I've been out of the school environment for three months (a.k.a.
summer vacation) and it's difficult to come up with topics when I'm
not in an environment that produces - well - any type of work. This
article is not on any particular piece of software, but on
OS X itself.
OS X Ahead of Its Time
When OS X was introduced in 2000, it was a major jump from other
operating systems of the day. Compare OS X 10.0 to Mac
OS 9 (introduced in 1999) and Windows 2000 (I'll go out on a
limb here and say 2000). OS X introduced the modern look and
feel we've come to love (assuming you run OS X - if you run
OS 9 or earlier, more power to ya).
From personal experience, I find OS X to be a more pleasant
system to work with. As I've said in earlier columns, my eighth
grade humanities teacher's husband works for Apple, and because of
that, she brought in two Blue & White
G3 Power Macs running OS X 10.2.
Creaky Old Windows
Compared that to the computers in use at our school at the time
- the teachers ran Windows 2000 Professional while most student
computers ran Windows 95 or 98. And those computers where sluggish
at that!
All the students in the class who preferred to use a faster
computer, which was just about everyone, would reserve the
computers before class started (last period of the day) just to use
them for the hour we where in class.
Plug and Play
Compatibility is a major issue nowadays, and I'm not talking
about data files; I mean hardware.
Just a couple of weeks ago I made a slideshow of photos for
church (time for an article on iPhoto), and I simply plugged in the
adapter, then the VGA cable, and in a second the extended desktop
popped up. Now when you need to do something for a demonstration or
are just in need of a few more inches of desktop space, it's really
nice not to have to search around for the appropriate drivers
needed for any device you want to use.
