"Is that an Apple?"
This has never happened to me before. There I was, sat in my local library doing some work away from the distractions of home, when a smartly-dressed woman approached me and said in an apologetic tone: "Excuse me, I don't wish to intrude, but is that an Apple?"
"Certainly is," I said, surprised but rather pleased that someone was sufficiently interested in my laptop to come and talk to me about it.
"Do you mind if I ask you something? Does it work on Word?"
I smiled.
"Sure, you can use Word on it. It looks a little different to the versions you'll have seen on Windows computers but it does the same job.
"Here," I added, "I can show you."
The woman moved round so she could see the screen. She pointed at my todo.txt, which I happened to be editing at the time.
"Is that it?"
"No, that's, um, something different. I don't use Word much, but I'm relatively geeky so don't worry about the stuff I'm using. Here, this is what Word looks like."
I used Quicksilver to launch Word and showed her a blank document. "It's all pretty straightforward."
My companion seemed to have made up her mind already; she just needed encouragement.
"Yes it looks great. I saw one in Selfridges in Birmingham and it was only £600, I didn't think they were that cheap. The chap said there was a new model coming out."
"There is, a new iBook, they've just announced them. But if writing Word documents is your main requirement, one of the old ones will be more than enough."
"I've always liked the look of them," she went on. "They appeal to me, I can't say why. When I decided that I needed a computer it just seemed like the right think to buy."
"Well this is three years old," I said, pointing to the iBook. "It still works fine. You might need to pay more for things like Applecare, which is an insurance scheme, and for Word itself; but the cost of the machine itself is probably going to be very good value in the long term. These machines last well and they are much easier to use."
I had to stop myself going off on an Mac evangelist rant; besides, the woman seemed to want to get away from this raving geek. And anyway, she knew what she wanted.
"Save up your pennies and get yourself one," I concluded.
She smiled.
"Thank you; you've convinced me. I shall."
How I work
If I were to break my work down to essentials, it becomes two tasks:
- come up with ideas for articles that will sell
- write them
This means I spend a lot of time looking for things to write about (via incoming email, browsing web sites, and monitoring feeds), and roughly the same amount of time writing.
I write ideas and rough drafts in my todo.txt file, a large single plain text file that includes all my work in progress, things to do, shopping lists, addresses, notes and ideas. As I write this, the file is just over 3700 lines, or 12000 words, long.
I edit the file in BBEdit, using split view so I can edit two different sections of the file at once. To me this is a natural and very efficient way of working; I know the structure of my file well, and can easily find the section I want to edit next by searching for keywords and section headings (marked with an asterisk, eg *todo or *weather or *books).
BBEdit is set up to display white text on a blue background; I've found this much easier on my eyes when spending many hours a day writing.
Usually, an article will start life as a snippet of text, or a couple of URLs somewhere in this file.
That snippet might get expanded to something much longer - several hundred words - before it gets cut out and moved to a file of its own. This happens when I need to know the exact word count of what I'm writing, and it's easier to do this when the piece is in a file of its own. And anyway, the article needs to be filed away in a logical place on my hard disk.
Because I write a lot of stuff for publication on the web, I often have to file copy in HTML. To make this easy, I write everything in Markdown markup language, and have got into the habit of doing this all the time. BBEdit makes using Markdown very easy and it's a function I use several times a day.
Copy is always filed by email; soon after filing, I send an invoice (usually by email, but some clients like to have a paper copy in the post).
I'm a part-timer, working on Mondays and Wednesdays when my son is in nursery, and looking after him on the other days of the week. Since some of my work needs to be spread over the week (especially Rising Slowly posts), I often write things in advance, setting them up in handler apps like MarsEdit so I can post them with a couple of clicks when the need arises.
Being a part-timer is wonderful because my life never feels dominated by work. If anything, work has a minor role to play alongside my other regular duties. The downside is that sometimes, I have more than two days worth of work to do within the week. That's when I have to work evenings and weekends, as long as it takes to meet the deadlines. Thankfully these situations are rare.
And that's how I work. It's a very simple process, the result of a very simple set of demands.
I'm very interested to know how other people work. I want to explore the mundanities of work processes; what tasks are people required to complete, and what tools (sofware and otherwise) do they use? How do they use these tools? What changes do they make to their work environment to make the work easier to do?
Smugness unsettled
Here's a column I wrote in the week after Apple's big Intel switch announcement. It seemed like a good opportunity to use the old "smug Mac users" line again, so I did.
There's many collective nouns for Mac users, but my favourite is "smug".
Put a dozen Mac owners in a room together and the air will reek of smugness. They are users of the best computers and the best operating system in the world, and heaven help anyone who disagrees with them on that matter.
Mac users have made great efforts in recent years to point out their technical superiority over Windows-using friends and colleagues.
"You poor thing," the Mac user would ooze, "having to spend so much time worrying about viruses and malware. I don't have that problem, you know."
The Mac versus Windows debate has been a religious war for years now, and neither side has ever been willing to give even an inch to the other.
I say all this as a Mac user myself, for the last four years. I've been as smug as the rest of them; moreso, probably.
All of which goes part way to explaining why any Mac users you know might be acting a little strangely now.
Last week, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple and surely the smuggest Mac user of them all, stood up in a crowded hall in California to make a speech. In it, he told his astonished audience that as from 2007, all new Apple computers would be designed around a new processor, the chip that is the "brain" of any computer.
The manufacturer of the new chips is Intel, famed for its close relationship with Microsoft. Apple's decision to embrace what it previously derided as weak technology seemed like a slap in the face to millions of devoted Mac users.
For a decade, Macs have used the PowerPC chips designed and built by Motorola and IBM. They were more expensive than Intel's chips, but worked harder and operated at far lower temperatures.
The last PowerPC chip to be used by Apple was the G5, a blisteringly fast piece of kit that turned humble computers into processing powerhouses.
Two years ago, Jobs promised that Apple would release laptops with G5 chips, but that promise was never kept. IBM could not produce a G5 that was small enough to fit in a laptop, or that could operate within such a small space without melting all the components around it (these processors get very hot indeed, and need extravagant cooling systems to keep them functioning).
Apple found itself in a quandry. It could hold out for further technical innovation in IBM's laboratories, or it could swallow its corporate pride and switch to a different kind of processor.
For the vast majority of consumers, the change shouldn't matter, or even be noticeable. Most people don't care who makes the components inside their computers, the only thing they worry about is getting a computer that works and is reliable.
But for the army of software developers who write applications for Mac OS X, Apple's award-winning operating system, dozens of questions have popped up. Not only do most of them face extra work just to make their programs work on the new Intel-powered Macs, they also wonder if those same computers could run Windows.
It sounds like the geekiest of concerns, but this announcement is the biggest story in Apple history for five years, and it has got under a lot of people's collars.
Some are confident that Jobs knows what he's doing, and that Apple can be sure of increased sales and greater success in the long term. Others gloomily predict the end of the Mac platform, and even the end of Apple as a company.
Whatever our view of the future, us smug Mac users can be forgiven for sporting a miserable expression for a little while. After all, the last thing we want is to have anything to do with - ugh - Windows.
