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Mac Geeks: The Lusers Have Breached the Walls
Dear Mac geek friends, there is no way to sugarcoat this: we have lost our high-horse control over the desktop.
When Apple said “The computer for the rest of us”, turns out they actually meant them: the average users, our pawns. Well, all the pawns have queened.
Just look at Lion: Full Screen apps, versioning, gestures, ad-hoc file sharing and —gasp— OS upgrades from the hard drive. These are our features!
We used them with hacks or enabled them from the terminal. We suffered through endless beta apps that would kind of work if you just remembered to click X and not use Y.
But it gets much worse, not only can’t we look down on average users and laugh at their ways anymore. No, to add insult to injury, we are the ones doing things wrong now.
What kind of Mac world do we live in when your mom saving ALL her files in the (iCloud enabled) Documents folder is the right way? No save dialogs, no different project folders. File system anarchy I tell you.
There where signs, I just choose not to see them. Someone would tell me about a cool Mac app that I’ve never heard of; I’ve been pretty busy this week, I told myself. A family member would show me how he streamed video to his iPad, etc.
Damn Mac App Store, you righteous easy-to-use basterd.
The Cloud is our Last Domain
These are dark times. Apple wasn’t happy just attacking our desktop superiority, they mounted a full frontal assault and invaded as far north as the cloud valley.
But there is hope, at least for while. Apple being Apple, doesn’t like chaos. And there still plenty of chaos left as our computers and the cloud merge into one.
We will still use iCloud, it will be like that fancy leather binder you take to meetings. But our heart will be on Dropbox, our digital moleskine with markdown files, symlinks and other loosely connected pipes that kind of work if you just remembered to …
We geeks are both free R&D and market research for the eventual plug-and-play solution. Lab experiments for all the permutations of how a file can be accessed, synced, streamed and shared on the cloud.
But it is our nature, no use fighting it.
And who are we kidding? We where done with the desktop either way. Bring on the next.