It’s no secret that I’m a fan of OS X, and having a forum like this to discuss what’s going on with the operating system is something that I truly enjoy. Although there are plenty of positive things to talk about when it comes to Apple’s OS, I’m not so blinded by fanboyism that I can’t see the shortcomings. The other day, actually, I had a negative realization about OS X that surprised me, and I thought I’d share it with you.
For a long time, Macs have been the de facto standard for graphic designers, and although I’m not a graphic designer in any way, shape, or form, I can understand why designers are drawn to the platform, and since my wife is one of them, this is made even clearer for me. To be honest, I’ve only done some image editing on Macs that had the full Adobe suite on them, so manipulating graphics was a piece of cake even for someone like me because I had the right tools at my disposal.
With that said, I’ve never really needed to install any graphics programs on either one of my Macs, so when I had to do a little work on a particular image of mine, I looked around my installation of Leopard to see if I could find anything that was at least close to being an equivalent to Microsoft’s Paint program. I’d never really seen anything like this before, but I figured that there might be something buried beneath the surface in this latest version of OS X. I searched and searched for some basic tool beyond iPhoto, but much to my chagrin, I just didn’t find anything. Here I was using an operating system for graphic designers that didn’t even include a basic image editing application. There’s something wrong with this picture.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this ridiculous? I’m sure many of you have been aware of this for years, and in the back of mind, I knew it to be true as well, but the fact that it’s still this way is completely beyond me. I know a lot of real graphic designers already have all of the expensive applications and wouldn’t bother messing with an inferior application, but for users like me, there should at least be something decent included with the operating system.
Whether they like it or not, Apple has to face the music and understand that designers are drawn to their computers, and when it comes time for one of their retail representatives to show off the design capabilities of OS X, they shouldn’t just have to launch one of Adobe’s bloated applications. Last time I checked, Macs were about simplicity and power, so where is that fantastic, yet simple, native image editing application that the platform demands?
I know there are some free and open source alternatives, but I shouldn’t have to track a third-party application down when Apple could have easily bundled their own solution with their OS. The Paint program that’s a part of Windows may not have changed very much over the years, but you realize how much you miss it when you’re using OS X.
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