Mike Propst

I think the first time I can recall using an Apple computer was, like a lot of people my age, playing Oregon Trail on the Apple II. The graphics were crap compared to our Commodore, but who doesn’t love Oregon Trail? I’m not sure what it taught, other than “I’m glad I’m alive now and playing on a computer instead of actually caulking my wagon and fording this river with my dysentery-riddled oxen in tow.”

In middle school, as one of the first generations to be taught from the ground up on computer, we learned word processing and spreadsheets using ClarisWorks or AppleWorks or whatever it was called at the time. It was my first time using a mouse, or drawing on the computer. That sticks out huge in my mind, the idea that you could do something other than clicky-clack.

In high school, I went to a vocational school and started learning design apps. The Macs there were powerful: There were Quadras with their math coprocessors (which were essential to education since they were required for Kai’s Power Tools KPT Fractal Explorer). There were some of the very first PowerPCs, which had enough horsepower to render full-length video despite being regular-sized desktop computers. We even had Apple QuickTake cameras, which seemed pretty awesome at the time.

I now know that my high school years, when I learned how to use Photoshop, QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and PageMaker, were some of the worst for Apple, and that graphic designers were some of the very few people keeping them afloat due to their undying loyalty even in the face of WIndows machines that could now do things you used to need a Mac for.

When I graduated high school, I used some scholarship money to get my first Mac, which happened to be Steve Jobs’s first creation after coming back — the bondi blue iMac. The first truly affordable Mac was a strange little computer. Only the RAM was accessible and upgradeable, the keyboard and crappy hockey-puck mouse were all USB (which no one used for anything), and there wasn’t even a floppy drive. At the time, I didn’t really think “this is revolutionary,” I thought “this is bizarre.” We started to get its big brother, the G3 desktop, in my school.

I got a job at the school fixing Macs, and that’s when I really learned to love them and when I started learning about the “cult of Mac.” My coworker and friend was a hardcore zealot who had enough collectibles to literally start a museum (including a Pippin, if I’m not mistaken, and a couple Newtons). It was far easier to fix software issues than with Windows, and most other things could be resolved with a restart or — last ditch — zapping the PRAM. 

The Bondi iMac lasted me for quite a while, but I went through a dark period of both working and living with only Windows for a while. That lasted until Weblogs, Inc.’s acquisition by AOL, when the large company would actually furnish Macs for its designers (and these days, developers — everyone wants them unless their job primarily involves Excel).

It goes on, of course, with phones, and the first cellphone, let alone smartphone, that I actually enjoyed using. I’m probably going to replace my 3GS with a 4S tomorrow, and in a couple weeks I’ll be bringing my Macbook Pro back onstage with me to power my band’s live show.

What Steve Jobs did, the first time around and the second, was not to invent anything radically new. What he did was take our vision of what things were supposed to be (why can’t a computer be easy? why can’t an mp3 player actually play a listenable amount of music? why do I hate my phone?) and step beyond that to the point where we loved using those things.

As a designer, you can learn a lot from the Apple way of things, which really is the Jobs way of things. Details are of utmost importance, because that is where people live their day-to-day lives: in the details. But those details also have to add up to a holistic experience that should never, ever, be compromised for any reason. When you stop compromising, you can go beyond “this works well” to “I like using this.” 

Hopefully Apple doesn’t forget that, and hopefully none of the rest of us in the business of making things forget it either. 

Recently I learned a truth that I long suspected: The Korg Nano series of USB controllers are crap. Mostly, anyway. I used all three for a few shows, and occasionally plugged them in to do tracking work (most DAWs that aren’t called Ableton are notoriously bad with controller mapping though), all in all pretty light use. But the only one still chugging is the nanoKontrol. The nanoKey was obviously junk from the start: the keys aren’t really keys, they’re just buttons arranged like a 2-octave keyboard, and they fall off at the first bump. The nanoPad was the most disappointing though. I never really got the X-Y control to map right, which is a real shame because it’s a Kaoss Pad style control for any parameters and frankly that’s an awesome idea. And a couple weeks ago when I started mapping for live shows in Apple MainStage, I realized that the triggers were off in some way, and hitting one pad triggered at least three others. Lame, because the construction seemed more solid and the action of the pads is great. Sloppy triggers on the pad and broken “keys” on the keyboard renders the whole shebang pretty much pointless.

So I picked up this little Akai guy for next to nothing (just under what two of the Nanos would cost you) and it really does the trick when I put it alongside the only working nano. The nanoKontrol covers track volume, mute, playback/loop triggering, and effects sends. The Akai controls synths and drums, with the knobs running a few parameters like filter cutoff, envelope controls, delay speed, and that sort of thing. It’s nice to not have to put a full size keyboard on my stand, and keys are actually really nice — think small Casio for the size and action. The knobs are very short, making the thing low-profile overall but they’re sort of hard to grip until you get used to it. The action on the pads is nice. They require a little harder hit than the nanoPad did, but they’re reliable and consistent, plus they light up when you hit them… fancy. As a bonus, the MPK Mini has an arpeggiator on it with quite a few options, and though I haven’t figured out how to get it to sync with the project tempo, it has a tap that works well and it’s a really nice little trick for throwing some of that Front 242 or Depeche Mode kind of sound in there (ha). There’s an auto map software that comes with it, but since I’ve only used it with MainStage, I haven’t needed it.

Here’s the Mini sitting with the rest. It’s small enough I can set it off to the side using the top tier of the 3-tiered stand. I created a little representation of it in MainStage and it’s now one of the cornerstones of the Sharks live set. If you’re looking for something in this vein, you could really do worse, and it would even suffice as a decent studio desktop controller as well if you don’t need a full set of keys.