We just came back from the MacTech conference in Los Angeles, put together by MacTech magazine. We met a lot of great people, and learned a lot of cool IT stuff. Here is a big-picture overview of what we took away.
1. Unitasking
In the keynote presentation, Andy Ihnatko coined the term “unitasking.” Multitasking has been shown to be not as effective as doing one thing at a time. The new Mac Lion, coming out in summer 2011, has a full-screen mode for applications, allowing you to focus on what you’re doing and avoid distractions.
2. Developer Tools
Learning to use developer tools, whether MacRuby or Ruby on Rails or Python or another programming language, is essential for assisting clients.
3. Remote Access
As Mac users are doing more traveling, and needing to work from numerous locations, it’s imperative that we are able to do remote access to all our clients’ machines. One session at the conference was about the numerous software options for remote access.
4. Communication
Part of being a good IT consultant is communication with clients. We are such experts with the Mac that, as presenter Nathan Toups said, “We’ve forgotten what it’s like to not know what we know.” We need to keep that not-knowing in mind in our communications with clients.
5. Windows on Mac
More users are using software, usually VMWare Fusion or Parallels, to be able to run Windows software on their Macs. More and more Mac users are switchers, and/or are not tech people, so it’s important to set them up in such a way that everything just works, cleanly and easily.
6. The Cloud
The cloud is increasingly an option for backup as well as for document storage, document sharing, and even applications. We need to stay on top of the services that are out there, and the pros and cons of each.
7. Options
One session at the conference broke us up into teams and asked each team come up with a solution for an invented client. Each team came up with something new to add to the proposed solution. We need to remember that there is no one right way; there are so many options out there, and we need to be aware of as many of them as possible, so we can create the ideal custom solution for each client.