[Tim Wilson]

Andrew Richards/b> “But maybe I feel it more since a lot of my work is in the OS, not immersed in creative apps that are nearly indistinguishble from platform to platform….“

Completely fair and very well-stated. I think the end of your quote is exactly the point that Walter and others have been making, that if you’re a “legacy“ Mac guy working in a cross-platform application, the trip to Windows needn’t be the fire and brimstone it has historically been made out to be…or actually may have been. 🙂 For many (most?) people, it’s little more than getting past a boot screen, learning some keyboard shortcuts, and getting used to faster speeds. LOL

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

“….gesture of truce….”

An overture to make up?

I hereby promise one (1) real pony to anyone who can provide a picture of these two kissing. Whatever happens in Vegas….could be worth a real pony to you.

I’m just saying.

[Tim Wilson]

Agreeing with Gary and filing under the category of Your Mileage May Vary:

[Gary Huff] “The Registry (and the all too frequent necessity to muddle with it): How frequently and why? I’ve hit up the Registry my fair share of times too, but only for special circumstances, and since Windows 7, it’s incredibly rare as well.”

I’ve been on the command line of a Mac many, many more times than I’ve dug in the registry on Windows. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve EVER been in the registry of Windows.

[Gary Huff] “The Ribbon/Aero (talk about sloppy overwrought chrome): I don’t really see this as a problem. I think Windows 7’s interface is actually kind of nice.”

I’ve grown fond of the interface as a whole too. And you can turn off the ribbon, right? I have in Word. Is there somewhere else I’m missing?

[Gary Huff] “Ugly screen fonts: Never noticed this.”

The difference is in the drawing: Mac optimizes for smoothness, Windows for sharpness. Two different goals, both legit. To me, Mac fonts look fuzzy.

Ironically, what finally tipped the balance away from Mac for me after 20 years of active Windows-bashing was Fusion. Running Mac and Windows side-by-side made come to resent every moment I had to spend in the Mac OS. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I haven’t booted that OS in five years now, and don’t miss it. Quite the contrary.

I’m not going to run down the reasons because they don’t matter. It’s my mileage and it varies. That’s the nature of mileage. I’m also not interested in evangelizing. Like what you like. I’m just saying that I made a lot of money running a Mac-only video production shop for a very long time, having Apple machines non-stop since 1979. The switch was not only painless, but a pleasure. I can’t imagine any reason I’d want to use a Mac again, not because I hate it or because Apple boo-hoo-hoo whatever. I just like what I’m using now a lot better.

And as scores of people have noted in this forum many times, the two play nicely just fine. It doesn’t have to be either/or.

It’s just a computer, man. Software? We kick software’s ass for a living, even if it sometimes kicks ours.

Terrifying? I’ll tell you what’s terrifying. An iTunes update on any OS.

The real irony in all this is that I can boil the “revolutionary” aspect of Final Cut Pro down to this one thing: it was the first NLE that proved you don’t need a tower to do professional Hollywood-grade work. FCP was the first seed in the destruction of the Mac Pro. FCPX is its full flowering — a post-PC NLE, designed to run on post-PCs.

Good thing or bad thing? Your mileage will vary.

[Tim Wilson]

We like this idea a lot. We’re a bit buried in the crush between our latest issue of Creative COW Magazine being posted and NAB, but it will happen as quickly as it can.

Thanks for hanging on in the meantime!

Regards,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

[Don Walker] “P.S. Tim Wilson, please don’t admonish me for trying to cut down the traffic on this forum, I truly don’t think that anybody (including me) will stop coming to the Cow!
“

I’m so sorry for the late reply, Don! Been out sick, and just crawling back.

Dude, anybody who starts a thread asking other people to chime in is MY BEST FRIEND.

Carry on, my friend. Carry on!

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

Here’s all I have to say about this. Be sure to swing by the NVIDIA booth at NAB and take a look at the HP Z820. Let’s talk about envy when you get back.

I should mention you’ll also be able to see the Z820 at Adobe, Avid and Intel too, among many others, but since we’re starting with NVIDIA, you should too.

🙂

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine

[Tim Wilson]

[Darren Durbin] “[Tim Wilson] ” e3000 not only cost in the same neighborhood as Xserve — it could cost a lot less”

We have/had several customers who dropped significant six figure sums on an E3000 box – in some cases, the memory alone was close to six figures. “

I’d be shocked if there weren’t scores of multi-million dollar installations.

My point is that A-line series, “A” was for “affordable,” or something along those lines. It was pitched very specifically at small and medium businesses with shiny brochures. I could swear that one of ’em had balloons on it.

And I’ll keep saying: 3TB. The series was not *limited* to deep pockets, and the small guys were just as well-cared for as the big ones.

But overall, I agree with you agreeing with me. 🙂

I also agree that roadmaps are of limited value. But I’m some combination of amused and amazed and annoyed that so many people are so adamant that good-faith attempts to stay in touch with their customers is somehow a bad idea.

Is it really better to have the most active threads in the largest media professionals community in the world speculate whether the hardware at the core of their business, provided by the vendor at the core of their business, is going to exist any longer?

I take that back. It’s a fantastic idea. Always happy to see the traffic. 🙂

And kidding aside, the energetic insights.

Especially when they agree with me. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Phil Hoppes] ” It would be sad to see everything go to laptop only with no large monitors. I just don’t see that happening.”

That’s what Jeremy and I were getting at with our question about Apple TV. It seems to me that you can put your screen just about anywhere you want, any size you want.

And not for nothing, but those 27″ iMacs are pretty sweet. Not as powerful as a Z1 mind you 🙂 but probably more screen real estate than anyone running a single monitor now…unless that monitor is connected to an iMac.

So anyway, that’s what Jeremy and I were writing at more or less the exact same time. If Apple TV or some variation of wireless connection to a monitor takes care of the screen size issue, you might be a lot happier on a MacBook Air — park your desktop there, and do your “real” work on the 65″ Panasonic Viera, right?

I’ve been using Mac portables non-stop since 1991 (back in the days when the Apple logo was upside down when you opened the cover), and I have to tell you, I really love the idea of a super-duper thin client: SSD boot drive, a couple of hundred gigs for the local mirror of Dropbox, iCloud, et. al., but work with everything remotely AND wireless connection to a big-ass monitor.

What are we missing?

[Tim Wilson]

[Phil Hoppes] “For that alone it makes for a strong argument for the longevity of desktops for the foreseeable future. Not that development could not be done on a laptop however.”

That’s what I’m not clear on. When talking about porting Xcode to Windows (agreed, unlikely at best) is that only because you’d find it unacceptable to code on a laptop without a big monitor?

Because wouldn’t you be able to use Apple TV to code on the 80″ LCD in your living room? While listening to Adele in 7.1 surround? LOL

Kidding aside, that’s my guess where this is going. The thin client isn’t just about offloading processing and storage anymore. You can now have as big a monitor as you want, with no wires.

So Darren and Phil, I’m curious what you mean by “The ‘hardest’ problem with dropping desktop support is that you suddenly don’t have anything on which to write your iOS app.”

Thanks for filling me in,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “[Darren Durbin] “In the enterprise space things are more stable ( see the e3000 example ), but partly that is because large enterprises will pay *significant* amounts of cash to hp/microsoft/ibm in order to keep things that way, but at the lower ‘corporate/departmental/pro/consumer’ level it’s a lottery”

Thank you. You said it much more eloquently than I did and I appreciate it.”

Except it’s still not true. e3000 not only cost in the same neighborhood as Xserve — it could cost a lot less. Remember the 146 gigs MAX? The 3.5″ form factor? 8 gigs of RAM? That’s not exactly heavy iron. The A-line was marketed explicitly as entry-level, low cost, near-commodity stuff. I’ve posted enough links that don’t work — you can look this up on your own. There are PDF brochures and still-active support sites a-plenty.

Even at 20 units/rack, 3TB only scratches the bottom rung of enterprise. I bet you have more than that at your shop.

Continuing to support it was a big deal to HP because it was popular, not because it was expensive. To most big companies, big groups of customers matter.

Now having said all that, I think that the idea that there exists a single person who is waiting on Apple to SPEAK before making a decision is…uhm…curious at best.

It’s like when I heard somebody say there was a Bigfoot sighting in Utah. No way, I said. Everybody knows Bigfoot lives in swamps.

So, I won’t say that folks will be waiting until hell freezes over before they hear from Apple. More like waiting until there are a lot of swamps in Utah.

And here’s the last thing I’ll say about this. Corporate roadmaps are worth the paper they’re printed on….and they’re almost never printed on paper. But the question was, are there companies that do roadmaps, and the answer is yes, and they offer products in the same ecosystems and price ranges that we live in — and hey! They’re products and companies that we actually work with.

You may not like them or believe them when they’re talking to you, you may not like what they’re saying, but Microsoft and HP are talking. They’re providing exactly the kind of forward-looking guidance and ongoing support through changing operating conditions that people want Apple to provide.

This isn’t theoretical, and I’m not meaning to be argumentative. Simple question. Are there roadmaps? Simple answer: Yes. Standard operating procedure. Except from Apple. If you want those things, you need to get them from somebody else.

Nothing new here, except that people are finally saying it out loud, because it’s becoming a problem it wasn’t before.