I tawt I taw a puddy-tat!

John Gruber on the "canaries in the (Mac) coalmine".

I certainly agree with his analysis, and on a personal level, having come back to Mac via Linux, there is no freakin' way I would go back now, not even if Ubuntu is the best Linux install ever. It's not just about the OS (although I still don't see how any PC OS can ever achieve the level of hardware integration that OS X has); it's also about the software. Only those who have never used Photoshop seriously can say that the Gimp is equivalent with a straight face. And what about BBEdit? Plus all those really cool Apple apps, like Garageband, iMovie and iDVD. I'll take Mark Pilgrim's word that iMovie doesn't let you export your edit points; but so what? It's virtually a free app! What do you expect? If you want to be able to re-create your edit from the raw footage on another machine, you're likely to be way above the target audience here. Apple sells real applications (for serious money) that do this; they've been used to edit feature films, so they must be in the ballpark. So pay for them, or put up with the limitations of the free apps that come with your Mac. Don't whine about "closed formats". It's nothing of the sort.

In fact, the more I read of what Mark Pilgrim and Corey Doctorow have written, the more convinced I am that these people are the most atypical Mac users (probably the most atypical anything, to be honest) I know of. They're not canaries. They're the weird birds who were hanging around the canaries when the miners caught them, and they flew away because they got bored. Or neurotic. The mine is safe.