Multitasking joy
Luis Villazon (Love Your Mac, June 2017), brought back waves of nostalgia for me because not only was I a proud owner of a Mac SE back in the days of yore, but I also owned a Mac Plus. Along with all the other ephemera, there was an application called Multifinder, that came bundled with the computer, that enabled multitasking. Not wanting to engage with this seemingly seductive idea, I plodded on with getting used to the other bundled applications so kindly donated by Apple. Besides, as many Apple fans of a certain age may remember, the Mac Plus came with 1MB of RAM and an 800KB floppy drive – and the manual insisted on having at least a couple of megabytes and a hard drive. Those were the days, eh? But of course, they weren’t.
Mind you, when I actually got round to discovering the joys of multitasking, I was hooked. Once I began to know what it would help me achieve, I quickly filled up my Mac Plus with its maximum memory of 4MB. It was liberating. I could accomplish two things at once – and it allowed more than one app to run at the same time. Before Multifinder landed, if I was writing, for example, and wanted to add a graphic, I had to close the word processor, open a graphics app, which in those days meant fiddling about with floppies; you had to insert another floppy, and so on. So the Multifinder was akin to finding the Holy Grail. With a hard drive that could hold several apps and docs, I could have two open at once. I could flit back and forth to my heart’s content! With this new flexibility and what was then, mind-numbing speed, my productivity went through the roof.
Nowadays, that is all old hat but, you know, thinking back, it was a time when Macs were open to being messed about with under the hood. Pure joy. by RAY HOW ES about why a pro should now move back to PC from Mac… I fell in love with the Mac’s reliability and ease of use in ’06 after many years of Windows frustration. It’s true to say that Microsoft lost their way with Windows (probably from 98 onwards), but Windows 10 is easily the best version they’ve come up with.
So, I don’t think it’s a choice anymore – you can have a PC and a Mac! I’m a training materials developer and I use both. I’ve got a Windows entry-level gaming PC next to my 27in iMac and I really like it (not quite as much as the Mac, but it was only £350!). In my work, I find there that there are applications that are just better on the PC (ie, PowerPoint and Outlook), plus one or two you just can’t get on the Mac. Since Apple created iCloud for Windows, it’s easy to have the benefits of my Safari bookmarks, calendar and contacts merged with Outlook. When I’m out and about training, I use a MacBook Pro (because it lasts three times as long as a Windows laptop), but the addition of VMware Fusion gives me a Windows 10 virtual machine so I can train people on the genuine versions of products, like Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. So, my message is, don’t ‘change’ to a PC, just buy one as well and use both platforms! by David BERESFORD