The set of Mac productivity postings I’ve been writing in recent weeks attracted more traffic than I had expected. In order to write those postings I was forced to research the topic of Interface productivity and I started to make some useful discoveries about this subject - not least of which is that there’s very little work been done on Interface productivity at all. My guess is that simply no-one was interested.

Contrast this with the fact that following the invention of the typewriter, touch-typing, a technique that significantly raised productivity using the device, was a necessary skill for typists. Touch-typing would be a useful skill for many computer users too, but no-one cares much.

However people do care about being productive and some techniques and shortcuts will make you more productive on a Mac or Windows. The Mac, however stands head and shoulders above the Windows PC in respect of potential Interface productivity for several reasons. Here they are:

• It has a clean 3 layer architecture: kernel (which happens to be the Mach kernel) - OS (which happens to be Unix BSD) - GUI (which is all that most people see). You could argue that Linux was as good as this, or at least had a well implemented architecture. However, Windows is pretty much all one lump of spaghetti with many archaeological layers buried beneath, for the sake of back compatibility. It does not have a clean architecture.
• OS X, in combination with the Cocoa development environment, enforces a number of standard ways of doing things. This has the welcome effect of making most applications work in the same way. There are exceptions - particularly applications from Microsoft and Adobe, that impose their own (and imho, inferior) approaches. But in the main the Mac behaves like a coherent environment where most applications work in a very similar way. This is very positive for those who wish to be productive.
• The Cocoa development environment is fundamentally object oriented. This means that applications are, under the covers, a collection of objects. And this in turn means that the whole environment can be scripted at the Interface. Now you may not care to even know that, but the outcome is that you can write many applications that enhance the productivity of the Interface and that, on the Mac is what quite a few programmers have done. The outcome is that there is a healthy ecosystem of OS X applications that boost productivity.

Anyway, to cut a long posting short, I’ve set up a web site, PDQMAC, which has the goal of helping Mac users become more productive. I have also transferred all the postings I’ve made on productivity from this blog to that site - although I’ve also left them here in case anyone has bookmarked any of them..

In the longer term I intend to produce low cost training material for Mac users to help them become more productive.

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