Becoming obsessed with the idea of a mac

Posted by Chris Thompson
Nov 24, 2007 at 06:40 PM

Just a couple of followup points to various posters…. I definitely agree with Hugh about the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners. One of those will change the way you work with physical documents, regardless of what software you use. The ScanSnaps also come with a license for Acrobat Professional, which is valuable in itself. Unfortunately Fujitsu persists in selling “Mac” and “PC” versions of the same scanner, differing only in color and in bundled software, so one has to have an OS in mind before buying.

Regarding Stephen’s comments about the low prices of Mac software seeming “too good to be true”... there are several factors that go into it. First, for a variety of reasons Mac users tend to buy more software. If you look at Adobe’s sales for Lightroom, which is available for both Windows and Mac, they’ve actually sold more units total of the Mac version, despite a 20 fold difference in market share for the two platforms, and despite the existence of a competing product on the Mac (Aperture). Second, though undoubtedly related, there is more competition in the Mac market, keeping prices down. Third, the Cocoa programming interface is just a lot easier to deal with for smaller teams of developers, increasing productivity without driving up costs. It’s also considerably richer and better thought out, having the benefit of nearly 15 years of experience (dating back to the NeXT days). For instance, every application using the Cocoa text framework got inline grammar checking and smart quotes for free when Leopard shipped, without needing to be recompiled or changed. I find it quite beautiful that I now have access to on the fly grammar checking in OmniOutliner, even though they haven’t shipped the next version of the product yet. There are many of these kinds of powerful building blocks. It’s a healthy environment for developers, both from a commercial perspective and a technical perspective.

The one thing I’m really looking forward to is Leopard’s cross-application, unified PIM functions becoming more widely adopted, making the whole OS more Ecco-like. Even now, it’s great to be able to create a task attached to an email message in Mail, see it automatically in iCal, and also see it automatically in my time billing application (TimeLog 4). Once it’s possible to attach a todo to an outline item or column entry in OmniOutliner, viewable in every application that’s PIM-aware, in some ways we’ll have a working environment surpassing Ecco as a general purpose tool. As icing on the cake, the unified PIM functions are CalDAV-aware, making them shareable and networkable. Some great stuff is coming down the pipe.

—Chris