the tindog coffeehouse

I’m not a Mac user, so maybe I’m not really qualified to pass judgment on Apple’s newest version of its OS X operating system, codenamed Mountain Lion.

But I can’t help but to laugh at all the negative reviews of it that I’ve seen in the last couple of days. It seems as though a lot of hardcore Apple fanboys just aren’t as impressed with OS X as they used to be, not because it’s not an adequate OS — which I’m sure it is — but because it’s only adequate.

If you’re keeping score at home, Mountain Lion is the ninth iteration of OS X (officially numbered 10.8) since 10.0 (Cheetah) premiered in 2001. Which means that OS X is actually older than Windows XP. Of course, a lot has changed since Cheetah, but maybe not enough. The problem is, since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has largely been coasting. Any new products have been merely a half-step better than their previous version, a gradual evolution rather than a bold revolution. Even the iPad for all of its success is really just a jumbo-sized iPod Touch, which is really just an iPhone without the phone part.

And then there’s Microsoft.

Continue reading…

Once upon a time, there was a computer operating system called DOS. It was a command-line, non-graphical OS that required users to type in commands to run the programs they wanted to run. And for a while, Microsoft Windows ran on top of it. Your computer would start up into Windows, but you could exit it and run DOS programs. Windows and DOS each had extremely different user interfaces and different ways of doing things, even though they both ran on the same computer.

Running the Consumer Preview version of Windows 8 is like living back in the days of DOS.

I’ll elaborate further, but suffice it to say, from everything I’ve seen so far of Microsoft’s newest OS, I’m not a fan. Windows 8 is designed first and foremost for tablets with touchscreens instead of PCs with mice and keyboards. It draws heavily from Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, prominently featuring the multi-colored tiles of its Metro UI, while pushing anything resembling a traditional Windows desktop as far away as possible. On a touch-based tablet, this approach makes sense (even if Metro itself is hideous), but on a laptop or desktop, this touch-centric paradigm is a train wreck. Microsoft has clearly bet the farm that everyone will be using only tablets in the future, somehow forgetting that the majority of its customers are enterprises that deploy thousands of laptops and desktops daily.

Here are my initial impressions after playing around with the Consumer Preview:

Continue reading…

Don’t call Google+ a social network.

Even though its users have profiles, follow others, post status updates, upload photos and videos, and “+1″ a bunch of stuff.

But don’t call it a social network.

Continue reading…

Gizmodo has a post out about what Microsoft’s successor to Windows 7 will look like. Pretty much anyone you talk to will mention the same things: more cloud integration, better hardware management, better security, faster boot time, expanded use of virtualization, etc. All good answers, and I think accurate ones.

But my gut tells me that if you really want to know what Windows 8 will look like, just look at an iPad. Forget Windows XP, Vista, or even Windows 7. Windows 8 will more closely resemble Apple’s iOS or Google’s Chrome OS than any of its predecessors.

Why? Several reasons:

Continue reading…