Niggle

I am a perfectionist at heart. I do not find it at all debilitating (except when attempting to explain WHY something is better the way I prefer it), and I rather enjoy details. I learn from them. This characteristic permeates my existence, and there is no greater show of this than with my computer.

Today in the car, I contemplated a recent conversation about why I use and prefer Macs. I had not engaged in such an explanation for some time, so I dusted off that section of my cerebral cortex and verbalized the ensuing summary of my Mac experiences. While some defer to arguments of security or stability—great things to have in any architecture, mind you—I synthesized my Mac experiences as an aesthetic choice, one of attention to details and visual simplicity. Some erroneously believe that simplicity equals no underlying complexity. I will point out that evidence of simplicity is not, as you may have surmised, an absence of granular control. Rather, it is the ability to design software that meets the needs for a broader cross-section of users. This, in and of itself, is an aesthetic point that most do not see or appreciate. (Of course, this is a broad generalization that does not hold true with all of Apple’s software/hardware implementations, but it is, in general, true with most of their offerings. More on this pragmatism later.)

John Gruber’s recent essay, And Oranges, on a reverse switch by long-time Mac user Mark Pilgrim enumerated some of the more enlightened points of Mac evangelism, including the following:

There’s an unbecoming tendency for some Mac users to contort their worldview in such a way so as to construe that Mac OS X is better than every other OS in every single way, or that its overall superiority ought to be obvious to everyone. This actually was true, or very nearly so, in the System 6 era of the late ’80s, but it certainly hasn’t been true since then; sticking to this notion just makes you look like a small-minded jackass. (Not to mention that many of the people I’m describing weren’t even out of diapers when System 6 was current.)

And cue my pragmatism: I am by no means an Apple fanboy. I may be a Mac junkie, and I may occasionally be consumed by the Reality Distortion Field, but I use it for the practical and personal reasons already mentioned.

Case in point: I have a niggle with an Apple product. (A “niggle” is how Mr. Gruber or Pilgrim ascribe minor shortcomings.) Specifically, I cannot understand how Apple developers shipped iPhoto with such anemic keyword handling. The implementation is hard to use, especially with as long a list of keywords as I have—one for every person in any of my pictures. Of course, recognizing this deficiency, an independent developer saved the day with Keyword Assistant, which ingeniously allows one to enter, by keyboard, keywords (such as my names) and have them auto-completed! A simple, but very effective time saver. In fact, before using this, I never even bothered with keywords: it was too much of a hassle.

When software implementations as popular as iPhoto have “hassle” associated with any of the major features, red flags ought to be going off in the developers’ heads. Needless to say, I can no longer use Keyword Assistant because it is still only compiled for use with PowerPC Macs (and I have a nice MacBook Pro with a screaming Intel Core Duo processor). I could launch iPhoto in compatibility mode that would allow use of Keyword Assistant, but I find any such suggestion a niggle of my aesthetic sensibilities.

(Will someone please get the developer of Keyword Assistant an Intel-based Mac to recompile and test his software so that I can catch up on all my keyword assigning I have piling up?)