Earlier this calendar month , Apple foretell it had trade 100 million iPod . Who knewfive and a one-half years agothat Apple would one day betray more of those small music players than it would computers ( 21 million iPods sold during the fiscal first after part compared to 1.6 million Macs ) ?
The iPod was released right as I go away the San Francisco Bay Area to commence living as a telecommuter . ( Yes , I keenly think of the annoyance of lack the press conference where all my coworkers were hand iPods to test out . ) So this milepost has made me contemplate on how much engineering has change since then , form my oeuvre life easier in the appendage .
When I started , telecommuting was ruffianly . My gamy - speed DSL connecter made it fairly easy to pass files back and forth through due east - ring armor , but other thing didn — tonne work quite so smoothly . Bit by bit , things obtain easy . Here are some of the modification that made the difference :
iChat : Back in 2001 , if I necessitate to call for someone a spry query I had to e - get off them and expect , or endeavor to get them on the telephony . We all know that the telephony can be a time sink , leading to tenacious give-and-take of the late episode of whatever show happened to be on the nighttime before . But in 2002 , Mac OS X 10.2 ( Jaguar ) introducediChat . Say what you will about chat software system , but I love it .
At ready glance at my Buddy List and I can see which of my co - workers and author are at their desks and , to a sure extent , what they ’re doing . This facilitate the loneliness of working at dwelling and lets me ask fast questions without getting bogged down in long conversation .
I was excited about iChat AV , but I must admit I rarely use its video or audio office . We did video meetings for a while , but slowly stopped because it was concentrated to see the whole room and the time postponement with articulation was too distracting . ( Plus , it meant I had to interchange out of my pajamas ! )
build - in VPN node : When I started telecommuting , our former technical guru , Sean Greathouse , spent an hour on the headphone walking me keystroke by keystroke through the conscientious whole tone of setting up a VPN connectedness … in Terminal . All this was necessary so I could post article toMacworld ’s servers . When Apple released OS X 10.3 ( Panther ) in October 2003 with a built - in VPN client that was accessible from the menubar , my biography was much simplified .
Acrobat Pro : Our copyeditors used to telefax me copies of stories in layout so that I could make baseball swing to match text on the Thomas Nelson Page . I struggled with blotchy lines that I could barely interpret — especially if there were any background tints to the sidebar . I receive my fax ( and still do ) usingEfax , so at least I could print them multiple multiplication and file them on my hard drive . But after these pages were marked up with pencil , I ’d hover over the facsimile machine machine trying to keep it from jamming — which it did on a regular basis with anything long than four pages .
Finally in 2003 , our copyedit section started using Adobe ’s Acrobat 6.0 Professional to carry through a ( legible ! ) written matter of an article . Now they could necessitate inquiry on the document and I could answer . My addition and subtractions to text were all clearly mark . rightful , I come up that version ofAcrobatwas fruity and cumbersome , but it was light old age better than what we ’d had before . I hope the future holds even right alternatives for this part of the process .
Voice over IP : I do n’t know about your townspeople , but in mine telephone bills can be steep . I ’ve written before about my move to Speakeasy.net’sVOIP inspection and repair . The fiscal savings have been enormous , but I did sputter with some call timber problems in the beginning . I ’m glad to say that the past two years have seen most of my VoIP problems disappear . Sometimes I wonder how traditional phone companies will stay in job .
Since I start telecommuting , the routine ofMacworldeditors wreak in other parts of the country has well up . I ’ve got to give improvement in OS X and third - party software a lot of the credit for making this potential . It ’s easy to forget sometimes that technology really can make our piece of work easier — and that it already has .
