I decided to take advantage of my local GP surgery offer to sign up for online booking of appointments.

Step 1 struck me as a little odd: I had to go in to the practice and fill in a paper form. Oh, well, I reasoned. They wanted a real signature.

The form duly filled in, I enquired how long a period of time needed to elapse before I could make use of this online system. That was when I was introduced to Step 2. “We write you a letter within 24 hours explaining how to do it, and you have to come in and collect it from reception.”

Technology, hey? Bless.

Following his post of feature requests for Lightroom, Scott Kelby – a Mac user and photographer who is also a renowned Photoshop guru and author – got deluged by comments from Apple fanboys saying he should simply switch to Aperture. Today he responds with a very clear post emphasising that Lightroom is the professionals’ choice, and why.

I had my own experience a few months back of the same kind of fanboyism. A colleague was extolling the virtues of Apple’s Aperture over what he persisted in referring to as Adobe Lightbox. He’d never used the Adobe software, yet he was convinced his Apple product was superior. Although I’m in no way a professional, I’ve used (and use) both. Lightroom has more of what I want both in the basics (like before and after comparisons) and the more advanced (like graduated filters), even though in some areas – and some only – Aperture is a better product.

I’m fine if my friend prefers to use Aperture. What annoyed me was that – like, I suspect, a number of the commenters on Kelby’s blog – he had never used the product he was dissing, and didn’t even know what it was called. All he had was a blind faith that anything made by Apple was the best, and didn’t even need to investigate the facts. That sounds sadly familiar to anyone whose argued with a fundamentalist.

Periodically I find myself moaning about many of the various ways in which people use their PCs (include Macs in that as a generic term). It’s often the typical “the PC is not a typewriter” type of moan, as I wrestle texts full of double spaces between sentences, multiple line breaks or paragraph returns into some kind of submission.

Sometimes it’s despair at the way people simply make life difficult for themselves by adding all their formatting on the fly rather than setting up styles to make formatting a) easy and b) consistent.

But tonight I am groaning having dealt with a set of data kept only as address labels in a Publisher table, with any gaps in the table filled in by new data out of any sequence. All the information on each person is stored in a single cell. Much of this information is duplicated elsewhere in completely different documents and formats for different purposes, but with different data structures according to different purposes.

Aaargh.

Data is most useful when it is broken down into discrete blocks. First name one cell, last name another. Street name one cell, postcode another. And so on. Then it can be sorted and repurposed so much more easily. Trust me, a little forward planning here will save you hours of heartache and headache.

It’s all about making the technology work for you, and save you time.

Longer term readers will remember that not long after this blog got started it got hacked.

I’m wondering if someone tried again this week. I had a very odd set of stats when in the space of a couple of hours a very high proportion of visits were registered, while at the same time no single page was getting any abnormal number of visits. Normally when I get more than my usual relatively small flow of traffic it’s because one or other post has drawn the attention.

I wonder of those more knowledgeable than I have any insight into whether this sort of pattern of visits indicates a repeated hacking attempt?

It doesn’t take long to get at least one response from someone to any post that is perceived as “knocking Apple” – even if all that post does is praise some Windows feature.

I note that in (a generally fairly-biased-but-trying-ever-so-hard-to-be-a-bit-more-even-handed) discussion the other day Apple fan site (and a very helpful one that anyone wanting a mix of news, tips and tricks should bookmark) TUAW expressed a frustrated dislike with the term “fanboy”:

But “fanboy” has been used so much in Apple vs. PC wars that it’s lost its flavor. “You’re just an Apple fanboy,” is a dismissive debate tactic, used to imply that someone is so blinded by their love for all things Apple that they’d say or do anything to support the company and its products. I don’t deny that there are Apple users like that out there, but “fanboy” has been spread so thin that almost anyone with a positive opinion of Apple’s products is saddled with that label. It’s even reached the mainstream press now, and as all internet veterans know, once something goes mainstream, it’s played out.

Leaving aside that rather “fanboy” attitude to the mainstream media from the ever so cool blogging gang(!), I note that later in the article they go on to acknowledge and heavily criticise some users’ Apple smugness:

We look down our noses at Windows and computers without Apple logos on them. We justify paying a little more for our Macs by talking about build quality, reliability, and the ability to run OS X with the same borderline snooty tones as BMW owners describing the merits of their cars versus a Ford. “Macs never crash,” we lie. “OS X runs so much better than Windows,” we say through clenched teeth, right before adjusting our ascots.

It is, I think, the “Apple and Jobs are best, whether they’re right or wrong” attitude which exemplifies the reason “fanboy” goes on being a valid insult.

Let me illustrate the diehard fanboy attitude from a conversation I had in the not-too-distant past. I note that I am currently (and was then as well) using an iMac, a unibody MacBook Pro and an iPhone and don’t currently have a Windows box in the house, and that’s the context for this conversation.

My friend was insistent that Aperture (and we’re talking version 2 here, not the vastly more able but somewhat sluggish version 3) was the best photo software on the market, and was a wonderful example of how Apple made life easy for creative people to do things easily without getting in the way. It was so obviously better, he said, than Adobe Lightbox [sic], and it even made his photos better than Photoshop.

There are some problems with this. The first is that he’d never really tried using Lightroom – he wasn’t even familiar enough with it to know its name! It wasn’t made by Apple, and that’s all he needed to know.

As for the comparison with Photoshop, well it’s certainly true that some people prefer the out-of-the-box defaults for how Aperture interprets Camera Raw to the starting algorithms employed by Lightroom and Photoshop. It’s also equally true that some prefer the Adobe starting point. But initial settings are hardly much of a comparison point when both can deliver the other’s basic functionality.

There are good features in both Aperture and Lightroom, and some users prefer one interface and workflow to the other. Lightroom, however, had become the dominant player in the market – even on Macs – after a shaky start by both. It will be interesting to see how the version 3 shootout goes and whether that changes.

As for the comparison with Photoshop, then it’s a bit apples and oranges. Well not so much oranges as entire fruit bowls. If all you want to do is organise and “develop” digital photographs then either Aperture or Lightroom will do a good job and will integrate both in a speedy and elegant workflow. If you want to manipulate digital images in one of a zillion ways, then Photoshop has no peer.

So, in short, my friend in that conversation absolutely defines “fanboy” – and there is no other word which quite captures the irrational attachment to Apple that insists its products are superior without any factual basis in a knowledgeable or well-founded comparison. It wasn’t after all, that he simply said he liked using Aperture. It was his determination to tell everyone else they should use it too, because it was better than the software he not only didn’t use, but for which he didn’t even know the right name.

That’s a fanboy.

The other day I had to setup a laptop for someone. I’ve never used Windows 7, and yet setting this up was a) straightforward and b) full of those “how do I do that, oh cool” moments I had moving from Windows XP to OS X and c) able to give me little pleasurable shivers of OS lust [literalist warning – that’s a metaphor, I’m not that weird!) as I saw how elegantly it did one thing after another.

I wonder if Windows now has the edge? Here are two sites that take a look from different perspectives at the perennial OS wars: BetaNews and Chris Brennan who wrote a whole series of blog posts starting here.

Hundreds of people queued yesterday in the UK to buy a mobile phone that won’t make calls and is too large to put in your pocket.

The BBC story is a piece of ridiculous puffery for a product which probably will need at least one generation to become properly useful, and even then will be primarily for readers and not writers, consumers and not creators.

Yet from the way it is written you would think the least the iPad could manage is an end to the global recession, food for the world’s poor, and peace breaking out all over. The reporter seems unable to muster a sense of how ridiculous his interviewees are:

Barry Church, one of the first out of the store with his iPad, said: “I’ve never used one but I had to have one.”

Of course you’ve never used one, you complete tosspot, that’s what “new” means!

People who are otherwise proud to call themselves “skeptics” (more about that in another post) drop all pretence of reason in a burst of irrational drooling over consumer eye-candy at the altar of Jobs. Yes, Stephen Fry, I’m talking about you.

The iPad is a great big symbol of the Cult of Apple, and the impossibility of finding anything like sensible coverage of Apple’s new gadgets ought to be a journalistic embarrassment. The BBCs commitment to “balanced” coverage doesn’t stretch to technology.

I call it the cult of Apple, rather than the cult of Mac. The famous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field has expanded way beyond its humble origins. It overpowers reason and turns the news departments of the world’s media into free advertising campaigns.

Honestly, it’s enough to make me think seriously of returning to Windows.

Update 29/05/10: If you didn’t like my comments you’ll like Charlie Brooker’s Padswipe even less, and positively hate the comments which stick the boot into iTunes with a vengeance.

What is it about the word “virus” that drives all common sense out of people’s heads? Today I received yet another of those panicky “send this to everyone you know” emails.

But shouldn’t the opening line have alerted everyone just as much as the “I’m a poor Nigerian widow” one does?

Dave’s brother is a very advanced programmer who does computer work for a living and has a high up status with Microsoft. He doesn’t send these if they aren’t real.

It was (yet again) the spam report of the postcard virus attributed to Hallmark. The real virus was a trojan, against which virtually all Windows computers are now patched. It certainly didn’t do what the hoax email claims, and has been around for nearly three years. I seem to get the hoax email (send to everyone in someone’s address book) at least every six months or so.

I’m getting a bit bored with finding nice ways to tell some of my friends not to be such gullible prats.

I find that some apps move in and out of my top five list while others are very long term residents. My top two are long term residents, accompanying me from Windows days into my Mac incarnation. Two are Mac only, and have been on my list from soon after switching. A fifth is one that comes and goes depending on the type of work I’m doing.

1. Photoshop. This is simply a wonderful app, always reliable for working purposes and a continuing adventure of discovery for fun and creativity. More than any other piece of software I use, Photoshop has me regularly saying, “Oh, that’s just cool.”
2. A fairly close runner-up, and a regular work-horse, is Photoshop’s younger sibling, InDesign. Both creative and precise, it helps me communicate by being sure what I produce will look good.
3. Keynote is the first Mac only app in this list, and to some extent drags the rest of iWork along with it. It makes presentations fun, and easy, and has a elegant ease of use that PowerPoint struggles to come close to.
4. The second Mac only app is the photo-managment app Aperture. I’m just getting used to its third iteration. So far, and I’m hoping patches might yet improve this, it is decidedly more sluggish than its predecessor, but its capabilities are so much more advance that it’s worth paying the price of a minor performance hit. If I were on Windows (and possibly if I were a pro photographer), I’d have no compunction about using Lightroom, but not being a pro, I find Aperture suits my way of working better.
5. The last on my short-list is the rather wonderful Dreamweaver. I haven;t come across anything I prefer for working on website development. Since I’ve been doing a bit more again lately, it’s elbowed its way back in to my top five.

There are a number of apps pushing hard on the shoulders of these. If I was on Windows I’d be looking at both Live Writer and Bibleworks. I’m slowly beginning to get to grips with Accordance on my Mac, and can see it making it in a future top five list. Among word-processors, I shall be looking to see if Pages gets more capable, or Mellel gets easier to use. My ideal would be a cross between these two which saved to an open and common file format!

There’s a lot of good software out there, and in one sense my listing of five is a little invidious. However this selection combines usefulness with being a pleasure to use. Your selection might be quite different. Are there other apps I should a) be trying out, and b) adding to this list?

There are some birthdays in the software world:

• YouTube is five – well sort of, since that’s when the domain was registered. The first video wasn’t uploaded for a couple more months.
• Photoshop is 20 – that’s some going, and that anniversary refers to the release.

The thing is, that’s not a long time, yet it seems like they’ve been around for ever. I wonder if that says anything about how quickly something new seems normal.