The Software Problem.

A few posts ago I stated my intention to purchase a MacBook air. The good news is that the first facets of "The Plan" are months away from being implemented hence the plan is still in flux. The MacBook is probably the nicest single piece of hardware currently available, however MacOS X is  not suitable for amateur astronomy in my opinion. Several Apple fanboi's heads just exploded, but hear me out. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

The problem is that the primary purpose of my next laptop will be the control of the telescope and focuser for acquisition of images. While there are plenty of applications that work with OSX which will do data acquisition there are serious gaps in the hardware support. The drivers for these objects simply do not exist for OSX.

Now the gap between OSX and Windows is nothing compared to the gap between OSX and Linux. People simply do not make decent acquisition programs for Linux. Now the thing about the hammer and nail is that since OSX is a UNIX  you might just say, "Aaron your a competent programmer, why don't you just write the drivers." To which my answer would be "F$#@ YOU!" because writing drivers for hardware you don't manufacture yourself is about the most arduous task one can set oneself.

The root of the problem is the fact that this hobby is small and populated mainly by a generation of people for whom modern digital technology didn't exist. The result is that most of them are windows users as a result of some anti-competitive shenanigans in the 90's.  Hence everyone who makes hardware to interface instruments to computers makes drivers for windows. I would argue that any off the shelf components are best plugged into a windows computer, since Murphy's Law goes double for Astronomy.

The solution of course is to make interfaces to mobile devices, tablets and the like for controlling instruments at the observing site, Bluetooth is more than capable of wirelessly controlling a telescope. However unless wireless USB matures and becomes a standard we would be stuck with Wi-Fi for carying image data. This is a problem I am interested in working on since wires and darkness tend to be a witches brew for ruining expensive equipment. Any thoughts readers?