MacBreak missing a demographic
TweetThere is a growing audience of new Mac users in the tech sector. Just to the O'Reilly Open Source Conference and take a count. Mac OS X and the switch to the Intel platform has brought about the most stable, easy to use *nix based desktops and laptops the world has ever seen. I was a long time Windows user. I made fun of Mac users. I even ran Linux on a Dell laptop for a while. Boy, that was fun. Nothing like waking up and having to edit X configurations so you can work. Apple just got it right. I can run my AMP stack on my MacBook Pro with no problems. And the Mac UI is wonderful. I am becoming a fan boy.
So, on this weeks MBW, Leo and the panel were talking about Leopard. The subject came up about the best new feature for home users, power users and mac software developers. There was neither anyone on the show that fit into my demographic of Mac user nor did anyone mention us. No mention of Apache 2.2 or PHP 5.2. No mention of a much improved Terminal.app. No mention of a built in SSH Agent that works with your keychain. If you work with Linux/BSD server, you use Terminal almost as much as any other application.
So, Leo, please include this growing Mac demographic into your discussions. There has to be someone out there in our space that is as knowledgable as Andy Ihnatko and Scott Bourne are about their topics. Merlin comes close when he is there, but I think he is still and old school Mac user that happens to have gotten into the geekier parts of Mac OS X.
Still, love the show. Keep up the good work.
Makea Says:
Good argument, but the episode in question featured John Siracusa. He's the reason why I even bothered to listen to the podcast in the first place.
Unfortunately, web developers are too niche of a audience. However, we are very well supported by apple in this regard: rails, capistrano, latest builds of php and apache/fastcgi.
I agree the new terminal is fantastic and I love the new automounter. I'm able to browse solaris nfs shares via /net without the amd utilities. The new nfs mounter gui is cool too.
If apple would support syntax highlighting in TextEdit, it would be even perfecter!