tangentalizingly delicious

Friday July 31, 2009

Almost all of my work is done in environments that have no regard for the platform. I’ve moved to the web to a large extent, or at least have moved to software that leans towards platform-independance.

For some time, my personal platform preference has been OS X. I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary work platform since the spring, and of course I’ve been using Windows since 3.1 (and MSDOS before that).

It’s hard to remember how excited I was for Windows 95, and even 98. It’s hard to remember how much I enjoyed working on Windows 2000. I still have fond memories of how stable it was and when I do end up on a Windows system for any length of time I end up making customisation choices that end up looking more like Windows 2000 than XP or Vista.

In fact, I’ve never used Vista.

I was struck with a spot of inspiration this morning, and realized that I use OS X because most of the time I just don’t want to think about my computer. I don’t want to think about what keystroke is necessary or what interface norm I need to comply with to do the work I want.

That took me a while to get to, to be honest. I got my first Apple computer in spring of 2002, beat the crap out of it then after it finally died in 2005 didn’t get another until January 2008 – price being my primary reason.

I keep using OS X I think because when I do want to think about my computer – when I want to configure something or change a default or develop an application for it or do something to the base system I get – I want to love it. For me in a large way that love means the FreeBSD underpinnings of Darwin.

I associate Windows with “Enterprise”, which for me has almost entirely negative connotations. An organization that is an Enterprise is big and bloated and lacks passion. That reflects even in a company I like as much as Apple, whose web-based offerings tend to suck ass. No matter how rigid and perfectionist they are about their hardware and platforms, they’re still using iTunes Connect for their iPhone developers to interact with the App Store and that application reeks of enterprise.

I associate Microsoft strongly with Enterprise, perhaps because of their marketing or some other brand element? Every time I cross paths with them, they’re talking to deep-in-the-bowels IT types dealing with a large number of servers and political tugs of war and applications who serve many masters poorly.

I am looking forward to trying Windows 7 some day, but as near as I can tell that day is a long way off. The only purpose Windows serves for me any more is as a gaming platform, and since I rarely indulge in any hot-off-the-presses games (I still don’t have a system that can play BioShock, which is now two years old) I expect my XP license to support that hobby well into the next decade.