My most respected colleague Ephraim Schwartz recently filed a Reality Check column entitled, “Mac Leopard: Not enough to make PC users switch.” In that piece, he sums up Leopard’s potential for luring him away from his familiar PC:[…] Leopard is beautiful to look at, but I spend about 80 percent of my time writing on my PC. Do I need all of these new capabilities? So far, I think not. They still only qualify as nice-to-haves and not must-haves. As long as I can get my work done somewhat efficiently, I think I’ll pass. At this point, I’m still waiting for that killer Mac capability that will make me switch. That’ll be a long wait. As much raving as I do about system software, no OS, desktop or set of bundled apps ever sold me on a platform. It was always an application that met the challenge, “show me the perfect use of my time at work.” (Solitaire!) That’s not a reasonable question to bring to system software.FrameMaker was my first encounter with genuine perfection in an application with a graphical front-end. When I wrote my first book, I wanted to design the visual and structural aspects of my book, then type directly onto that book’s furnished pages, and print the book in its entirety only at the end. FrameMaker ran identically and brilliantly on all of the platforms I had around me: Windows, x86 UNIX and Mac. FrameMaker is cemented in my mind as the exemplar of the cross-platform GUI application and a one-word answer for the question, “what can you do with a GUI that’s impossible from a command line?” Symantec’s MORE gave me my first reason for keeping a Mac around after I finished reviewing it. MORE is impossible to describe to anyone who’s never used it, although this site takes a crack at it. I used MORE as a highly flexible, affordable alternative to the likes of Chyron character generators and Quantel Paintboxes for their basic capabilities. I didn’t care for the Mac OS look and feel, but MORE took me from concept to preview to broadcast inside a single tool.But it was Matrox Studio that made me see GUIs as indispensable. Studio was a complete broadcast/corporate video production suite in a box: A 3U rackmount PC stuffed with custom peripheral cards designed and manufactured by Matrox in Canada. At its peak, Studio was doing non-linear editing with uncompressed 4:2:2 component digitized video, with the ability to render a virtually unlimited number of layers of video and graphics. Studio handled everything in hardware, from audio mixing to VTR control to 3-D effects. In hardware, it was hopelessly complex. Matrox’s software exposed every knob and dial, yet made it turnkey.There is such a thing as perfect software. When you find it, you become engaged in whatever platform that perfect app calls home. Software Development