it's how apple keeps the competition down - apple makes the profit on the iPod.
How much profit is competitor X going to make on the X Music Store? Well, none off the songs, as that money goes mainly to the labels. So it has to come from the player. But as they are all WMA-based, you don't have to use XPod, you could use YDJ or ZMusicPlayer. So that's the entire business model for everyone except Apple screwed.
but when i went round our customer's office the other week, explaining the new functionality in our software, 6 out of 10 of the people there were utterly shocked that right-click menus existed! Most people simply are not as comfortable with computers as us techies.
the other difference i've noticed is that on mac software, if you can do it there's an item in the menu bar for it. there may, or may not, be a right-click/ctrl-click/long click item for it. a lot of windows software, you try the menu bar, the right-click, the toolbar - you have multiple places to search for the functionality. and i know that this is down to the developers, but the legacy of one-button mice is that sort of ui design is part of the "culture" of writing mac apps.
Fax your MP couldn't make it much easier. I even mentioned that I was seriously considering emigrating (true). Don't let them get away with this - just because Messrs Betcham and Eriksson have got some people distracted (sh*t your pants Ronaldo) - we need to make ourselves heard. While we still can.
I'm a Windows developer who had a fit of Bill Gates rage a couple of months back, and bought an iMac. Today, the web team at my company asked me to bring the mac in, cos they needed to debug some pages which were showing up incorrectly.
So, I, a Windows user, linked the Mac to the network, left Ben playing with it, and then using Cygwin, SSH'd into it, downloaded Fink (a port of Debian's apt) and used that to download an X-server and GNOME (remotely from my Windows box).
As my previous *nix experience is installing Mandrake and then going "now what?", the fact that I am able to do all this in two months - I am comfortable with Tcsh (and Bash on Cygwin) and am getting used to navigating my way round a *nix system - is pretty amazing. Yes I'm a geek, but OS X has given me an easy way into Unix, and if it works for me, it's bound to work for others as well.
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it's how apple keeps the competition down - apple makes the profit on the iPod.
How much profit is competitor X going to make on the X Music Store? Well, none off the songs, as that money goes mainly to the labels. So it has to come from the player. But as they are all WMA-based, you don't have to use XPod, you could use YDJ or ZMusicPlayer. So that's the entire business model for everyone except Apple screwed.
but when i went round our customer's office the other week, explaining the new functionality in our software, 6 out of 10 of the people there were utterly shocked that right-click menus existed! Most people simply are not as comfortable with computers as us techies.
the other difference i've noticed is that on mac software, if you can do it there's an item in the menu bar for it. there may, or may not, be a right-click/ctrl-click/long click item for it. a lot of windows software, you try the menu bar, the right-click, the toolbar - you have multiple places to search for the functionality. and i know that this is down to the developers, but the legacy of one-button mice is that sort of ui design is part of the "culture" of writing mac apps.
Fax your MP couldn't make it much easier.
I even mentioned that I was seriously considering emigrating (true).
Don't let them get away with this - just because Messrs Betcham and Eriksson have got some people distracted (sh*t your pants Ronaldo) - we need to make ourselves heard. While we still can.
I'm a Windows developer who had a fit of Bill Gates rage a couple of months back, and bought an iMac. Today, the web team at my company asked me to bring the mac in, cos they needed to debug some pages which were showing up incorrectly.
So, I, a Windows user, linked the Mac to the network, left Ben playing with it, and then using Cygwin, SSH'd into it, downloaded Fink (a port of Debian's apt) and used that to download an X-server and GNOME (remotely from my Windows box).
As my previous *nix experience is installing Mandrake and then going "now what?", the fact that I am able to do all this in two months - I am comfortable with Tcsh (and Bash on Cygwin) and am getting used to navigating my way round a *nix system - is pretty amazing. Yes I'm a geek, but OS X has given me an easy way into Unix, and if it works for me, it's bound to work for others as well.