Apple Sex Change

As a lot of people surely do, I have quite a few RSS feeds pouring into my Mac everyday. One of my top read feeds is the Apple Hot News feeds. Most of the time it gives news items that I really don't care about or don't affect me with my now outdated PowerPC-based Mac. Everynow and then however I like to follow the link and read a bit more on the news items - sometimes because I really am interested in their latest 'tip of the week', and other times because I'm bored.

Today I clicked on it because their use of language intrigued me. The news feed came in as:

Mac OS X Tip of the Week: One-Way Video Chat
Your iChat buddy doesn’t have a video camera connected to her Mac? You can still conduct a one-way video chat with her — you won’t be able to see her, but she’ll be able to see and hear you (and that’s the important thing, right?) [Jun 14, 2006]

The thing that got my attention was that they constantly referred to 'she' when talking about a generic iChat buddy. I clicked the link to read some more and was confronted with this:

If your buddy doesn’t have a camera connected, but you do, you can still have a one-way video chat. That way, your buddy gets to see and hear you on his end. The only downside — you don’t get to see him.

Notice they've moved over to 'he' now? Interesting....

Anyway - regardless of Apple not knowing which gender they want to talk about I would higly recommend adding the Hot News feed to your RSS reader. In fact - another good tip for Tiger users is to set up the screensaver that displays RSS feeds. Absolutely genius idea!