it just works

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Thank you, Russ, for your thoughtful comments about OSs and apps, and
the virtues of Mac OS X. I agree in general, that for people doing
creative work (in web or graphical design, for example), both the OS and
the app should disappear into the background as much as possible to
allow the person to concentrate on his work instead of having to futz
around with the tool. The only reason I ever learned about IRQs and
drivers was that I _had_ to because Windows didn't sort them out on its
own. _It_ should just work because _I_ just want to work! A carpenter
should know how to keep his tools sharp, but he should also not spend
most of his time just sharpening them.

As for bending the OS to my will, if the OS did what I wanted it to out
of the box, I wouldn't have to bend it to my will. If Windows merely did
what its manufacturer CLAIMS it should do, I would have been willing to
stick with it. But as it won't even do what it is advertised to do, much
less what I want it to, I switched to the Mac for my creative writing
work. I still need the pc for my network-consulting work, but only
because that is what my clients are running and they want to see how
their networks perform with Windows clients. Many of them are running
UNIX or Novell servers, but they obvisouly don't have many problems with
their UNIX or Novell servers; it's their Windows clients which give them
such trouble.

There are several apps which were originally designed for the Mac and
they are industry standards--period. There is simply no contesting that.
Among them is Photoshop, with Illustrator a close second. QuarkXpress
was industry standard for newspaper layouts (I worked for newspapers in
commercial advert departments a few years ago; nothing but Quarks on
Macs, as far as the eye could see), but I'm not sure if Quark is still
preferred now, as that was several years ago. I just sent a TS to a
publisher in England; I offered their typesetter a choice of file
formats: Xy3, MS-Word, RTF, PDF, PageMaker 6.52 [all done in w2k], or
InDesign [Mac OS X]. They wanted the InDesign files.