I remember the day I first encountered Apple's Macintosh computer in 1985. Craig and I were working with the Flamingo boys on a magazine, and it was Craig's idea to do the layout using this new thing called desktop publishing. Off we went to some strip mall on the outskirts of the city, and there was a Macintosh 128K. When I saw that first Mac I could feel the revolution coming, because it created what I ended up calling the empowerment layer -- the first real intuitive combination of GUI and hardware -- a layer that sat between the code I had learned in high school and the user I wanted to be. Macintosh became one of my passions.

Zoom ahead 20 years. I still love reading about Apple, tracking the rumour sites, and watching the Jobs keynotes. But I don't use a Mac in my day-to-day work, and I haven't purchased a new Mac in ten years.

What happened?

Most people don't remember the difficult period for Apple between those first insanely great Macs and the 1998 iMac. During that time Apple produced what can best be described as some very uninspiring stuff, like the buggy System 7 operating system and the boring beige-box Power Macintosh 7200, my last Mac. That was also the time when the Mac stopped being a great platform for games, and with the launch of Windows 95, the Mac lost a few of its unique qualities.

But I decided a few months ago that my next PC is going to be a Mac. With the introduction of Boot Camp and, more interestingly, Parallels Desktop for Mac, most reasons one might have had to stay with purely PC hardware have been banished. The Mac has gone beyond simply being flexible to become, again, very much about empowering the user to focus on what they want and need within the context of using technology.

Today's evidence of the Mac's Renaissance is the My Dream App event, a sort of collaborative creation of what look to be some amazing Mac apps. In particular, Atmosphere takes the weather forcast gizmo and turns it into a work of interactive art. Portal looks to be amazingly useful, and I'd love to try out Whistler. Looking at the shortlist of six apps, I hope they all get made.