Use a Mac, and Still Be You.  [video]

In Apple’s latest Get a Mac ad, Elimination, the customer makes her greeting to the Mac by saying, I’m a Megan. And that’s why the Mac builds such enduring loyalty among its customers. You can be you. With a Mac, you don’t need to take on a new life fighting viruses, system crashing and headaches. As my wife BB says, you don’t fit the Mac, it fits you.

See two more of the Apple Get a Mac ads, Customer Care and PC Choice Chat.

A new Get a Mac Ad

Apple introduces Easy as 1-23, a Get a Mac Ad inside the web browser. The message: PCs take longer to do things then Macs. And, they have no viruses.

See the ad below on the YouTube video or you can go to the Wired site and see it (for as long as Apple runs it). Now it’s at the NY Times.

The 23 steps
1. Remove unneeded bloatware
2. Configure security settings
3. Download and install OS security patches
4. Restart
5. Download / install extra security programs
6. Restart
7. Download / install drivers for peripherals
8. Restart
9. Remove optional Windows components
10. Update new virus list
11. Run full system virus scan
12. Update new malware list
13. Run full system malware scan
14. Download / install application updates
15. Restart
16. Clean out system registry
17. Repair corupt system registry
18. Defragment hard drive
19. Free up disk space
20. Scan disk for errors
21. Run system file checker
22. Read online instruction manual
23. Cross fingers

The biggest opponents to Mac conversion will be with the IT people. Why?

They don’t understand the Mac, and more importantly, it threatens their job security. Macs rarely break, so IT becomes the proverbial Maytag repairman waiting for a support call.

With a Mac, there is no need to understand the mysteries of DLL registries. There are no viruses or malware. But the best reason for convert are the productivity savings.

Another one bites the dust.

Michael Schneider, CEO of Fluidesign, a Los Angeles-based interactive agency, reports for PC World his experience upgrading his operation to the Mac. Some excerpts here…

In the summer of 2006, I upgraded about 80% of my company’s computers to Macs; we’re a design agency, and so most people wanted Macs anyway. I kept hearing about their strengths – how the OS never crashed, how it just worked, how you don’t need to reboot every day – and dismissed them as blind lust from googly-eyed Apple enthusiasts.

But then he converted to Macs.

But something changed. People started doing things quicker. Work started flowing faster (I estimate by about a third)… Words can’t describe how much productivity rose, including my own. The same machine, two years later, sits on my desk and operates flawlessly every day.

This is one of many positive reports of PC to Mac conversion. And where do you read about people converting from a Mac to a PC?

See the full report here in PC World…

PS- About the only reason left to stay with PCs is managing mail with Microsoft Exchange. Apple reportedly will have this neutralized by the fall of 2009. The other reason is if your IT pros have managed to build their server apps on the proprietary Microsoft standards. Woops, more job security.

I love it. Why? I have been using the Mac since 1984. Those early days were glorious as we Mac users found a “PC” that was usable and practical, especially if we were right brained creatives. Meanwhile, Microsoft was selling gazillions of left-brained DOS (non-Windows) machines into the corporate market. Whether you were left or right brained, that’s what they made you use. Then, in about 1987, Windows 1.0 was finally shipped (late as usual). Over the years, the corporate users drove us into the hills. We spent the years of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s living in caves, not seeing the sky.

Now times have changed. The Mac is cool again, and actually recognized as a great platform. We are out of the caves and back in the green grass, with sunny skies. We can now proclaim openly, without derision, Long Live the Mac!

I have posted one of the new ads I especially like, called Time Traveler.

You can find the other ads here at the Apple site.

I am a serial idea generator.

I have been using a tasty little iPhone app called Evernote for about eight months. It makes it easy for me to capture, organize and develop ideas into usable form.

Evernote makes it incredibly easy to capture all your ideas, notes, pictures and even voice recordings. They are automatically stored at your account at Evernote. It’s all automatic, no tech required.

Use it anywhere on any platform.

I can be taking notes in a sermon in church, a meeting at Starbucks or working at home. I can type a note into my iPhone and it automatically syncs to my account. I can also access and edit my posts through my browser or a robust, dedicated application. If I am writing on my MacBook, I can see and update from there, too. It really doesn’t matter where I am or what platform. It also runs on Windows and Blackberry. BTW – iPhone text syncing is fast, even on the slow AT&T Edge network.

It’s now easy to capture my mind. I am a spatial willy-nilly thinker, so I can easily find my posts by keywords, tags or notebooks. It’s lightning fast. Posts can be any length from a tweet to a book.

Did I say tweet? Yes, they have just introduced integration with Twitter. Any or all of your tweets can be posted to your notes. Just put “@myEN” anywhere in your tweet and it gets put into your notebooks. If you send yourself a direct message, the post will be private. Sweet!

Evernote is feature rich, bulletproof and FREE! It’s so rare to find something so well designed. The best I can say about anything, including Evernote, is the more I use it… the more I love it!

Go to Evernote for even more features and the downloads…

I am not a big tweeter, or to put it properly, a big user of the twitter social network, but I have to admit that it is slowly growing on me. If you don’t know, “tweets” are a name for the micro-blogs posted on twitter. They are limited to 140 characters for each post. Tweets give a very different sense of a person. I enjoy reading them. For someone I know, it gives a different perspective on their life, what they’re up to, how they like to share themselves. And, when I see them in person, I don’t really have to say, “How ‘ya doing?” I know that already.

I am also getting into crafting my own postings, from a simple tweet telling my world about this blog post, to my more zen-like…

Andrew loves the leaves popping out. God always brings forth life from the dead.

…with a little Christian structure thrown in. If you want more of these, you can follow me at alewis7.

Twitter postings are an interesting word puzzle. When you’re limited to 140 characters you have to choose your message, and your words very will. This is tough for someone as long winded as me.

The world’s expert on twitter?

I have also been following a few people I’ve never met, like Jack the twitter founder. I figure he must know best how to express oneself in 140 key strokes. He is the zen master of this world. So I sit at his feet for now and learn the way. Oh, for I am wrong. He says…

Grasshopper, there are many tweets that make a song. Be true to your inner voice.

Hmmm… just kidding. I guess there is no one right way to tweet. Anyways, at this moment, Jack has 336,254 followers, and he follows 414 people. He needs what I’m going to tell you about next.

TweetDeck, a cool new app…

Keeping up with all the twitter postings, plus facebook wall postings, can be like trying to drink out of a firehose. I have found a cool new Mac app called TweetDeck. It does a great job managing the firehose and provides a lot of other handy features. It’s a free download, and, woops… silly me, it’s also available for Windows users. Better, let the people at Tweetdeck tell you about it…

Anybody using Twitter will discover the mass of tweets can be somewhat overwhelming and difficult to digest. TweetDeck enables users to split their main Twitter feed (All Friends) into columns allowing a broader overview of tweets.

But at the heart of TweetDeck is its ability to group people together and search across the twittersphere. Grouping friends or work colleagues separately means you have a window on all aspects of your twitter life. Searching across the twittersphere means you can monitor any subject within Twitter. These additional columns automatically update so providing the user with a very effective dashboard of realtime information.

Go here to download…

From the first Mac’s introduction in 1983, the phrase “hello” was brought to the consumer as a way of introducing a computer that was to become your friend. In the time and since, software developers would always use the phrase “Hello World!” as the first code generated by their program. The phrase has now become ubiquitous. For example, the Wordpress blogging application uses it for the default page when a new users sets up the first page. By the way, I sold my IBM PC when the Mac came out. Well, actually the first adoption was an Apple Lisa which preceded the Mac. It was the first consumer machine offering “windows” and a “mouse”. As usual, Microsoft came along several years later with Windows 1.0 , and then they still required several more years to get it functional. Have things really changed with that company?

Speaking of the past, I can remember these same engineers doing “electronic mail” on something called ARPAnet which formed the basis of the soon coming “world wide web” and the Mosaic web browser which changed the world forever. While I did have the foresight to get my company’s first web site online in 1994, I did not have the foresight to see the firestorm of new applications coming. Well, I was swamped with the development of our first clone under the Apple Mac clone program. Unfortunately, Apple canceled this program a few years later, leaving everyone high and dry.

So, to make a long story short, here is my first blog post. 

Hello World!