Kirk Hiner's

"When thinking differently just isn't different enough."

Mac OS X Hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

By Kirk Hiner

I called my mother the other night, and I got the answering machine. This is normal. My parents' machine picks up after only about two rings, and they never make it to the phone in time to prevent this. So, provided my father's message isn't another of his Oliver Stone lengthed epics, I'm usually forced to jabber on for a while until they get to the phone.

But the other night, I ended up talking for so long that I accidentally found myself leaving them a message to call back. Just as I was about to finish, mom finally picked up the phone.

Mom: "Hello?"

Kirk: "Wha...I...what took you so long?"

Mom: "Oh, I was playing a game on the computer and I didn't want to be interrupted."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. My mother--my 60-year-old mother--was playing a computer game and she didn't want to be interrupted!

Kirk: "Aw, mom, you gotta tell me it's Unreal Tournament.

Mom: No, it's that monkey game you gave me.

"That monkey game" is Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab (mom's particularly fond of Zen Mode), so my dream of facing my own mother in an online death match tournament would have to wait...at least for now. But still, I was proud of mom, and I was happy that she was getting good, quality use out of her new iMac.

See, from the day I moved back to Ohio from New York, my mother has been cycling through many old computers. It started with a Mac SE 30 which she used pretty much for nothing more than playing Klondike and occasionally writing a letter. Then I got back my old LCII from a friend, and mom used that to advance to Klondike and writing the occasional letter...in color. Some time later, we borrowed a Quadra from a friend's parents because mom had now become good enough with the computer to play her Kenny Rogers CDs as well.

But soon after that, mom started getting freaky on me. She actually indicated interest in spending real money on a modern system. Now, my mom's not a cheapskate (she once greatly upset my father by paying $60 for a Kenny Rogers sweatshirt), but laying down big bucks for a computer just seemed so...unmomish.

So the day she decided to make the purchases, I made sure to ask her no less than three times if it's really what she wanted to do. It's painful to talk someone into getting a Mac, only to have her eventually hate it simply because she never felt comfortable with the purchase in the first place. But mom was ready, she had the cash, so it was off to Circuit City.

Now, I've learned from the Book of Genesis that the snake who tempted Eve with the apple went on to push DIVX at Circuit City, but mom wanted that $400 internet plan discount. MSN has no local dial up in the sleepy town of Ashland, Ohio, so that ruled out CompUSA's set-up. Mom's only choice was Circuit City's Compuserve plan.

Tangent:

Let me just say now that if you lined up everything in this world that I hate and organized them from most to least, standing second in line behind the movie "The Bachelor" would be Compuserve. I could use adjectives and expletvies galore to describe the ugly, bloated mistake that is Compuserve, but I really feel the entire Compuserve experience can be described best with one word...

Dung.

The $400 discount combined with the purchase of a floor model that had been returned (the original owner wanted ruby for Christmas, not indigo), I managed to procure for mom a $999 iMac for $350. Not too shabby, huh. And by setting mom up with an Applelinks.net e-mail account, hassle free internet access is as simple as hiding Compuserve and launching a real browser.

But the fun part of this wasn't purchasing and setting up the computer--as is usually the case with me--it was teaching mom how to use it. It was a bonding experience, I guess, as it's really the first time any of my interests have been all that useful to mom. Hip as she is, she has never asked me to teach her the bass line to "Fat Bottomed Girls," you know (although we both have a certain fondness for Neil Diamond). But moreso than that, it was fun because she was--and still is--eager to learn the computer. She wants to get online and send e-mails, she wants write letters, she wants to surf the web and play games and watch music videos from enhanced CDs. She actually takes notes! My mom is going through the joy of discovery that I did over ten years ago, and it's fun to be there with her. I miss that joy. Or at least I did until OS X.

Now I'm not about to launch into another debate over the merits and demerits of Apple's next generation operating system. There's far too much of that going on right now, and I guess it's expected...occasionally even useful. But you know what? In two years--maybe even one--everyone will have stopped the whining and moaning as quickly as when Apple killed off the clones or dropped Open Doc. OS X is the new operating, after all. It's Apple's new direction, and one either climbs aboard the spaceship to seek adventure and reward, or one waits until the area is charted and the evil space bugs have been exterminated. There's not right or wrong, here, just personal preference.

Me? I'm Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwald attempting to rescue three space models from Michael Ironside. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going, how long it'll take to get there or what dangers lie in wait, but the scenery is new and there's adventure to be had. That's why I got into the Mac in the first place. It's an adventure. There's life in there.

That's not to say I just closed my eyes and hopped on. I still have 9.1 installed on a separate partition from which I boot whenever I want to get some real work done (i.e., play the alternate endings of Deus Ex), and I haven't yet installed OS X on the machines at work. I'm not crazy, after all. I'll wait through a few upgrades and until our key apps are OS X native, and I certainly hope most professional Mac users out there do the same. The last thing the Mac community needs right now are a bunch of disgruntled users screaming about how Apple destroyed their company and sent dozens of women and children homeless into the streets.

But at home where there's no money at stake, I'm having a blast with OS X. It's a different groove, but once you get into it, the interface is a breeze to get through (consistency issue aside, as I assume they'll be addressed in future upgrades). It's surprising what you don't miss once you have a good look around. Like most others, I feared the lack of a solid desktop, for example. Not anymore. Any pangs I may have are easily outweighed by the convenience of not having to navigate through dozens of open windows or drag my icons back in place after a game resized my screen. And the dock...

Okay, I've read many reviews from people who say that OS X reminds them too much of Windows. My only guess is that they're either exagerating to vent their anger or they don't actually use Windows. Managing the dock is much, much, much--let me repeat...much easier than managing the Windows task bar. Also, the Finder is easier to navigate and the filing system makes more sense. There are countless ways to move from folder to folder, from app to app, and although it's different from the classic Mac OS, OS X retains the elegance and grace that one would expect from an operating system from Apple. I believe most people will happily settle into OS X once they've given it a fair shot.

Of course, this is the problem; most don't want to give it that fair shot. I understand this, I'm usually the same way. This is why I never really grew to appreciate a cold bottle of beer. I never really liked the taste, and when I expressed this to my friends, they'd point out, "It's an acquired taste." This made no sense to me. Why spend all that time drinking something I didn't like, hoping I'd soon grow to, when I knew I already enjoyed a can of Barq's?

People have said OS X will force Mac users over to Windows, and this is probably true in some minuscule degree. But I know some Windows users who are only now considering coming to the Mac platform. And what about all those children or even adults who never used anyplatform? When they take a look at the streamlined OS X and see what it can do, they'll laugh at the classic Mac OS like I now laugh at DOS.

So, I don't know. Maybe it was just curiosity. Maybe it was an obligation to my readers; my reviews should start to reflect OS X compatiblity, right? Or maybe it was just my frustration with the stagnant classic Mac OS. Perhaps it was a combination of all of them that led to my purchase of both the OS X Beta and the full version, which I'm enjoying tremendously.

Most likely, though, it was mom. If she can learn a new operating system...heck, if she can learn to use a computer at 60-years old, then certainly I can learn OS X, right? In return, I'll expect mom to master use of the redeemer or the impact hammer in Unreal Tournament. She's always been a good cook, and I'd love to see her serve some internet gamers a little homemade gib.

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