Apple’s personal production environment…

Though I use Windows XP and Linux at home, my preferred platform is Mac OS X. The primary reason I use it — and have since it’s intro in 1984 — has been how incredibly well everything works together. Today there are no viruses or spyware, and Apple’s guidelines for developers mean applications work seamlessly under a common set of user interface rules just like they have since the beginning.

Applications ‘behave’ the way I want and expect them to and the manipulation of media is considerably more elegant than on Windows or Linux. I’m constantly struck by how much “bit twiddling” is required on these two platforms — twiddling that is remarkably minimized or absent on the Mac. With Mac OS X built on top of and based upon unix (BSD and the Mach kernel) it has the robustness of a modern operating system. Delightfully, Apple has married an extremely functional and elegant user interface on top of these unix underpinnings (a friend told me, “..it’s like Linux but with a great user interface and tons of cool apps”).

Apple’s Tuesday announcement of the next wave of products (iPod shuffle, Mac mini, iLife and iWork) are allowing Apple to leverage the momentum they’ve achieved with the iPod. But to me, the really interesting aspect of these announcement have been how the software has taken the integration and seamlessness in Mac OS X to the next level.

Music and photos are instantly available with your word processor (Pages), presentation program (Keynote) and iMovie (now with High Definition editing capability). What really tripped-my-trigger was that the new ‘iWorks’ version of Keynote allows output to Macromedia’s Flash standard! If you had any idea the hoops I’ve jumped through to do simple Flash animations (without investing money and huge effort in to learning Macromedia’s monolithic tools) you’d understand my enthusiasm.

This Steve Gillmor article pulls together some of the possibilities behind these announcements with a focus on the iPod and podcasting and the even more powerful capability of people producing their own radio shows and much more.

I’ve not fully digested all of this yet…but when I think about the kids *I* know that are doing cool things with iMovie and GarageBand producing incredibly good stuff with a home or school Mac, I get really jazzed and think “we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”