Net Results/ Karlin Lillington: Technology should help you get a life, not condemn you to missing out on one. I don't mean that those who love to tinker with hardware and code are wasting away their productive years in the glow of a screen.
If you love the geek life, tinkering can be bliss. I'll admit right now that I've been known to remain inside for alarmingly long periods of time on perfectly nice sunny days, in obeisance to screen and keyboard.
But often, the engagement between mind and machine is not happy. We've all spent frustrating hours doing battle with our home computers, trying to fix this or download that or accomplish some task that seems basic in execution but turns into a nightmare.
More subtle alienations come from technology that neglects to demonstrate its possibilities, leaving us to guess what it might enable us to do.
Sadly, this is such a common failure with PCs and software that we accept it as the norm. I'm sure that's why few of us venture beyond basic tasks such as email, creating documents and, occasionally, sending a few holiday snapshots to friends and family.
What we're missing is what might be called (to use an overworked but useful metaphor) joined-up technology, hardware and software that shows us some wonderful things we could do, and lets programs snap together to enable us to do them.
This is technology that ignites our imaginations so that we suddenly find ourselves doing new and wonderful things with our computers, things that never occurred to us before, technology that helps us find its own uses.
You'd expect that computer and software manufacturers would be rushing to supply this kind of fluidity and fun for people who want to use their computers to do things with audio, video, and pictures. Show people what they can do and make it easy for them to do it and they will buy new machines, buy peripherals like cameras, and sign up for Net services that cater to these interests. But no.
Even when your PC purchase comes with some of the needed peripherals and software (in my case, a digital camera and scanner), I found it too messy to bother doing much of anything with them.
That's why it has been a revelation, even to my already admittedly geeky life, to get a Mac. I'd used Macs years ago but eventually, for various reasons, switched to using PCs.
So this isn't an anti-Microsoft rant - I like my big Dell Dimension running Windows XP, and see no reason to abandon Windows, which does many things conveniently and well.
But even XP - an operating system explicitly designed to make it easy to use media such as audio and images - does little to make you see the potential of your PC's media-handling capabilities.
It remains too complicated, too fussy and too unintegrated with software (and this from a company that has based its US antitrust suit defence on the fact that consumers want high levels of software and hardware integration for ease of use - phooey!).
It took my purchase of Apple's brand new aluminium-finish 12" G4 laptop, a compact beauty that has a CD-rewritable drive built in, upgradable to a DVD-writable drive, to make me see the digital media light.
In a few weeks of ownership, the possibilities of the machine have tempted me into buying a new Sony digital camera, creating a website of photos for family and friends, downloading music and creating my own playlists for CDs, and weaving together audio and pictures to design a DVD of wedding memories for an aunt and uncle.
In other words, I'm having a blast doing stuff I never guessed I'd fall in love with doing. Technology as enabling, rather than disabling.
The Mac was the centre of attention at a family wedding in the States last week. With the camera, I captured dozens of photographs of the rehearsal dinner.
Then, back in my hotel room, I found that Apple's iPhoto software made transferring, organising and editing the pictures so ridiculously simple that I had a slideshow of memories in under 15 minutes that dropped some nice classical guitar in as an audio backdrop. The family - from little cousins to my 95- year-old grandmother - loved it. Each day I could whip up a new batch of images. Who doesn't like portable instant replays of themselves at such enjoyable events?
Back in Dublin, I decided to check out the Apple .Mac account I am trying out (www.mac.com), a service from Apple that gives subscribers a whopping 100 megabytes of Web storage space and a range of services. Among these is the ability for even a total idiot to make fantastically easy websites that incorporate elements I wouldn't begin to know how to do from scratch. And .Mac integrates seamlessly with Apple's media management software that came with my laptop.
Thus, I discovered I could get all those photos up on a website, nicely framed and with captions, in under an hour. Better yet, I could even create a file sharing webpage that would allow all my relatives to download any of the picture files they want. It's easy, too, to add in video clips, and you can password-protect the website so that only family and friends can access it. The file sharing page resolved the looming hassle of getting copies of the pictures to the relatives back in the States. The service costs just under $9 a month, good value for anyone with a Mac who wants to extend the multimedia capabilities of their machine to the net.
Microsoft should be (and undoubtedly, is) looking hard at what Apple has done with its iTunes, iPhoto and iDVD, suite, and how it integrates these beautifully with .Mac (it's a real surprise that similar features don't come with Microsoft's .NET service).
Apple is famous for making technology easy to use, and it has truly come up trumps with how it serves up digital media applications. Just on the basis of this, I am delighted I decided to opt for a Mac for my laptop purchase, and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in having fun with pictures, text, audio and video. This is how technology can really inspire.
Karlin's tech weblog: http://radio.weblogs. com/0103966/
