I Have Partially Switched
I’m currently looking at the world through a new type of window. New to me at least that is… I’m sitting in my small living room that have recently grown considerably larger, due to the fact, that I have pulled a stationary PC out of it. My home is now officially Mac territory.
Lately I have found myself critizising & designing user interfaces and usability design for a living. I have done so for some years now, as a part of my work at Titoonic. With a variety of purposes, missions and target audiences. For games, web sites and advanced software for kids. But allways with the PC as my own working foundation, and as the unconscious meassure of standards, of good and bad, of right and wrong.
Somehow it seems irresponsible of an interaction-, usability-, user experience-, and communications designer not to absorb as many ways of solving the problems of the trade as possible.
The solution is actually quite obvious. I’ve bought a 15′ PowerBook. I’ve scrapped the old noisy wintel-hell and I’m forcing myself onto a path that I forsee becoming a troublesome one; I’m (currently) the only Mac user at work, and the guys are already giving me hell for switching. My brains keyboard shortcut centre is temporarily fucked up. I feel a frightening, yet at the same time somewhat comforting, lack of control. I’m not used to photo library software that wants to take charge of all my files, instead of using the folders I’ve created. I get scared when iTunes move my music around and follows some weird system depending solely on all the music files to have proper ID tags (allthough I recently bought an iPod nano, I’ve allways used WinAmp). And what’s up with Photoshop not having a solid gray background – I mean, I can see my friggin desktop image through it ?!
On the other hand. All that are just indicators of what I’ve been used to so far. Not of good and bad, or right and wrong.
I find myself in a small living room, slimmed down of approx. 20 kilos of ugly, default gray, noisy wintel steel and plastic. Everything just works. I’m not getting any info I don’t need. Not even while booting (”Searching for secondary slave” – well, aren’t we all in a way?). I’m listening to my music streaming from the PowerBook to the stereo (yes, I know I would have been able to do that on the wintel PC as well, but still, the AirPort with AirTunes is Apple, as well as the ease of setting it all up). That’s a promising couple of first experiences.
But, admittedly, all of the above are just lame excuses for my to buy an expensive computer. The actual reason for this purchase when I’m being completely honest to myself is – brace yourselves; I’m petting a slick titanium finish 2,4 kg completely wireless (at least for 4-5 hours more) computer, that looks friggin cool. That’s it. I’ve bought the design.
What’s even worse is, that I have now found myself turning into one of those bloggers that crowd the blogosphere with mile long praises of all their designer hardware. Designed by Apple in California. Made in China (but that’s a different story).