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My bride and I are planning to attend this weekend’s Fabulous Food Show at the IX Center this weekend.

If you want to purchase your tickets early, save time and money, you must purchase them online.

This is not a bad idea; in fact, it’s a great idea, as it saves time, printing costs and money (for the publisher), and it saves the consumer the hassle of standing in lines, risking the “Sold Out” sign being slammed down in front of them just as they arrive at the ticket booth, and just the overall experience of wasting a lot of what could otherwise be productive time.

True, it shifts the burden of the tickets squarely on the consumer, but if you went out and physically purchased the tickets, you’d still have that burden.

Anyway, in my purchasing process, I got to this point, where you are instructed to use the “Print” command in your browser to print the tickets. I have blurred the barcoding and blacked out sensitive information:

All went fine, save for one problem: I’m using a Mac. What you see in the screenshot above is exactly what printed: one ticket layered underneath the other, so only one ticket printed.

I called the help line. They asked me what the issue was and I told her.

“You using a Mac?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah, that’s a problem. I’ll have to send you PDFs. Do you have Acrobat?”

“Yes, I do. What do you mean that it’s a problem?”

“Well, our guys haven’t fixed that one yet. They’re supposed to fix it so we don’t get so many calls for resends.”

“Well, I can tell you how to fix it real fast,” I replied, “just develop for the Mac first, then tweak it in Windows. You’ll cut half of your development time and it’ll work for everyone — including saving you a lot of time working the support desk.”

“Yeah. OK. Is this your email address?” she asked, totally ignoring my direction…

And it’s true: develop first for Mac, then tweak your work in Windows. It saves truckloads of time. Windows developers just don’t see the whole picture — or they just don’t want to.

I’m not banging on Windows developers here — far from it; there are a lot of good Windows-based Web developers out there. I used Windows for years. I originally developed in Windows, and when I learned that there was another world out there, I began to learn how to program for that alternative. Today, I live in that alternative; I know how the other half lives.

I also know how to work smarter, and make that work for a greater number of people.