Stephen's Personal Blog

Last night was spent installing and setting the VM and to a less extent the Mac. More bookmarks added and I had to figure some more things about how it works.

The most annoying thing right now is the way the Home and End keys work. In Windows you would press one of these to jump the beginning or end of the line. It doesn’t do anything on the Mac. Probably because there is some two key combination. It seems Apple designers are in love with Chorded keyboards even though no one has one. There are even some command that require you to hold down the Apple key and click the mouse.

Some advice I saw earlier about the one button mouse. Either switch it to two button or plug in a multi-button mouse like I did. When I was trying to use the touch pad I couldn’t figure what to do without a right click.

When selecting files to copy, ctrl and shift don’t work the same. Normally, you would hold down Ctrl and click each file. Holding down Shift selects a sequential list of files. On Mac, Ctrl does nothing and Shift acts like Ctrl.

Overall, minor difference that can’t be worked around.

Some things I really like. The fixed Program bar at the top of the screen takes some getting used to. Installs are fantastically easy. Just drag a mount a drive, drag the picture into the folder you want to install to, and poof it’s over with. Remember to unmount and delete the install files.

The VM works great. Win2K Pro installed like a dream except for being Windows. It took 3 hours of reboot, patch, install, etc. No problems switching, hanging, or speed issues.

The dock on the bottom of the screen holds programs you would use most frequently. You add or remove them. When you minimize a program it goes into the dock on the right side. This is kind of like Windows taskbar, but not really. I could see how this might be limiting on a development machine. My dock right now has as many applications as I use just for programming, without, Word, Excel, Outlook, Firefox, etc.

The most fabulous feature is F9. With windows layered on top of each other it’s easy to loose something. MS tried to resolve this with the MDI interface and by organizing windows for you, but both suck in some ways. F9 takes a snapshot of each window and like zooms out and arranges the windows so you can see them all. Pick the window you want and everything pops back to it’s location and size, and you selected window is on top.

Finder is growing on me. I can see where MS got the idea to search for everything. Finder at once makes it easy to organize and to find files. It uses a 4 pane Explorer window with a search field in the top right corner like Firefox. They advertise that you should use the search field most of the time.

The program windows have another fundamental difference. No resize bars. In Windows to make window wider, just grab one side, hold down the left button, and drag. In Mac, there is no bar to grab. At the bottom right corner is a diagonal arrow. Drag that to resize the window. Windows has fat frames around everything, because of the resizeable bars. Zero pixel width is taken up on Macs but useless, seldom used resize controls. So, you can see alot more content.

The right side scroll bar is different too. There’s one bar that you can drag up and down to make the window scroll. At the bottom there are up/down arrow buttons to scroll one line per click. In Windows, these buttons are at the top and bottom of the scroll bar.

It turns out Mac has a better IM client than PC. Adium supports like 6-8 different networks. More than Trillian’s 4.

There is an Audacity that runs on Mac. So Grandma’s Oral Family History project can continue in the same application on Mac as Windows.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installed fine in the VM and built the Flickr app. It copied the files to XP and it ready to test. So, that part worked quite well, if time consuming to setup.

So, what’s running most of the time? Firefox has several tabs open. VM is running right now, but that’s won’t be common. Finder is always open.

VM or Virtual Machines have been an enticing prospect for over a year. A virtual machine is what lets you run multiple operating systems on one box. Each VM thinks it is a complete computer. Really, it’s just a really big file, like the size of a DVD, that a program like MS Virtual PC or VMWare knows how to open. The same way you use Word to open a file and edit it in a window, you can open a file and run a whole computer in a window. This is how you run Windows on a Mac.

I want to use a VM as a build machine for the Flickr app I’m making. There are some Win2K Pro discs that should let builds maintain compatibility on Win2K, WinXP, WinVista, Win2K3, Win2K8,.. I could not run VPC or VMWare on Vista. Mac, has quite an advantage here. Even though it was free for Windows and cost $60 on Mac. I’m using VMWare Fusion. The other alternatives are MS Virtual PC and Parallels.

Another free possibility is Boot Camp. This lets you reboot into Windows or Mac. It sounds like it would be the fastest option by far. But it’s the other way around, the slowest option.

VMWare has really amazed me. It asked a few questions, even asking for the product license key. I gave it 8 gig and it filled in all the prompts automatically, blazing through the setup. Right now, it’s on that interminable Windows Update/Reboot cycle. Once that’s done, I’ll take a snapshot (backup). Then whatever happens to the machine I can get back to that snapshot.

For those people who have rebuilt computers or had it done every few years you can see the advantages of a VM. It takes weeks for a computer to get back to normal after a rebuild. However, if you could backup the entire computer every so often by copying a huge file, rebuilds would take hours or days. If the computer got infected or started acting crazy, you just delete a file and go back to the previous one. This is one reason that VM’s seem like the way things will go in the future.

The whole Mac has seemed pretty snappy, but the VM also is really quick. It’s set to use 256 of 960 meg, 1 processor, on an 8 gig hard drive.

Ah, after 2 reboot and installing Internet Explorer 6 SP1 I’ve got 60 updates to go. Then a couple of .Net Frameworks,..

I like the Mac. There are many cool little things about it. As with Windows, I’m in the installation phase, which usually lasts 2-3 days tapering off after 2 wks. Installing a video player, IRC, chat, DVD ripper, CD ripper, WMV player, Firefox, making bookmarks, entering passwords, etc.

The biggest thing that catches me. Well, there are two. The first is the program bar is not on the program window. It’s fixed at the top of the screen. And the content changes depending on which program has focus. I think in the long run it’s a much better method, but it takes some habit breaking.

The second thing is installing applications. The process mostly follows these steps. Download a .dmg file. Double click it and a Window pops up. Drag the picture of the application you are installing into your Applications folder in Finder. This does the install. Close the window. Right click the dmg file and eject(sometimes) and then Move to Trash.