Platform Compatibility

In ancient computer times (less than a decade ago), a battle raged between Macintosh and Windows users. Amazingly, the passion and prejudice generated by proponents of one platform or the other bordered on religious fervor. What is it about a computer platform that generates such divisiveness in its adherents? I think it s because a personal computer is, in essence, an auxiliary brain. It stores information and ideas that can t fit into the limited storage capacity of our own gray matter and extends our ability to make calculations and perform complex tasks . A platform simulates the way we think and organize our reality. We can personalize the way each interface behaves and how it looks, to a certain extent, which increases our attachment to it.

The phenomenon of platform prejudice will, I m sure, be a topic for social theorists to thoroughly investigate in the future. The battle has died down because of the capability of the different computers to read each other s data. The latest Macintosh operating system, Mac OS X, has a program called PC Exchange bundled into the system, which gives the computer the capability to read Windows disks. If you install a program such as MacOpener 2000 by DataViz (www.dataviz.com) on your Windows PC, it will read Macintosh disks. With the same data now readily accessible by both platforms, the barriers have come down.

Note  

The one area of disparity between platforms remains the distinction between Mac and PC fonts, which has graphic designers and computer artists cringing when they have to work on more than one platform.

The platform issue has also diminished because of programs such as Photoshop that, for the most part, ignore platform differences. Photoshop is designed to be cross-platform compatible and to perform comparably in Windows and Macintosh environments. Photoshop will open documents from either platform, providing they have been saved in a format that supports cross-platform compatibility. The native Photoshop format is probably your best bet, because it supports layers. Photoshop PDF and TIFF (which also supports layers in recent versions), PICT, and EPS are good alternatives for flattened images, providing they are saved with cross-compatibility in mind. You can use JPEG or JPEG 2000 formats with their efficient compression scheme to archive images to CD and open them in either platform.

Photoshop performs equally well on Macintosh and Windows computers. For the most part, the Photoshop interface is similar for both versions of the software, with minor differences in appearance. Because Macintosh and Windows keyboards differ slightly, keyboard commands are different. Table 3.1 lists the parallel command keys of the two systems.

Table 3.1: Macintosh and Windows Keyboard Equivalents

MACINTOSH	WINDOWS
	Ctrl
Option	Alt
Delete	Backspace
Return	Enter