Niklas' blog

I have just arrived home after having shopped in-town. Mikaela just tried to open a bottle of Gustave Lorentz Gewurztraminer Réserve 2003 that we are enjoying while making spaghetti with meat-sauce; rather, she’s showing me how, and I’m adding my peculiarities, such as dicing the yellow onion into real chunks and adding more sea-salt when her voice studders, implying I really shouldn’t. I feel as if I’ve got real power, the Lord Nelson of the battlefield consisting of canned, whole tomatoes swimming in a sea of shredded meat and fuming spices.

In town I went looking for books. I found “AA Gill Is Away“, an anthology of writings by some restaurant critic covering a bunch of subjects. I liked the typeface that the book used, and it cost me £4.

I found nothing at Akademibokhandeln save for “‘Giant’ Size“, an Andy Warhol experiment; the book was…gigantic, and the copy available for members of the audience to peep in was standing on a holding-device built especially for said book. Interesting, but nothing I’d care to buy for the price.

It reminded me of what Pete Townshend once said: “It’s not hard to find anything to write songs about. Just go on a walk in your home-town and you’ll find loads.” True, very true. The same goes with viewing art. I am, of course, not demeaning Warhol, but art itself – at times.

I then visited a shop at Västermalmsgallerian, the semi-new, soulless pit that rummages one of the best coffee-shops in Stockholm; the service at that place is, sadly, growing more than lax. Anyway, the shop I visited carried two MacBooks, which was exactly what I was looking for.

I already know the black MacBook offers a little more hard-disk-space than the white, but that’s not enough to make it cost more than 2000SKR for the white variation. I was really impressed with the screen, which is glossy. The shop offers an iBook G4 for comparison with the black MacBook. Of course, this makes the MacBook look God-given, but some things seemed a tad sluggish at times; of course, you have to think about the switch (pun intended) that Apple has just made, from IBM to Intel, hence allowing Windows to run off a Macintosh computer, not to mention re-writing their software architecture to make their oldware runnable on a new chip. A dual-core chip.

I launched MS Excel, MS Word and iCal at the same time, and – lo and behold – they all opened within 30 seconds. Not very impressive, maybe. The thing is, I’m a Windows person. I needed the Task Manager, and in a few minutes, thanks to Finder, could kill MS Word, which actually hung and did nothing. Upon restart, it worked.

New, Intel-based applications are on the way everywhere, and most have already been converted. I’ve only heard talk about the products from Adobe, people saying they’re not fool-proof running off Intel, but that it will be taken care of come Adobe Suite CS3, which will hopefully be released next year.

The biggest issue of mine is the fact that Apple is more a stalwarthy, staunch giant than Microsoft, in one way. Get this, MacFanboys: MS dominates the software market. Apple make their own hardware and software and aren’t exactly prone to talking about some problems with their products – until an army speaks and Apple feel they have to express themselves.

Also, Tiger differs a lot from XP. Come Leopard and Vista, the gap will be even wider. As Microsoft are now inviting geeks to partake in beta-software such as Office 2007 and Vista (both in the beta 2-stage) Apple, as far as I know, are not doing this – apart from offering their Bootcamp to everybody. Of course, both Apple and Microsoft are doing this not because they love us, but because they want us to purchase their products.

To be fair to Apple, Microsoft haven’t delivered anything new for ages; Vista and Office 2007 are proof that they’re actually bleeding enough cash to care what their users think about their products, flaunting feedback-tools that they really need people to use and sporting blogs written by people at the top of the Microsoft food-chain (of course, Bill G. seems exempt). A lot of people still don’t think MS are change-prone. OSX is build on UNIX. For sure, OSX has had its fair share of security-problems, but nowhere near the bundle that MS have faced – and, more importantly, are most likely facing, i.e. trying to patch bugs for third-parties.

It’s interesting, though, to hear stuff like Windows Meeting Space first, and some kind of OSX collaboration features later. It’s boring, but it seems OSX is even more closely guarded (e.g. no betas) than Windows.