Over the years I have had a number of Macs (I was late to actually own a Mac - my first one ran OS9, despite having been a Mac user for many years before that).

I’ve already talked about my heavy heart as I freecycled my iMac (G3, 500Mhz).

But last night, my 12″ Powerbook G4 died. It had been my workhorse machine for four and a half years, spending the last six months in retirement as my daughter’s DVD/Youtube/iPlayer box. She woke it from sleep, it clicked, clicked, died. Repeat. Click, click, died.

The reason it was retired was because it was bruised and battered to fuck. Four and a half years of being lugged about, every single day, to and from work, to and from clients, upstairs, downstairs, all over the shop. The combo-drive didn’t work. The hard drive had been replaced once, as had the (removable) memory chip. The clasp was nearly unusable as the metal was buckled around it.

It was replaced late last year by a shiny (refurb) Macbook Pro. An Intel dual-core 2.3Ghz job. Appearance-wise, not too disimilar (although this was a 15″, not 12″). Spec-wise, it beats the pants off the Powerbook (1Ghz G4). Rails tests took seconds instead of minutes to run on large applications. Nothing seemed to beachball. Multi-touch scrolling on the trackpad is fantastic (and something I really miss when I use other computers).

But (and it’s a big but) - the Macbook Pro does not feel anywhere near as nice. I don’t know exactly what it is.

The Powerbook was personal, intimate - it was mine. The MBP is just another, expensive, computer.

The Macbook Pro has no soul. The Powerbook had bags of it.

Blackfriars Marketing commenting on Bill Gates’ claim that Enterprise Software gets little respect (via the Wall Street Journal).

As someone who has worked on ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ software for most of my career (the difference being one of scale as far as I can see) I wholeheartedly agree. I got sick of being told that the user-interface was ‘good enough’. Half a second of frustration quickly adds up if you are sat in front of an application for eight or more hours a day(*).

especially when we confront real systems at work that increase workloads, enforce meaningless restrictions that don’t help customers, and sport user interfaces that feel Kafka-esque in their user hostility. It’s not surprising that enterprise software gets no respect; it is surprising that there aren’t more cases of employees throwing their computers out windows in frustration.

(*) Incidentally, that always used to be my response when people said that Windows had achieved parity with the Mac user experience. Give two experienced users a tight deadline, one on a Mac, the other on Windows, and see who swears the most. Frustration => Unhappiness => Staff Turnover (for the buyer) and No Repeat Sales (for the vendor)

I love the song “Standing Here” by the Stone Roses (you may notice a Roses-bent to this blog). Not only does it have some of John Squire’s finest noodlings, great lyrics and fantastic work by Mani - it also includes one of my favourite bits of backing vocals in the world. A simple “ooh ooh” from Reni. That’s not the clever bit though. In the first verse there is no “ooh ooh”. In the second verse there is one “ooh ooh”. In the third, there are two “ooh ooh”s. I can still remember the first time I noticed it (months after I first heard the song). I pointed it out to my friends and they were all impressed too.

Just a tiny detail.

Hard to spot.

But once you’ve seen it you notice those same, tiny, details in their other songs. That craftsmanship, that attention to detail, is what made them great songwriters (at least till the Second Coming when Squire shoved Geffen’s money up his nose).

In the same vein, I have just spent twenty minutes adding a similar detail to our application. One that most people will never ever notice. But if they do, they will think “that’s nice” and for thirty seconds they will feel good about their choice to shell out cash on us. And the feature? It’s this:

Spotted it yet? How about here?

That’s right - the person object has a gender field and, based upon the gender, it displays the correct possessive - his or her (or their if not known) in the menus. Again, a tiny detail. But they all count.