Allegiance
Remember back in the day when the biggest debate in computers that the general public was aware of was Mac versus PC. Except back in the day IBM was synonymous with what we now refer to as a PC, or a computer with hardware based around the x86 CPU architecture. Every once in a while I still run across a person who refers to IBM�s against Macs. The majority of the non-techie public assumes that Apple lost the OS war and has had little success. This is not entirely true because of the way they have diversified their products and been careful to maintain the allegiance their viciously loyal followers. I have personally never been a big fan of the Mac because of biases from my grade school days. I had already been used to using the Win3.1 machine at home and could maneuver through it with ease. When we came to school we had to deal with the brand new PowerPC’s which I had little or no experience with and seemed counter-intuitive in many ways. I was already used to a command line at that point, although I didn’t really understand what I was doing, I simply memorized which words to type in which order to make a few things happen.
The Mac was just as unstable as the PC in many ways back then, it was not uncommon to get a ‘bomb’ while trying to write a paper. This and the fact that I could never find any games to play on the Mac tainted my perceptions of the entire product line. Now I have changed my mind, I have matured and am able to make less biased decisions about which operating systems are best for me. I really like the new OS X, which is what is on the machine I am typing this from right now. OS X is a beautiful interface with lots of eye candy yet is still efficient and not at all sluggish. It is also built on top of a Unix variant. Therefore many of the linux commands that I am familiar with work on the terminal in OS X. This makes the Mac feel less like a dumb appliance for running Photoshop, and more like a real powerful workstation for almost any application. The biggest draw-back is the price of anything related to apple, the second drawback is the proprietary nature of apple’s hardware as well as software. This is very undesirable for a person who loves the concept of free software and everything that the open-source world has to offer.
I was quite angry at the Mac’s in a lab here on campus today but that was more the fault of Adobe premiere, which I detest almost as much as the spawn of Satan called coconut. Vegas Video has treated me very well, and it is only available for Windows. Let me tell you that Vegas Video will do everything that premiere will do but it will let you do it easier and faster with greater quality results. The interface of this program is really nice and clean, and the controls are mostly intuitive.
Whatever you choose for your multimedia/graphic design needs you should really shop around and try out a lot of less common software. Adobe isn’t going to have a monopoly on their market forever, I think it is really important to learn computer skills on your own, because classes on the subject never really give a good comprehensive look at what these highly complex software programs can do for you.