Crazy Apple News Site

Our lab tests today have conclusively revealed the reason that Snow Leopard’s Font Book application is so small.

One of the main “features” of Apple’s nascent operating system is the reduced size of all the core OSX components.  Graphs have been bandied about showing size decreases of 80%.  Font Book, the ubiquitous “no-you-can’t-see-the-font-unless-you-click-on-it” program that allows nearly all Mac programs to slightly annoy consumers is one of those massively reduced programs, and we have disovered, in this case at any rate, how Apple did it.

The only font in Snow Leopard’s Font Book is Helvetica Neue.

“It was a tough decision,” remarked Jim Baxter, Apple’s SVP of fonts, while cleaning out his desk. “We had literally hundreds of fonts that have been clogging up OSX’s hard drives for nearly a decade, even though no one ever uses them.  I mean, when was the last time you used Bank Gothic? Or how about Bernard MT Condensed?  And those are just two choices from the “b” section!  Really, we feel that Helvetica Neue is the only choice needed in the future.  It’s light, professional, bright, and serious all at once.  Also Steve told me it was going to be what we go with.”

According to our lab tests, users will be able to install other fonts, but they are no longer included by default.  This mistakenly leads Adobe to believe that they will now be making thousands of sales of their professional fonts.  We didn’t have the heart to tell them about free font web sites.

Apple was unlikely to comment, all things considered.

The CANS labs have reached a shocking conclusion that may affect the outcome of the virtualization wars on the Mac.  

According to our research, Parallels is 28% more effective than VMWare Fusion at keeping the stench of Windows evil out of your Mac OS.  

“It’s well known that Windows exudes a certain amount of evil whenever it’s running,” said our lead testing ninja, “and you have to expect a certain amount of seepage. I mean, your Mac is sharing screen space, memory, audio channels, and everything else, so the Windows evil is soaking into your dock, your desktop picture, everything.”

Overall, we found that, after 100 hours of use, Fusion poured 250 units of evil into our test iMac, while only 180 units had spilled over from Parallels.  VirtualBox was tested, but we really didn’t care about the outcome.

“We think it has something to do with the way each system handles its desktop integration,” our ninjas report.  ”Parallels tries to contain elements in a simple ‘cohesion’, whereas Fusion seeks for real ‘unity’.”

Fortunately, there are ways that you can mitigate the effect of Windows evil when using virtualization technology.  The first, of course, is to always run Windows in “single window” mode, so that the virtualizer will wrap a protective Cocoa frame around Windows.  This also mitigates the evil spread by using a single mouse pointer between two operating systems.

“Never share cursors,” said Leo Laporte.  ”A contaminated cursor can carry corrupted drivers, dirty files, anything.  Be sure your cursor is free of Windows before use, every time.”

Other strong pollutants include Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office, and, of course, Internet Explorer.  

“Basically, running Microsoft products that have perfectly acceptable Mac counterparts degrades the moral shield inherent in OSX and allows a greater flow of evil.”

“Internet Explorer is evil,” said Douglas Adams, who came back from the dead to contribute to this article.

When asked about the effects of running Linux in virtual machines, our lab ninjas simply stared. “Linux. In a virtual machine. On a Mac.  Why?  Why would we do that?”

Apple declined to comment, but was seen buying some E-Z Cleen™ Evil Remover after seeing the test results.