I'm a Mac

I didn't realize it till recently, but I'm a Mac. The sense of wonder I felt in 1986 when my dad bought our first computer still stays with me to this day. That Macintosh XL was way ahead of its time. Many of its operating system elements such as the menu bar and the "trash can" are maintained in their full glory to this day in current Apple computers.

Although that Macintosh XL was a pleasure to own, it was the last Apple computer I owned till this year. For close to two decades I endured driver configuration headaches, unexplainable operating system slowdowns, and virus threats for the sake of saving money on my Windows computers.

This year, I finally had enough and made the switch to the Apple universe. I have a 15" MacBook Pro and am rocking the iPhone 3G. What a difference that sexy Apple logo makes. The products work the way you expect them to. New features are breakthroughs in innovation rather than things you should take for granted (the Windows 95 promo which advertised allowing for spaces in file names still makes me laugh).

But I digress. I'm not here to hate on Windows. Instead, I want to praise Apple's goal of perfecting the user experience in every product it puts out. In fact, when we designed the Eyes On Campus website, we used Apple's user interface design as our benchmark for excellence. We'll be the first to admit that our website has plenty of room for improvement. Our decision to utilize MediaWiki as the engine for the collaborative content of Eyes On Campus has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it's the same engine that powers Wikipedia, and has a thriving open-source development community. On the other hand, the editing interface does take some getting used to. While I've never had to open an instruction manual for Apple products, Eyes On Campus has developed tutorial videos that we think our users may need to see to become comfortable with the MediaWiki interface.

But with that said, I'm confident we've laid the foundation for us to realize our vision of becoming the ultimate insider's guide to campus life. Recently, I used an Internet archive tool to check out Apple's website in the year 2000. It's quite a stark contrast from the way it looks today, but the fundamental aspects of the brand--intuitiveness, simplicity, and elegant design are all there in spades. Hopefully when I look back on this version of the Eyes On Campus website several years from now, I'll make a similar comparison.