Frydmania

Mac to Reality

I’ve finally taken the plunge back to my roots and bought a Mac. Okay, the company will be paying for it, but I ordered it and use it and get most of the benefit. It’s very sweet, cool and dare I say it, sexy. It’s quiet, quick, light it gets things to work so much easier.

It’s not all plain sailing as I’m having to learn all the little Mac bits and pieces that I’ve missed in the ten years since I stopped using Macs. I used to use them at university, but moved entirely to PCs in 1995 when my flatmate [Adam Park for those of you who remember him] bought a PC. It was a Pentium 133 with a 1.2Gb hard drive and 256Mb Ram. Can you believe it that I remember that kind of thing?! My camera has more storage capacity than that now . . .

I’m determined not to turn into a Mac geek [like my Inigo colleague Colin], as I know that the reset of the world is PC-based and will continue to be for a long time to come. I’ve been telling our team that we have to design for the real world - those people still limited to Microsoft, Windows and Internet Explorer - but I have seen the light with MacBook, OSX and of course the massively popular and wonderful Firefox.

The new Mac [not given it a name yet] is Intel based, which allows me to run PC applications in a window run by software called Parallels. This allows me to run software [albeit fairly slowly] that I used to use and doesn’t put me just in the Mac camp.

So here’s looking forward to being efficient, flexible and funky in 2007.

Add comment December 9th, 2006

Growth

Inigo has grown a bit in the last eighteen months. In early October 2005 there were two of us full time and one part time. Now there are four full time and one part time.

Turnover from 2004 to 2005 was 42% and 2005 to 2006 was 35%. So things are on the up. We’re not seeking investment, we’ve never been in debt to the bank and most of the growth is from referral and repeat business.

2007 is going to be the year that we really have to grow up. To keep growing at the same rate we’ll need to be even more technology driven, step up our already high levels of design, but most of all more focussed on our customers. Take care of your customers and they take care of you. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but I think it’s worth it.

Add comment December 9th, 2006