[Ti] mandatory booting into os x

[Michael Bigley]

>Like InDesign - most of the
>newly carbonized Apps have a *little* way to go yet.

This is another valid point for backing off of the harsh January 
deadline.  The design community, will also be left out in the cold if 
this happens as most of the Adobe suite is poorly implemented on OSX. 
While they hold promise, they still lack the stability of the old OS9 
apps (even taking into account the limitations of OS9):

Illustrator 10 is sluggish, buggy and crashes frequently; yes, you do 
not need to restart, but the time it takes for Illustrator to come 
back to reality is longer than a reboot! When I have tight deadlines 
I use Illustrator 8 in classic mode; it is more robust and stable!!

Photoshop runs well, but is a huge memory hog, and even with 512mb of 
RAM I have to occasionally quit and restart to keep the memory paging 
from getting out of control.

Although InDesign is not as sluggish as Illustrator, it is still slow 
compared to even using Quark in classic mode.  The problem I have 
found from running Quark in classic is that some extensions are 
unreliable which makes it unstable. On a positive note, the beauty of 
InDesign is that I have opened numerous, complex Quark4 files in 
InDesign pretty flawlessly.

Back to the original point, the "product" of design companies and 
designers is TIME. All of the above are issues of OSX that may be 
minor to an individual, is huge to a company that has, say, 30 
designers.  If OSX causes them to lose 10 minutes of productivity 
over the course of a day, that is 300 minutes to the company. In 
terms of billable time, at a conservative $75/hour that is $375 a day 
in lost opportunity cost. Annualized that is $97,500!  That 
opportunity cost may be nebulous in business that other industries, 
but in advertising/design, we sell our time, so that is a very real 
issue.

That productivity gap must be closed before Apple can "mandate" OSX, 
or they will find they are forcing a reverse switch campaign.  Adobe 
and Macromedia improving the performance of their OSX apps is 
probably more important than Quark porting to OSX.
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Mike Bigley                Maineville, Ohio
       http://www.norbertrunning.com
Please support an American Indian Elder &
Medicine Man by visiting the above link.
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