I've always considered a Mac to be a $2000 OS that comes with a free PC. This nifty yet awefully true statement is not my creation rather I read it somewhere on Neowin.net , my favorite online community site. Until a couple of years ago I used to think that a Mac could pose a significant threat to Windows dominance if Apple decides to shift their platform to Intel based CPUs. This feeling spurred once again recently when Apple decided to actually go ahead with shifting on the Intel platform.

But the one crucial thing that every OS now comes with; (yes I'm talking about a web browser which regardless of the OS you're using comes bundled with) it's a whole different story in Apple land. Safari makes a mockery of the CSS we build (most visible in case of CSS buttons). And Internet Explorer... well we all know there's no love lost between page designers & IE.

I've been developing the Seminars resource website of World Press Photo. Sorry its not a public site, but to understand my point you only need the login interface page and obviously access to a Mac (not an old one, one with at least OS X). When you're visiting this page on a Mac regardless of the browser you're using, you'll notice the Welcome "Tab" appears disconnected from the rest of the page underneath it. I've tested this with Safari, IE 5.2 & Firefox 1.0.4. If you were browsing the same page on a Windows or a Linux machine on  whatever browser you choose it is connected and you get the "Tab View" feeling! I recommend using  Firefox so you know this is a Mac problem not the CSS or rendering code I made. So far I've been unable to understand the cause behind it. Apparently on the Mac the background image of the div containing the tabs is just not showing up which isn't the case on other OS's.

UPDATE: Since the site has been updated, the example is no longer relevant.

So, I've started on a path down the road that people know as blogging. Though not a great fan of it at first I realized that for me with a busy professional life to publish my views & ideas, blogging would be the ideal solution. And eventually I ended up on the dilemmatic crossroads; use the platform that I use to earn my bread or go with my undying first love. Folks who know me know I'm talking about the great platform divide of LAMP & Microsoft .net. (Since I consider ASP a dead platform now.) Though it seemed like a morally difficult decision, turns out that it wasn't after all. My host is running IIS 6 / Windows Server 2003, and supports only SQL Server. And almost every PHP based blogging engines out there are built with Apache & MySQL in mind. And a flat file based solution doesn't seem to be an elegant solution when I had the choice of running .text, CS or .netNUKE.

I have been following the development of Community Server for more 1 and half years now. And absolutely adore the work of Kevin Harder. CS has now become my weapon of choice. I have liked it very much so far, and believe it would do wonders once it adapts to the .net 2.