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Mr. Silver will have to go to Washington and slap the old timer IT managers and CIOs silly before they change their ways. They're so entrenched in Microsoft products they will never willfully let more than a few Macs in and when they do, they will push for some kind of legislation forcing yet another requirement that only Microsoft products can meet. This is how it happens now and I can't see it changing anytime soon. I have to deal with DOE and only the contractor organizations have any Macs. DOE HQ doesn't allow them.

rob53, on 06 June 2012 - 03:06 PM, said:

The NSA, CIA, NASA and other organizations use Macs. It's hard to see how there's any threat from Macs for the DOE or anyone else!

Small to mid-size business is where the IT Naziis still wield some power. These are the second and third string IT guys who went to Sanford Brown College to get their MCSE piece of paper. Then they entrench themselves into public schools and mom and pop businesses and pretend to be IT professionals. The anti-Apple sentiment is particularly strong in these bozos as some used to be sales clerks at Best Buy before becoming an IT "professional."

rob53, on 06 June 2012 - 03:06 PM, said:

People used to say the same thing about IBM products and now that has changed. I don't think it is impossible, just something that will take time. I think the short-term will depend a lot on whether Windows 8 is a gem or a flop. We'll see.

Yesterday, a client needed me to make substantial changes to the formatting of a book. I was able to make those changes in about ten minutes because InDesign has a marvelous search and replace function (including GREP) and powerful paragraph and character styles. It was little more than search for one style and replace it with another.

Unfortunately, if that book or any document had been in a text application (such as Scrivener) that primarily uses the anemic text features that come with OS X, I'd have spent hours making those changes by hand. Named character and paragraph styles have been in Word (and rtf) since the late 1980s, but Apple still hasn't added them to OS X. GREP searches have been available for Unix probably since the late 1970s, but they're still not part of OS X, even though its core is Unix. OS X's text-handling seems to regard WordStar circa 1982 as the 'gold standard.' That's dreadfully backward.

If fact, while Apple has been spending vast sums to tweak video and audio encoding formats for just a tiny bit more efficiency, it's been spending little-to-nothing to make OS X a better text-handling tool, despite the fact that sort of thing is what most of us, in business, government, or academia, do for a living.

Apple not only needs to get into this area in an aggressive way, it needs to do so with its usual finesse. Named styles should be done in such a way that exporting documents to ePub for display on iOS devices becomes as easy as printing with PDF. And while GREP itself can be very geeky, Apple could add a shell around it to make it much easier and it could ship OS X with a system-wide GREP that shares a library of useful search and replace scripts.

It also should be as easy as pie to send a document from my Mac to my iPhone or iPad. Currently, the process is so convoluted, the best way to view a document on my iPad is to send it via Amazon to my Kindle app. That's disgraceful. There should be a Digital item in my file menu that not only lets me export to ePub, it lets me send documents directly to my iOS devices or those of colleagues.

The result of all these improvements would be a operating system with text applications whose sheer ease of use beat the socks off anything from Microsoft. And the time saved at work would let us go home early and spend more time enjoying Apple's entertainment products.

leicaman, on 06 June 2012 - 04:48 PM, said:

Unfortunately, you'll be hard-pressed to find them anywhere in the DoD or places where that type of security is needed. We seem to have trouble with the more, and more onerous, security requirements with our Windows machines. Definitely not going to move away from the PC or the BB for the forseeable future simply b/c there are tools for those platforms that let IT completely control the end HW. They can deploy the SW and setup instantaneously to all of the end user machines from one place and they like it that way.

ericole, on 07 June 2012 - 10:38 AM, said:

Interestingly, a month ago I started a new job at a major research medical center. There is a need for security to protect the technology and sensitive data. My personal Mac was able to handle it all seamlessly without any issue from day one. The IT department is still trying to get the PC they purchased for me configured.

Inkling, on 07 June 2012 - 07:07 AM, said:

So what you're telling us is that you think Apple computers can't do it, despite the fact that Apple's computers run Microsoft Office (and other applications) just fine. What you're trying to do is blame the OS for a shortcoming in somebody's software of choice in order to make Apple look less capable than it really is.

In fact, I notice that you go out of your way to name an Adobe product that works just fine on Apples but costs almost $700 retail and compare it to a $45 authoring application from a much smaller company which, by the way, also works in Windows. Such straw man attacks only show how biased you are and invalidate your arguments when somebody bothers to do even a simple web search of the facts.

In other words, your complaint is pure BUNK!

This post has been edited by vulpine: 07 June 2012 - 11:05 AM

My issue with Windows admins is that they insist on administering the Macs instead of letting the lead Mac guy do it. Windows IT guys are the most paranoid people I have ever met (and for good reason, as we are talking Windows. One day they pulled a coup and, despite the fact that there had never been any trouble from Macs or Mac users, they enabled superuser accounts on all our Macs and dumbed us down to the point that we couldn't maintain the machines properly. If an app got corrupted and someone needed to trash a prefs file, work stopped for half a day or more until a Windows IT guy could find time to ask you how to fix the problem. I've seen this happen at two different companies I worked with and at a third, some bozo made the decision that the Macs had to go. Scads of files, including a ton of Keynote presentations, were lost forever. And then there was the issue of renaming a couple of thousand files or so that did not have ISO compatible filenames. Hundreds of hours of work were torched because the IT guys decided to sit in the dark and say boo to one another. In another company an IT guy yanked our tape backup. If we ever had to retrieve a file, it wouldn't take a couple minutes as before. Instead, it could take up to a day and a half. I have had my fill of these oafs and am glad that I've been able to spend the past seven years with enough rank to keep them away from my department's machines and from causing trouble.

Inkling, on 07 June 2012 - 07:07 AM, said:

Strange... When I open up my OS-X terminal window, I find grep. I seem to recall it was always there. So I'm confused. What is your point, again? Is it the OS you don't like or the applications that appear to be available for it?