I got me an iMac!

[Richard Amiel McGough]

Thanks Richard. Did you get a chance to see the second half of the presentation?

Yes. I saw the demo of the graphical searches and the 3D maps. Is that what you are referring to?

[heb13-13]

Yes. I saw the demo of the graphical searches and the 3D maps. Is that what you are referring to?

Yes, what did you think about that. Does your software have that? Do you think those features are important? So, you have BibleWorks on a Windows PC? I will take a look at it.

Thanks Richard,
Rick

[jce]

I've never owned a Mac. Always been a PC guy. But then I got interested in developing iPhone apps using Flex Builder on my PC, but soon learned that to write professional apps you need to use Xcode which only runs on Macs. So I kinda dropped the idea for a while but then last weekend a friend asked me to help him develop a custom iPhone app and this was enough to push me over the edge and now I'm a happy owner of an iMac and I'm spending many hours each day learning Cocoa, Xcode, Objective-C.

Any other Mac users out there? Or are you all writing on PCs? I'm pretty happy with it, but it comes with Safari (the Apple browser) and Safari doesn't support the vBulletin WYSIWYG editor that we use to write comments. So I have to use vbCode like [b]Fred[/b] to get Fred.

My first experience with the GUI was an Atari ST 520 with a color monitor. It ran on the Motorla 68000 chip and was a real Mac knockoff, only problem was it would not run Mac software, not until a little hack known as Spectre GCR came along. Spectre was a little box that plugged into the SCSI port on the Atari and with a couple of Mac Roms installed... presto/chango, the Mac OS would boot up on the Atari. Now I was all set to use the software that was ahead of it's time "HyperCard", developed by Apple Software guru Bill Atkinson. I think it may have been the first program to employ "hyperlinks" to access data. It became the foundation of our entire real estate database running on an Atari ST 1040.

Eventually I moved up to a real Mac, the classic. The original standup B&W monitor 32MB Mac. With that platform came the real workhorse of Mac databases, "FileMaker", a Mac user's dream come true, perhaps still the most used database on the Mac today. We run our entire oil & gas exploration company on that DB.

Over the years, I think we bought every new style of Mac that Apple introduced and even purchased the first premium video editing package for the Power Mac known as "Media 100", an outstanding software package that was a viable competitor to the then industry standard "Avid Studio". Of course, it wasn't long after the introduction of Media 100, that the world began its migration to non-linear editing and Apple, not willing to be left out of that exploding market, acquired a little video editing package of its own and named it "Final Cut", which soon became the first truly affordable, very powerful, video editing studio for the masses. I use it whenever I need to create a video segment.

I now use several iMacs from 20" to 27" and I couldn't be more satisfied with their ease of use and reliability. I've owned a couple of PCs but they just can't win me over.

And now... The iPad, the personal digital assistant that every Apple competitor wants to imitate, but falls short. I take my iPad everywhere, it holds thousands of our leases, our GEO maps, and our entire database on FileMaker Go, the FMPRO solution for the iPad. And now, with the introduction of the Alesis IO iPad Dock a little over a year ago, those who are musicians, including myself, have at our fingertips the most portable recording studio the world has ever seen. In fact, I recently attended a concert by the California Guitar Trio and they were using the new Digitech IPB 10 effects pedal which has a slot for iPad insertion to control a world of multiple stombox effects. You had to hear it to believe it!

The world will miss Steve Jobs and his pursuit of perfection.

Happy computing to all of you happy Mac Users!!! Think different.

John