You saw it here first!

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You saw it here first!

Naturally, I hopped over to the Apple site to download it, and was bleeding from the eyes within minutes.

One thing that I've noticed about Macs, is that whenever I'm using one I feel as though my eyes are about to explode from the pressure of attempting to focus on the seemingly intentional blur effect applied to text. This is probably a personal thing, but I don't want to go back to the bad old days of dodgy CRT monitors that required manual focusing to avoid brain haemorrhage after prolonged exposure. I don't like the default softening effect that Macs apply to everything. Annoyingly, Safari on Windows applies it to all text rendered. Perhaps more annoyingly, there is no way to turn it off, meaning that I'm stuck with a multicoloured haze around characters, and the feeling that everything is in bold type.

Another problem I have is that Safari on Windows looks virtually identical to Safari on a Mac. Might be nice if you spend all day masturbating over Apple's latest product line, but very annoying if you like your UIs to be vaguely consistent. If you really want a Mac, you'll probably buy one anyway. Mac software should look like Mac software, Windows software should look like Windows software, and Linux software should look like whichever of the 101 or so widget sets that the developers decided to use.

Apple aren't the only offender here, but they're more relevant than Sony and the shitty custom apps they bundle with their PCs, or Nero with their increasingly shit "Media Center Solution" or whatever - what happened to Nero Burning Rom? - I couldn't find it on their site a few weeks back, and it looks like they only offer bundles of software that happen to have the ability to burn optical media.

I imagine that Apple try so hard to keep their Windows software looking like Mac software, is to get people used to the look and feel, and convert them to the way of the Mac. I still think that it's bad manners to ignore the look and feel of the system that your software is running on.

Unfortunately, I think Safari for Windows will be relegated to a place alongside Quicktime and iTunes, as software that I'll probably not use unless I have a file or site that won't work in anything else.

So finally (probably to much jubilation and mockery of my insistence on using CRTs for so long), I've finally purchased a TFT monitor, and will soon have more permanent desk space available for coffee cups and assorted clutter. The unit in question is an Iiyama 17" LCD 1280 X 1024 Black 2ms. It looks rather nice, and I'm hoping that the 2ms response time will go some way towards changing my opinions on cheap TFT screens. I've always said that I couldn't afford to replace my CRTs with a TFT that could match the image quality and response time. I hope I was wrong. I'm used to the 20.1" Sony TFTs we use at work, and I'm probably spoiled slightly - those things go for around £500 these days, whereas the Iiyama above is less than £150.

Incidentally, I was reminded of some discount vouchers that Dabs emailed a while back, offering £10 off an order over £100 placed by 28/2/07. A fortunate discovery indeed, I thought. Perhaps my late display unit remembered that email, and chose its time to go accordingly. Or perhaps it was just 10 years old.

The identical unit that I'm using at the moment was manufactured at the same time, but seems to have seen less use, and is still very bright without cranking the brightness beyond 60%. Hopeully I'll manage to preserve this piece of computing history until it's 20 - by that point it'll probably be illegal to own, and impossible to dispose of.