How did I know that Steve Jobs had left the building?
I did the see the news reports, the book, and had walked past the memorial that someone had built on a local street corner. This wasn't like the moment in grad school where I had to ask "O.J. did what?" when one of my students tuned on a radio in class to hear the jury report.
But how did I really know that he was dead?
A week before Burning Man my laptop failed to work with a projector. This is how I knew Steve Jobs had departed this world.
I doubt Steve ever touched Mountain Lion. My presentation was given from a brand new laptop, with a shiny from the factory setup of OSX.
Out of the box my OSX setup did not work with the projector.
That would have never happened if Steve had been actively using Mountain Lion.
Can you imagine what would have happened to the developers if Steve would have been alive, let alone experienced, such a simple failure of technology?
It would not have been pretty.
One week after my own experience with OSX not working with a projector I found myself in a different environment reliving project-fail.
There is something to be said about knowing for certain that the reason that the laptop sitting in front of you is not able to run a presentation is because the OS is at fault.
I was standing in the desert, in a giant circus tent, with dust in the air, staring at a hodgepodge of cables that were connected to some ancient CRT. There is a lot of things that might be contributing to the problem.
When I was asked, "why isn't this working?"
The most useful thing I could contribute was:
"Running the presentations off a mac isn't going to work; the laptop is running Mountain Lion. Go find a Windows laptop."
The presentation was moved off the Mac, and onto a PC.
The PC immediately worked.
I am wondering if anyone at Apple used Mountain Lion to give a presentation before it was released. It is hard to imagine that someone didn't run into this problem long before Mountain Lion was released (as far as I know Apple has not fix the bug yet).
I am sure that there is a lot of testing happening each release.
Testing software is not the same as "using" software.
Apple is a company, someone, at least once a day, must be giving a presentation.
How did they miss this?
Steve Jobs would have presented Mountain Lion to the world using Mountain Lion.
If that presentation had blown up on him,...
Egads.
