Stand Up For Macintosh

Aug 12, 1999

Perhaps I'm still in the National Day mood, but I thought it's time that I properly introduced some noteworthy homegrown (Singapore, that is) Mac websites to regular readers of The iMac NewsPage. What has brought this on was my realization that the voice of the Mac community has gathered considerable momentum in the last few years, particularly since the explosion of the Internet in the mid-90's. But even before then, I had witnessed the initial sparks myself a little earlier, in 1991, when the Internet — before there was Netscape — was introduced to our campus during my first year in Architecture school.

When I launched this website slightly over a year ago, it started off as no more than a single page linking to the day's iMac news. (Hence the rather unimaginative name; I didn't figure the site would last beyond a month or two.) But as I began to discover that there were many other stars in the Mac universe apart from just Macworld or MacCentral, it dawned upon me that here was a unique community that would thrive in the new environment of the Web, unfettered by neither geographical nor cultural boundaries. The Mac community had finally found a place to band together to articulate its collective consciousness, just like many other interest groups on the Internet.

You can shape opinion through the Web. (And yes, that can be both bad as well as good, and some concerned readers have hastened to tell me with pleas not to "spread misinformation" and the like.) Well, the world's changing, and news is no longer just the domain of the big news networks. The Web has effectively leveled the playing field and rewritten the ground rules overnight. Today, anyone can be a reporter, columnist, rumor-monger, or whatever. And the way things are moving at Apple, anyone can be a broadcaster too.

Suddenly, I can have as much a voice as John C Dvorak or Fred Langa, even if they get paid to write fluff and generate hate-mail, and I don't (get paid, that is.) I find it rather refreshing, and I trust readers to be intelligent enough to discern between which websites to continue visiting and which to delete from their bookmarks. It's so utterly democratic, don't you think? But seriously, while we can't all be perfect, we can aspire to contribute positively to making the most of the information age.

And so, with all that said and done, I hope you'll welcome the following websites to the global community of Mac websites:

AppleSurf — Needs no introduction, really. Created by Heng-Cheong Leong, and currently hosted by MacOpinion, AppleSurf has quite a history behind it, having been around since 1996. In fact, it's the oldest-established Singapore Mac website I know of. I like to think of it as the Singapore equivalent of MacSurfer's Headline News, your portal to all the latest news, rumors, announcements, and whatnots about the planet's most-underutilized natural resource.

By the way, AppleSurf had recently axed its parent website, An Apple A Day, which during its time had showcased each day a newly-discovered Mac website ever since it began in early 1996. (The iMac NewsPage was itself privileged enough to be showcased on one occasion while it was still largely unknown.) Following the demise of AAAD (shades of the Newton or Dr Gil Amelio, don't you think?), AppleSurf has just recently launched SingaporeSurf, a website that's not necessarily Mac-oriented, but certainly Singaporean in content, to serve local readers and all else who might be interested to find out more about a culture that possibly rivals the Mac community in its uniqueness. (Just like Apple, we're only a tiny red dot, and mostly misunderstood by people who don't take the time to find out more about us.)

MacSingapore — This is another independently-run website by teenage student JustinZ, who juggles his time between his regular Sunday updates and his torturous school curriculum. The news updates are mostly local in nature, but Justin keeps his ear very close to the ground, so I do in fact get some interesting tidbits from his website occasionally.

The MacOS Page — Greg Chan runs this site mostly as a Mac resource center, so for the latest software, shareware, freeware anywhere, go there. As an example, recently, before anyone else even spotted the e-One blip on their radar screens, The MacOS Page had already featured a full glossy photospread of close-up shots of the iMac rip-off found in a Japanese website, which I subsequently featured on Aug 1. Only about a week later, the rest of the websites started picking up on the story. So there you go. Singapore's closer to Japan, after all.

The iBrary — (Warning: Shameless Plug Ahead!) — The iBrary is the younger sibling of The iMac NewsPage, and was inaugurated on Aug 1, 1999. It will be to the iBook what The iMac NewsPage is to the iMac. I had more time this time round to come up with a more inventive name than say "The iBook NewsPage" (Eeww! Not to mention I didn't wish to invite another letter like the last time from Apple's lawyers about using the iMac trademark.)

Want to find out how the name "iBrary" came about? Then visit the site. Some of you who've actually done so have asked, "why no updates?" Well, truth be told, The iBrary is presently in sleep mode to save on battery life, and only comes on occasionally. But things will change in September, I think. Meanwhile, there are at least half a dozen other iBook sites you can visit for news and rumors. Or you could simply just read the FAQs in Apple's TILs and be done with it till launch date.

The Mac Page — Just debuted this week, this weekly column is presented by W D Yang, and is hosted on IT@AsiaOne. Yang has penned quite a few articles about the Mac in local publications. He's what you might consider a 'real' columnist, unlike myself :-), and as he explains in his own words, he isn't doing this column as an Apple PR exercise and would be "just as quick to slam the company when it makes a wrong move". Already, I've gathered one interesting nugget of information from his first piece: Mac users make up 13 per cent of Singapore's overall PC-using population! (I'll have to check my stats again.) I'll leave him now to make his own introductions in his inaugural column, Here's the deal...

These are of course just a few of the growing number of Mac websites in Singapore, none of which I believe do it for anything more than an unshakeable belief that the Mac, whatever its mindless critics may have you believe, is far and away the superior platform IN TOTALITY — it's a gestalt thing which dumb hit-starved critics like Dvorak and Langa will never understand.

So don't let Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt have you think otherwise. Just as Yang and his mates would proclaim to you: "Macintosh — It's not just a computer, but a lifestyle."

*Titlenote: The title of this article was inspired by a popular national song, "Stand Up For Singapore".

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