Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple’s newest and greatest OS X Tiger. It looks and works wonderfully on my iMac, and my iBook. Sweet, seamless fun all around, with all my cool Apple apps working very well, as always.
But, you know me. “Less is More” has always been my motto, sort of. At least I enjoyed hacking my Mac operating system way back when we all lived with 800K floppy disks and 10 MB hard drives on our $4000 Macintoshes. I loved building a complete boot disk, with the whole OS, onto a single floppy. I loved carrying around a Sony box of ten floppy disks, with all my apps and my files, and with a boot disk too, so that I could work on any Mac I happened to have access to.
Since I was a ‘job shopper’ and working in a number of companies, this was a necessity for me. My work was mostly in FreeHand and Illustrator, with a prehistoric version of Photoshop, so I needed to be able to use my software applications, and have access to my files, my illustrations, with me at all times.
You know, I miss those days. Now, everything I use, like NewTek Lightwave, along with video development apps, fits very nicely on my iBook. My iBook also has all the other Apple apps too. Safari, GarageBand, iPhoto, iTunes, Calendar, Pages, etc,, etc. None of these get used much, except Safari to check my online email and do a little surfing.
But, I keep looking at the iPod. I am thinking it makes a great USB memory stick or hard drive, doesn’t it? I could store most of what I need and use on it, and not have to lug a laptop anywhere. It has me wondering if I could put OS X on there and boot from it, on someone else’s office Mac? This would be especially nice when I go to someone’s place of business and they have none of the apps I need to use to do their small job for them, which is true of most of my clients, and many of them still use OS9!
So I did some extensive research on this. OK, I did some extensive online surfing and keyword searches. (What? You thought I went to the library?)
What I found is puzzling. Hardly anybody does this – putting their apps and files on their iPods. I guess they would rather have their own laptops with them instead. Or else nobody ever thinks of their iPods as memory sticks.
But, then, I am thinking about something much more extreme too.
What if I relied on the iPod’s OS instead of the big and hefty Mac OS X?
Could I easily move my apps from the iPod to the Mac temporarily? Sure. Mac apps are all-in-one civilized applications, which are easy to install, run and delete on strange Macintoshes. This is not at all like Windows, you know, where files with strange names appear in odd places all over your hard drive.
How far can I carry this idea? iTunes, iPhoto and Calendar run on the iPod. (Or at least truncated versions of them do) I am curious if any other Mac apps could run on the little bugger. Could my email app run on the iPod?
Most people who use laptops rarely do more than surf, watch movies and do email. Strange. So many apps on the Mac, and most people never open them. MyMac readers are an exception to this, I know.
So I wonder if I could plug into a bigger monitor, and access a keyboard from the iPod? Could I surf the web from my iPod? Just how good is this little known, little spoken about operating system that runs on the iPod? Or would I have to keep on using OS X? If I did, could I boot OS X from the iPod and use it as an external hard drive on somebody’s older Mac.?
Stay tuned to this station, to find out.
Regards,
Roger Born
“Always Drink Upstream From The Herd.”
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