mac revisited

My self training into developing iphone applications is now in its second week, and I feel confident enough to start making little applications that will probably not make it into the App Store, but should serve as nice stepping stones to my first real app.

As I work with the Mac more and more, i find that it is usually a pleasure to turn on the mac and browse through some emails before heading for work. It is a clean interface, and it has a good trick that I appreciate – I usually do not like many windows open at once, because it clutters the task bar (for XP anyway) and leaves little reminders like the irritating flashing and beeping that keeps me from concentrating on my work. With the mac, when I click on the “close” button of some applications, the window disappears, but the process continues. So there is no physical window pestering me, or any big disrupting indication that I must always be kept known about. Mail, ICal, and ITunes are good examples of such a trick – Being a real time freak, I usually want to know if a mail comes in, but I do not want to keep the window open all the time. With Mail I can simply close the physical window and concentrate on my work – an there is no urgent flashing or sudden window pop-up that distracts me from working.

I think working on the Mac might actually improve productivity like all the fans say, because of all these clever user-interfaces that are built into the system. One of these things may be small and subtle, but together they might just work wonders.