Sure, there are still plenty of hurdles for Apple to overcome if the Mac is ever to secure greater acceptance as a viable platform choice, but sometimes it's worthwhile to step back and consider how far things have progressed in such a short time. In particular, we're thinking about the age-old argument that "there's no software for the Mac." While it's certainly true that there's a lot more software available for DOS and Windows, we at AtAT can honestly say that we've never had any real trouble getting Mac software that lets us work and play the way we want to. Of course there have been occasional game titles that we would have liked to play, but what games are available for the Mac provide more than enough time-sucking distraction. In fact, we keep the boxes for any software we buy-- and we have a lot of boxes. (Trust us. Lugging all of them across town into our new studios really drove home just how much Mac-compatible software is really out there. It's just not as easy to spot on the shelves.)

While most of the software in our collection was bought before the iMac debuted, there's no doubt that Apple's funky blue consumer powerhouse really started to lure back the developers. But even as Apple's fond of crowing about the thousands of new software products announced since the iMac's introduction, Mac software buyers like you and us know that Mac software still isn't exactly overflowing the aisles in the local CompUSA. But the software development process takes time, and the iMac's only been shipping for just over a year now, so we're hoping to see the software situation continue to improve dramatically over the next couple of years as the developers actually ship all those titles dreamed up when the iMac's sales numbers first made the dollar signs pop up in their eyes.

Wanna hear how we know there's still a wait ahead? Perhaps you remember early last year when Intuit announced it was dropping development of further Mac versions of Quicken-- a move especially painful since Intuit's CEO, Bill Campbell, was a member of Apple's board of directors. About a week later, though, Campbell announced that Intuit had reversed its decision, due entirely to some secret project Steve Jobs had shown him which convinced him that Apple would soon be back in the consumer game in a big way. That project, of course, was the soon-to-be-unveiled iMac. And it's only just now that Intuit's recommitment to the Mac platform is bearing fruit; a MacCentral article notes that some customers are now receiving their upgrade copies of the brand new Quicken 2000. (The product apparently won't start showing up on store shelves until next month, however.) So there you have it-- new Mac software inspired by the iMac's consumer appeal is finally starting to appear. It just takes time.

Buggy software is the bane of any computer user's existence. It crashes just when you're trying to print that last-minute report, or just before you're about to save your work. It can cause data loss, time loss, sanity loss, and hair loss. In severe cases it can cause job loss and even life loss (though if constant crashes are making you so frustrated you're looking longingly at implements of mass destruction, we'd advise you to relax a smidge). At the same time, though, it seems we all just accept that software has to be buggy. Some Windows users we know, in particular, simply see restarting after crashes as a fundamental part of operating a computer, as integral to the whole process as launching applications and copying files. It's just something we all have to endure.

But longtime Mac shareware developers Ambrosia Software are drawing a line in the sand-- and an icky one, at that. Faithful viewer Keith Lim points out a press release in which the company announces that if any of its upcoming releases contain any bugs at all, Marketing Director Jason Whong will be forced to eat real insects at next year's Macworld Expo in New York. That's right; if Ambrosia has to release a bug-fix patch for any of its new product, Jason will be chowing down on "live or roasted crickets, grasshoppers, locusts, spiders, or any number of edible insects." (Yeah, we know spiders aren't insects, but this publicity stunt is goofy enough that we're not going to call them on it.)

We like any idea that might reduce the bugginess in the software we all use, but while we are especially fond of the idea of punishing the marketing folks when bugs surface, we have to wonder about the effectiveness of Ambrosia's plan. We don't know what kind of good-time vibes and happy campfire songs ring through the halls at Ambrosia, but in general, software developers and marketing people get along like cobras and mongooses. If other software companies were to institute Ambrosia's "eat a bug in public" policy, we bet the programmers would be making mistakes on purpose just to watch the marketing people squirm. So what's the deal; will the computing public accept a reduction of system stability if it translates into a rampant rise in marketing types publicly wolfing down creepy-crawlies?

Here's a quickie; we spent a few hours over the weekend volunteering some computer training time for the Activities Director at a nursing home. Unfortunately, the computer in question was some Compaq Presario running Windows 95, and while the experience may have warped our fragile little minds, we emerged otherwise unscathed. We covered a lot in three hours, and now she seems psyched to leap in and start creating. She can now add clip art to her AppleWorks-based newsletters. She understands that saving all her documents only to a floppy disk is just asking for data loss. She's thrilled that she can build her activities calendars by double-clicking the stationery we left on her desktop. The few hours we donated will save her days each month.

Anyway, the whole experience really drove home what Apple understands and what many of us forget. When the iMac (and now the iBook) is criticized for a lack of expandability, or a lack of legacy ports, or stuff like that, those criticisms are coming from "computer people." Now, you may not consider yourself a computer person, but trust us-- if you're tuning in to watch a daily soap opera about Apple Computer, you qualify as one for these purposes. See, the person we were training wasn't a computer person at all. She's been using this Compaq for months now and didn't even know that she could select text with the mouse and change its size-- she would backspace over entire paragraphs of existing text, set the font size, and then retype it all from scratch. That's the level of computer familiarity that Apple knows is out there: the people who really don't know anything about computers. These days, computers are increasingly essential tools, and we think Apple's creating products that can let "regular" people accomplish great things with a greatly reduced level of frustration.

So spending some time with a misconfigured Wintel box that crashes when the screensaver comes on and didn't allow the dragging of shortcuts to the desktop (we had to use Windows Explorer) really made us appreciate the iMac all that much more. The Activities Director we trained could do so much with just an out-of-the-box iMac; it has AppleWorks pre-installed, it's Internet-ready, and it's inviting and a joy to use, whereas the Compaq was viewed as a necessary evil. We're no longer surprised at the iMac's runaway success among first-time buyers, and we hope that Apple continues to simplify things for "normal people." (As long as they keep making systems that appeal to geeks like us, as well.)