Whither my apps?

    I am not a geek. I’m a Mac fan and have been since 1984. For years, I and others were relegated to the netherworld of applications. Programmers ignored us and we made due with whatever we could get our grubby little hands on. All that would change in the new millenium. With the OS X renaissance and eventual post 5% market-share world, it seemed like a golden age. New developers began to appear and great new apps followed.

    This was a time of plenty and I was at the height of pseudo-geekdom. I would spend a good portion of my day discovering what new wares were available in the market and how I could use my lovely iMac DV to its fullest.

    Its now 2009, I am using a MacBook Pro and I find myself left behind. The last useful application that I downloaded was Writeroom and that was well over two years ago. How?! What happened? Reality, maturity, employment and other interests began to creep more and more into my ‘App Discovery’ time to the point where I am lucky to visit a site like Macgasm or TUAW once every two months. Some may say that this is sufficient but its an absolute life time in the time of these sites and to trawl back through weeks of posts to find one or two nuggets of code is not efficient use of my time.

    Have I really been left behind? Absolutely. Apple has failed me. Why is it I know what newest widget will fit into my Google Apps or what idiotic application a Facebook friend is using? Why is Twitter generating a lexicon of Twit-prefaced terms born out of useful apps?

    It may be that Apple has not totally let me down. Maybe they’re focused on something else. Something like the iPhone. I can happily sit there and browse through the hordes of apps (crummy or otherwise) on my phone and not be left behind. I am being bombarded with ways to increase the utility of my phone but not my MacBook Pro. If I want to get more bang from the latter, I have to go trawl for this stuff myself. Considering the cost difference between my iPhone and my Macbook Pro, I find this laughable.

    Am I the only one that has been relegated to using a $2k laptop as a fancy Netbook? Is it possible that I would get more day to day value from my iPhone if it had a full size keyboard attachment? I think not. What’s to stop me from actually purchasing a Netbook instead of a new Macbook the next time I need to make a change?

    I don’t have the solutions, I’ll let someone who makes a living from that sort of stuff actually come up with one. What I do know is that I want to easily find ways to get more utility from my top of the line laptop.

    [Photo via : YukonBrat]