Personally, I think the mouse should be one of the build-to-order items. Have the standard Apple mouse be the base item and allow the user to upgrade it to different ones like a 3 button with scroll, a trackball, wireless mice, etc. More choice is better in my mind.