appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

liveArticle

appConfig

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sectionsV2

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

json

Do you remember that nifty little advert that Intel came out with about a year ago?   It showed an Intel Pentium chip whizzing through the innards of a PC, past various software titles and then landing in its appointed socket in order to bring you the knowledge of the universe, or at least all the knowledge that Bill Gates has seen fit to give you.

  There is only one problem with this picture, though: the advert was created on a Mac.

  Why is it that the Macintosh is the platform of choice for multimedia designers?   Many of the titles commonly available for the PC, just like the Intel advert, were designed, written and created on the Macintosh.

  From its very inception the Macintosh was a computer for the creative mind.

  Macintosh invented the simple concept of Wyswyg (What You See is What You Get) graphics.

  Fonts and layouts on the screen appeared exactly as they would on the page.

  The Microsoft/Intel lot, often simply called 'Wintel' produce machines that are work-horses.

  They are built for drudgery; they are cheap, ugly and utilitarian.

  This, at least, is the opinion of many a designer.

  The Wintel machines are great at sorting databases in a flash.

  They do great spreadsheets, don't cost much and you don't even need a colour monitor to do your company's taxes.

  In short, they are the machines of lawyers, certified public accountants, and guys who 30 years ago would have carried slide rules.

  The Mac, on the other hand, has sex appeal - that easy, reliable visual interface that the kind of creative people who do multimedia are looking for.

  They want to make art, not sit in an office for hours on end with a cup of coffee in one hand and a manual in the other trying in vain to figure out how to configure config.sys or autoexec.bat. The Mac is a creative machine built by divergent thinkers.

  PCs were made by people who still think that Unix is pretty cool, the kind of people who like to sit down with a hot double Mochachino and talk about Lans and batch files.

  Intel makes chips and Microsoft makes software, but it takes far more than just a chip and a copy of Windows 95 to produce a multimedia presentation.

  In the Wintel world's hardware and software, standards can often be a chicken-and-egg situation.

  Standards are usually dictated by whoever manages to make the most popular piece of hardware, such as the SoundBlaster sound board.

  Mac on the other hand owns the whole thing.

  Apple can, therefore, decide to produce a piece of software like QuickTime or QuickDraw 3D, and then make sure that there is hardware out there to support it.

  QuickTime has become such a standard for multimedia that it is not only available for Netscape for use on Internet pages, but Apple has actually ported the software to the PC.

  This domination will most probably continue with Apple's QuickDraw 3D.

  But it is not just the multimedia designer that comes into this equation.

  The makers of multimedia authoring software have been drawn largely to the Mac market.

  The combination of the attractiveness of the Mac to multimedia creators, and the ease with which multimedia authoring software can be written by using QuickTime and QuickDraw 3D, has meant that the vast majority of multimedia authoring software is available for the Mac only.



Sexy Mac or dull PC: the debate still rages