Quite a lot of my Mac programming friends having been jabbering on about the Osbourne effect, and saying things like: “well I was going to buy some new hardware, but now I’m going to wait”.

I don’t really get it to be honest.

Sure, if the Osbourne effect kicks in then it will hurt Apple, but there’s not much reason for it to kick in, other than a bunch of hand-wringing Mac developers creating a self-fullfilling prophesy.

When you look at what Apple have actually said, it’s just that at some point next year they will be releasing some products using Intel processors. They haven’t said when, and they haven’t said what.

They have said that they definitely won’t instantly be replacing their whole product line. By definition then they will continue to support PowerPC for a good while, and since the trend is towards processor independence, not away from it, it is unlikely that they are going to do something in the future which stops OS X from working on PowerPC.

So by buying a PowerPC machine now, you aren’t going to be left out in the cold in a year. Sure your machine will be a year older than next year’s model, and perhaps a little slower, but that would be equally true if next year’s model was PowerPC based. That’s always true, and one always has the dilemma of whether to wait a while or not, but I see nothing in this situation to make matters worse.

The Osbourne effect is based on the idea that the new product is going to be so vastly superior that there is absolutely no point buying the old one. Apple haven’t said that. One imagines that the machine will be a bit faster, but the real reason (at least the reason that Apple have stated publicly) for switching to Intel is that their long term roadmap is better, not that the current crop of chips totally blow away PowerPC chips.

For all we know, Apple’s first Intel based hardware might be a tablet, or a handheld, or something else that they don’t even make right now!

So what’s all the fuss about? If you need a new mac now, because your current one is too old/slow/noisy, then go out and buy one. If you don’t need one, then wait until you do.

As our Californian cousins might say: “like, duh…”.

Kevin Marks keeps posting about interesting meetings that I want to attend, or wish I had attended*.

I am jealous. Every now and then, it’s just a little bit irritating to find onesself nowhere near California!

Hey Kevin, fancy a technorati European tour? We could probably host you in Dublin at Learn3k… once they finish building our office anyway :)

(*your definition of interesting may vary)

No really, these are completely mental images

Tom Smith has been having painful experiences with Word. No surprises there then.

I actually quite like Word (oops, did I really admit that in public?), but these days I find myself more and more tempted to use html + css for writing documents - either as a blog entry, or on an internal project Wiki if it’s not a public document, or even if worst comes to worst as a standalone html page.

Admittedly writing web content can be painful, and most tools are either shit or totally over-engineered for writing simple documents, but generally it isn’t too bad if you’ve got some sort of simple mark up add-on installed (e.g. Markdown).

Sorting out the basics - headings, images, lists, text styles - is easy, and I often find that the constraints imposed on me have a positive effect, leading to a simple layout, or a well structured group of pages.

What I’d love to see is for someone to do a Wiki tool which had a good client-side authoring component that ran as a standalone application.

What it should do is:

• let you author offline, using basic word processor-like wysiwyg editing
• upload your changes to the wiki later, resolving conflicts
• let you package up a group of pages as a standalone document and distribute them as a pdf so that others can read them offline
• be as fun as OmniGraffle to use :)

I attended the (rather grandly titled) ELSPA International Games Summit yesterday, with Stephen Heppell, who was there talking about links between the learning and games communities in the UK.

There were a few interesting sessions, but also some mind bogglingly turgid and boring ones (the speakers shall remain anonymous).

At times I was reminded of the worst of my undergraduate lectures, and felt that we would have been better off if everyone had just gone to the pub for a chat!

The idea of these days is presumably to share information, but often the presentations were too long, going into too much detail, when what was really needed was a brief overview and a discussion.

There’s got to be a better way!

I’d love to see events like these organised differently, so that we got short (15 min) presentations to provide key facts, talking points and perhaps a bit of provocation from an expert.

Each presentation could then be followed by a moderated discussion (the panel events yesterday were the best ones) in which the audience ask questions or make suggestions, depending on the topic under discussion.

What would be really nice would be if these Q&As were actually recorded and minuted, then written up by someone during the day, and presented later as a summary and/or the start of a further discussion.

That way it really would start feeling like the best kind of brainstorming sessions in the pub, but with the added advantage that someone was actually writing down all those great ideas, and you’d also get the minutes and summaries to take away at the end of it, instead of your own scrappy notes!