Commentary
Straddling the edge of a revolution
- by travis , September 4, 2008
I've now had my MacBook for about two weeks and after buying into the Mac revolution that is sweeping college campuses I have but one thing to say: I'm not that impressed.
The biggest appeal of having a Mac is simply in the name and look of the computer itself. I will admit that 90% of the reason I purchased the MacBook was because I liked the idea of owning a Mac.
The marketing department at Apple really knows how to sell a product. The trendy commercials, the sleek look, and the surprisingly simple logo (the half-eaten apple) really got me hooked. For months I thought about how I had to have one no matter how little I actually needed it.
Now I’m not saying that I don’t like my MacBook. Au contraire. I find the extra long battery life to be incredibly useful, and I definitely can appreciate how simple it is to use, but overall I really just didn’t need this computer.
I consider myself a typical computer user; I don’t do many things outside of the ordinary. I write papers for school, I chat with friends, browse the web, and listen to music and that’s about it – all things a PC can do just as simply as a Mac.
One thing that utterly saddens me about the Mac is its lack of a program comparable to the familiar PC program “Paint.†This often-overlooked program is really quite beneficial in the hands of the right person – I consider it Photoshop for the technologically impaired and I am a huge fan of it.
What’s up Apple? Why can’t us techie-amateurs have our paint program to cut, clip, crop, and create pieces of artwork not seen since our elementary school years. I guess I’ll just have to stick to crayon on paper for the time being.
Overall, I guess you can say that I’m basically neutral on the Mac/PC battle (consider me Switzerland). But why take the time to write about my neutrality? The answer to this question is simple yet complicated at the same time. It’s easily relatable, but something only Mac users can understand and the answer is: I just wanted to tell the world that I HAVE A MAC!
Now that you've got that Mac, explore! Take that creative side of you that liked to do fun things in PC Paint and apply it to your whole computer experience. Search macupdate.com for "image paint" and find 30+apps that do what you're talking about, some of them free (try IMaginator, at least in demo mode, to inspire you). You may have to "unlearn" a bit - to crop and use multiple images, you might use a path to crop an image, then copy and paste it into a layer in a bigger canvas. Use the stationery in Apple Mail to put cropped photos in your email, then find out how to create your own stationery. Learn 3D animation, or programming, or climate modeling, or create artificial life! Zillions of commercial, open source, and shareware apps are waiting for you.