In the 1990s, I used to give a presentation on PC productivity with the title:

Our Grandchildren Will Laugh.

I would begin the presentation by saying;

“When I was young I saw photos of bathing machines in books. Those strange devices that the modest Victorian’s used in the UK in order to go bathing in the sea. They were like bathing huts on wheels. I laughed. They were crazy. It was almost impossible to envisage how you could go for a swim in such a thing. In fact I doubt if you could. I laughed and laughed and laughed.”

“I was laughing at my crazy grandparents.”

“Well our grandchildren will laugh at us, too. At some point in the future they’ll go into museums and there will be PCs from the 1990s on display, with their windows and keyboards and mice. And the kids will try them out and then they’ll roll on the floor laughing. ‘Look’, they’ll say, ‘Here’s the keyboard and you need two hands for that. And here’s the mouse which requires another hand. These machines were designed for people with three hands!’ and then they’ll laugh until tears roll down their faces.”

And it’s true.

But the damage is done and for the moment we have to live with it.

In 2005 I bought a Mac. I’d simply had it with PCs. It seemed to me that Microsoft had no interest at all in user productivity. I’d even had a meeting with one of the guys that ran the Microsoft labs in the UK, and entered into a discourse with him about the unproductive PC, but although this man was clearly very intelligent and could certainly trade in the concepts of higher mathematics and computers science, it was clear that he had been lobotomized in respect of the user interface. The fish was rotting from the head.

Now, I wasn’t immediately impressed with the Mac except on one important point: it just worked. That’s a big plus, because it means that you don’t suffer too much heartache in using it. You get very few unexpected interruptions – and that on its own delivers some productivity gains. It’s worth a few days a year.

Gradually, as time went by, I began to pick things up about how the Mac works. The Mac is very poorly documented. There is no “go to” book or web site that I’m aware of that simply documents every little important feature and there are actually many features that are really good (and some that are fun and some that are artistic). Eventually, I began to realize that there was a very big difference between the Mac and the PC. On the PC there were many blocks to productivity, but on the Mac there are almost none.

In June 2008 I started to document what I knew about how to be productive on a Mac, in postings to my blog (HaveMacWillBlog.com). Then I realized that this was a worthwhile area of research, so I started to get methodical about exploring Mac productivity. Finally I realized that I was gathering very useful knowledge that shouldn’t really be confined to a blog. So in October 2008, I started to build this web site.