The last thing I require to do on a California wintertime weekend is rake leave of absence and clean out rainfall gutter . Yet it ’s an inevitable part of my life history as a homeowner : either I do my job or our house turns into a leaking , rotting shanty fence in by mouldy leaves and sprouting mushrooms .
If you are n’t a homeowner , you may be spared from raking leaves . But if you own a Mac , you do have some job to do . No , your Mac may not burst forth if you do n’t take care of it ( despite this issue ’s rattling cover image by Joe Zeff — see “ About This Macworld ” ) . But you could lose data , productivity , or both . By taking a little time now for some quotidian maintenance , you’re able to debar waste lot of time subsequently star at that spinning beach - ball icon .
Clean Your Room
As an editor , I ’m always hesitating to publish chronicle like “ Prevent Mac catastrophe ” . They make me sense like I ’m secernate you to floss your tooth and clean house your room . But when we recently ask a panel ofMacworldreaders to pluck their favorite from a listing of more than a dozen narration estimate , Mac maintenancewon by a solid margin .
Perhaps that ’s because even now , several years after OS X arrived , pot of Mac users are still interested about all the cryptic hooey going on behind the view of their computers . The fact is , while OS X is a fantastic operating system , it ’s also a complicated , weird brute . And although it come with a bunch of utilitarian self - sustentation routines that you should take advantage of , those routines alone are n’t enough .
Hello Again, Eddy
As usual , plenty of big companies take the air off with a coveted Eddy statuette . But so do a bunch of underdogs — modest , up - and - coming developers that work on a shoe string ( Rogue Amoeba , developer of Nicecast , for object lesson ) and that fill a niche or amount up with a noteworthy invention the heavy society have missed .
We lend back something this twelvemonth that we have n’t done since the mid-1990s : Readers ’ Choice Awards , one for hardware and one for software . To fix those winner , we polled readers on Macworld.com , as well as members of our private reader panel . These source agreed on the two winners ( both from Apple ) .
This is the 11th twelvemonth I ’ve spent some serious quality time with Eddy . When I first met him , we were award a company run by Steve Jobs — but it was Pixar , maker of 1994 Eddy winner Typestry 2.1 . We also grant a new Mac desktop back then , but it was the 6100/60 Power Mac . And comparing the game of 2004 to those of 1994 prompt me that no matter the decade , my Mac can still be a great time wastrel : I honestly ca n’t figure out if I ’ve drop more personal time playing this year ’s Halo : Combat Evolved or 1994 Eddy winner SimCity 2000 .
play either one , however , beats spend time raking leaves and cleaning out rain gutter on a chilly Sunday .
Sidebar: About This Macworld
Back in January of 2002 , our cover showed a Power Mac G3 being squeeze by a PowerBook . umbrageous readers indite in , ingest us to chore for destroying a absolutely beneficial computer . We had to inform them that we had n’t actually squashed a Mac — the image was an illustration . So before you fire up your east - mail clients , let us see you that no Macs were harm in the product of this issue ’s cover . The burned - out , beat - up screen background you see was the instauration of Joe Zeff , an illustrator who ’s done covering forTime , Newsweek , Esquire , and other desirable mags . He build up the figure of speech from scratch , using NewTek ’s LightWave 3D running on his very own duple - processor G5 — which also double as his model .
