| Forward to the Mac - Kiwi's who've switched |
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| Written by Belinda Carter | |||||||||
| Tuesday, 01 July 2003 | |||||||||
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NZ Macguide Issue 10
Apple calls it 'switching' - MacCentral.com has been running a column since the late '90s called Forward Migration, carrying stories of PC users who have dropped their clones in favour of real computers. Apple in the US has been running a full-on Switch campaign, with brief Quicktime movies on its website, featuring real Japanese and Americans who tell sad PC tales with happy endings.
Barbara Newton -photographer And she can use a mouse again. Missing a digit on her right hand, thanks to an accident with a toaster a long time ago, she had been using a graphics tablet instead but the easy-to-touch single mouse means she can mouse again. Barbara is a prize-winning photographer of alpine plants and New Zealand landscapes and her husband Dick takes slides of similar scenes. It was getting these photos onto a computer that got them on an iMac in the first place. The slide digitiser, a very expensive item at the time, had a SCSI interface (since replaced) and the retailer told Barbara her warranty would be void if she opened up the new PC she was considering purchasing to install a scsi card. Digital cameras will need to come down in price and increase in resolution before Barbara goes completely digital; until then she will use a Nikon film camera, have the negatives developed at a local film lab and then scan the results through a negative scanner. There is no space in their flat for a darkroom. The portability of the iMac makes it easy to put on shows for photographic clubs using Kai's Power Show. It is certainly easier than trying to run a show with two old-fashioned projectors and a slide carousel with the tendency for slides to drop onto the floor. The PC hasn't been retired yet and it shares space in the study. The card reader, which feeds her Janome sewing machine with embroidery patterns (she was wearing one of her designs when I interviewed her) will only talk to the PC.
Jim Cheetham - Unix systems manager Some Unix users at the London company he had been working for had been experimenting with the Unix side of Apple on cool-looking TiBooks. What would make the former PC system administrator, more at home on a Unix box with command line tools, switch to Apple? "I wanted an up-to-date machine as opposed to a reconstructed relic. I wanted something I could use for work, not to work on . With PCs you are always working on them - changing, fixing. But if the box works well, as it does with the Apple computer, it removes the temptation to fiddle. Plus it looks good and it doesn't take up much space." Jim explains that when he arrived in Christchurch with his wife Marie, "We bought two bicycles, a car and an iMac". With Mac OS10 on an Apple computer it is like having two machines in the one desktop; Unix and Mac, since at the core of Mac OS X is an iteration of Unix apple calls Darwin; this has opened up Apple computers to a range of open source software that's mostly free of charge, and free of restrictive licensing practices. It opens Apple up to a much larger base of developers, a dispersed collection of thousands of keenly interested developers, including some amateurs, working to produce good software. Getting to know the computer, Jim has been writing a content management program for small websites on his Mac. Called I'nau, the program makes it easier for schools' secretarial staff to, for example, change website materials on the Mac using a text editor. It's in beta and will be trialled at the school where Jim's wife Marie works. Jim's happy with his iMac, although not so happy with the single-button optical mouse (it has been replaced with a wireless three-buttoned scroll mouse) and he still can't use external stereo speakers. When he isn't writing programs he'll be out on his bicycle or taking digital photos of his Kiwi-born wife's family and friends or focussing on New Zealand landscapes with an SLR camera. No longer working from home, Jim's company iNode is now part of the Effusion Group, based in Kenton Chambers in the CBD. Guernsey's flag hangs in the doorway while Jim Cheetham works on Open Source applications - he's a convert to Apple computers and not solely to the Mac OS.
Noel Strack - retired pharmacist Not too many years ago, Noel had a PC running Windows 3.11, which he used for word processing and data entry. "Push it and it would crash." One day, after both the printer and computer packed a sad, he decided enough was enough and splashed out on a second-hand Apple at a school sale and has never looked back. "I was delighted with the ease with which the little Macintosh worked." When he mastered that, he bought a new iMac, which is what he needed for his photographic collection. Noel is hardly a newcomer to computers. In the early '80s he had a Sanyo 255 and wrote his own programs in Basic. In those days, unlike now, there were few commercially-produced specialist applications and most programs had to be written by the users or by programrs. The transition to Macintosh has been made easy with support from reseller Magnum Mac and the Apple User Group, which he joined about the time he switched. The only glitch has been getting the scanner to work with Mac OS X but a replacement scanner overcame that difficulty. So when he isn't polishing a collection of antique brass microscopes, which share the study with the computer, you'll find Noel busy adding more mountainous vistas to the computer's hard drive. Lorae Parry - playwright
An established playwright and screen acting tutor at the Wellington Centre of Performing Arts, Lorae is also writing scripts using the program Final Draft (industry standard cross-platform scriptwriting software that gives scripts a professional finish) and editing 15 minute film festival dramas shot on a Sony DT100, an entry level professional video camera. A PC user for some years, Lorae wanted to be able to edit short films on her computer but the options for the PC all involved spending large amounts of money on software. Then she discovered Macs - they came with iMovie for free. And they looked lovely. Stylish. Although she considered buying an eMac, the portability and good looks of the 17-inch flat screen iMac won. "I would never have dreamed of moving the PC, but I have moved the Mac between my apartment in Wellington and a beach house on the Kapiti Coast four times. "Its all-in-one components make it a lot easier. It is very easy to swing it round and plug the camera cords in. I can move it with one hand and plug the camera in. It's a lot harder with a PC rammed up against the wall." But two months ago Lorae was struggling. She had bought a new iMac and was on her own with deadlines to meet - not even a manual to help. They sell you the computer and then there is nothing. Support is lacking and it's not satisfactory. "It's a myth that the Mac is easy to use. It is as hard as any new computer. Everyone says the Mac is so wonderful but the learning curve, if you don't know anything about them, is really difficult." Switching to a Mac in the middle of deadlines didn't help matters but she felt she had little choice. "Most of us have to learn it and work on it at the same time. We don't have two weeks to play with them and learn." All was not lost, however - Lorae was saved by two good books that spoke to her in people language and not computer language: The Flat Screen iMacs for Dummies and iMovie for Dummies . Two months after her brand new iMac was delivered to her home, it is getting easier. "Now I have my head around it - I had a couple of sessions with Miraz (of First Bite of the Apple and a fellow Macguide writer) to cover the basic things." Having used both Mac OS 9 and X, she prefers X; it's big and graphic and alluring. Mac OS 9 is necessary to run iMovie 2, the downloaded iMovie 3 having proven too buggy to use - it had to be removed at the computer shop. Like a number of recent switchers spoken to for this article Lorae, still hangs on to the PC. It will be a while before she moves all her play scripts and business files across, but she is getting there. Returnees
© Parkside Media 2004 Related Articles
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