I can’t speak for Windows Vista as I have neither used it or even seen it in action but from Windows XP right back to MS-DOS version 1 the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ with it’s cryptic error codes was a well known and unwelcome feature that would flush your unsaved work from memory and make you scream with pent-up rage while making a solemn vow to perform more saves and backups in the future. And there was nothing for it, of course, except the power button.

Apple’s Mac OSX really is a very stable operating system but don’t let those legions of Apple fan-boys convince you that it never crashes. Of course it does.

But it does it with far more style and elegance. The preferred method seems to be a curtain of greyness that descends from the top of the screen, sweeping down to the bottom, a sort of ‘grey screen of death’ with grace.

There again, when things really become scrambled it reaches for the abstract as can be seen in these screen shots. It was quite amusing too. With every keystroke or movement of the mouse, the screen displayed a completely new look.

However, Microsoft may not have anything to crow about here. I was using MS Word at the time.

For my photo and graphic editing needs I use Adobe’s Photoshop Elements. While Adobe have always annoyed me for their complete and arrogant disregard for UI standards, their Photoshop software has to be considered pretty good stuff and the trimmed down ‘consumer’ level Elements does more than I need. And finally, for the Mac, they recently released version 6 which runs natively on the Intel processor and has the speed and robustness previous versions lacked.

So far so good. Is there a negative coming up? Sure there is.

There is a growing tendency – and I believe Apple themselves started this trend – for a ‘black’ interface. Dialog boxes and toolbars are black with buttons and text being, well, nearly black. See for yourself on the illustration of Elements. It actually looks rather nice – I have nothing against black; I have a solid black desktop all the time. And when I am sitting in the office at my iMac with its great big screen, it is a pleasure to use.

When I use my MacBook Pro however, and this is the machine I use the most, I am usually out in the conservatory or on the patio under a sunshade. The screen is smaller. The ambient light is brighter. I load up Elements. And all I can see is… black. I can just about make out the text on that toolbar but there is no way I can see the textbox. Or the dropdown control. Or make out which tool is which in the tool palette. The very first time I installed and opened it up I was, in fact, outside and it was one of those ‘wtf’ moments as all I could see was black. Bloody black everywhere.

Take the test. See the bottom toolbar? Look along it until you find the word ‘Normal’. This is a drop down selection list so somewhere to the right is a little down arrow. Can you see it? Wait until night time and then turn out all the lights. You’ll be able to see it then. And if you can see it now tilt the screen to pretend you are working in a lighter room.

Professional software like this will go through hundreds of hours of design work and possibly thousands of hours of UI and usability testing. I am forced to assume that it was all done in a darkened room and nobody thought to turn the fucking lights on. Either that or everyone who works at Adobe has a mental age of 12.

And before anyone says anything – yes I have scoured the options, the help files, the documentation and nowhere does it say you can change it. ‘Bridge’ – the library program that comes bundled also has black on black and that can be changed. I even posted on the support forum and sent them a support request and guess what? Never even got a reply. That’s Adobe for you.

If you know how to fix this I will be indebted for the information. If you don’t, and like me prefer to be able to work at places of your own choosing, then I’d avoid this if I were you. Unless you’re under 12 that is.

I know I have touched on this stuff before but I am as mad as hell with my MacBook Pro this evening and nearly felt like throwing it out the window. No – it’s Apple I am really mad as hell with and there is just a chance that someone might read this and let me into the big secret.

Internet access at hotels and public places can be patchy. On the whole – or at least in my experience – there seem to be three types of WiFi access ignoring the ones you have to pay extra for.

There are the type that just pop up when you open a browser and connect you up without you having to do anything. And they always seem to just work.

Next come the type that are secured with a WEP or WPA key and once you have entered the correct info they also just seem to work.

And then there are the completely free and unsecured networks often found in bookshops, small cafes and friendly hotels. According to Apple you just select the network in your WiFi list and it will just work. Like buggery it does! And it is always the open, unsecured type that give me problems.

Oh, it finds and connects to the wifi OK. All my little bars go black. But it never assigns an IP address and gateway. It seems totally unable to deal with DHCP and happily ’self-assigns’ an IP that is, of course, totally incorrect. At this lovely hotel I am currently staying at (Solvang, California) they actually have about 4 free networks busily humming away and I can’t become a member on any of them. And here is the real kicker – bloody Windows connects like a charm! First time, straight in. OSX? Hasn’t got a fucking clue. Mention this to Apple and they just repeat the same tired old mantra… ‘it just works’. No it fucking doesn’t!

So if anyone out there knows the secret of how you get the OSX network preferences to actually talk DHCP with a free, open WiFi network then please, please let me know. because I really don’t want to have to take a Windows notebook on vacation next time.

Before I switched to exclusively using Apple Mac’s I thought that the only web browser available to those poor Apple folk was the – at the time – newly released Safari although I do recall knowing that an old and ugly version of IE (5.5) was also bundled. It was not, of course, true at that time and it is not true today. The Mac platform is as spoilt for choice as users of Windows. All the major browsers are available with the one notable exception of Internet Explorer – a demon which Mac users remain, thankfully, not tempted by.

Personally I have been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days and before the switch. Opera I find too confusing and idiosyncratic. Safari may be relatively fast but I find it’s dark grey toolbars and borders foreboding and just plain ugly and much prefer Omniweb which also uses the same webkit platform. But I have stuck to faithful Firefox partly because of it’s wonderful plugin architecture.

But therein lies, I believe, both the strength and the weakness of Firefox. It can not be denied that with every new update it gets just a little slower at core rendering and while some of the plugins become indispensable, each one adds it’s own overhead. I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to reboot my Mac because Firefox has, to put it bluntly, slowed to a crawl. But I like it – it does what I need – one or two plugins really are indispensable – so I carried on using it.

And then I was talking just a couple of days back to a guy who mentioned Camino. Camino uses the same framework and engine as Firefox but is both optimised for the Mac platform and has dispensed with the plugin architecture. It is a plain and simple browser without all the bells and whistles of it’s bigger brother. I tried it once a couple of years ago and didn’t like it.

I tried it yesterday and was, to put it simply, quite amazed. My own site here was displaying in a fraction of the time Firefox takes to render it. Other sites I regularly visit were suddenly popping up while Firefox was still looking for the progress bar. And the good news seems to be that Camino is not suffering from the same degradation that Firefox regularly displays. This – to me – is a revelation of some magnitude. If, like me, you looked at Camino a few years back, thought the centrally located tabs were a little weird and then dismissed it… load it up and have a go with today’s version. It’s just like the weather here in England today. Hot.

As an Apple Mac fan that doesn’t think Steve Jobs is close to God and can do no wrong I rather fatuously enjoy it when he makes a very public mistake. At yesterday’s MacWorld keynote, Jobs unveiled ‘Time Capsule’, which is, basically, nothing more than an Airport Extreme box with a WiFi card and a big hard disk in it for dedicated ‘Time Machine’ ¹ use. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a good and an obvious product for Apple to market and they haven’t priced it too badly either. But Uncle Steve must have been thinking about the mistake he made last year when he announced it.

Last year, when Leopard feature ‘Time Machine’ was announced, Jobs stated quite clearly that users could hook up an ‘AirDisk’ ² for it’s use. Indeed, early development editions of Leopard reportedly had this feature available. But when the final version was released the feature had somehow disappeared. Apple fanboys everywhere deduced that the code must have been unstable so good ‘ol Steve took it out and it would come later in an update. The more cynical amongst us, figured that somewhere along the line it had dawned on Steve that disabling the feature and then coming up with a nice shiny box that would allow it could be a good source of revenue. No problem with that – that’s business. His mistake, of course, was the transparency with which he went from free to $300.

¹ For those people who live in a world where an Apple is simply a piece of fruit – Time Machine is, actually, a rather nifty program. Hook up an external hard disk to your Mac, turn Time Machine on and you get continuous and incremental backups of your system. You don’t need to do a thing. You can easily restore an entire system to, say, what it was like at 3pm last Wednesday or retrieve any file mistakenly deleted from any point in time.
² AirDisk is an external hard disk that plugs directly into the Apple Airport extreme wireless base station that can then be used by any Mac (or PC) on the network as a storage device. It’s a great idea. Sadly, as anyone who comes here may have seen before, I have never managed to get it working without losing my internet connection and having very slow write times. But others have.