Switching from the Mac to the PC – Why and How

As I recently mentioned in another post, I’ve just switched back to Windows as my primary operating system after years of using Mac OSX. The reason for this wasn’t because I chose it, but because my wonderful Macbook died after years of hard use and poor care. I loved it dearly, and I must say that it was the best machine I ever bought. I often took it with me when I left the house and I used it pretty much as my primary machine for years. At the same time, I also had this PC (the one I’m writing from) running a dual boot Hackintosh/Vista configuration. I only used Vista for gaming and the occasional Windows program, so most of my time was spent on the Hackintosh setup running OSX. I managed to mess this up recently and ended up having to rebuild the system. Rather than set it back up the way it was, I decided to give Windows 7 a try.

At first, I found switching quite painful, but after having several days to get used to it, I have to acknowledge that Microsoft has finally produced a decent OS again. I find the taskbar a huge improvement and the new window docking system is fantastic, especially coupled with use of the hotkeys. It goes a long way in making up for historical lacks in productivity features on Windows, and it makes switching applications, bringing them up side by side, maximizing and minimizing them all very intuitive and effective.

Added to that is the fact that the new look of Windows 7 with aero is quite beautiful in its own way, though I wouldn’t say it goes so far as to come close to OSX. Nevertheless, the themes feature is nice, as is the ability to dock items to the taskbar and control the colors/tints of the translucent areas of the aero interface.

However, there are certain features and programs which I still find lacking. One of these is stacks in OSX. Fortunately, there is something which comes close to dealing with this. Alastria Software has produced something called 7stacks which operates in much the same way as stacks. You essentially just create a shortcut with the software on your desktop, and then pin that shortcut onto your taskbar. What you get as a result which operates and looks very similar to the stacks you would get as part of OSX. At the moment, the software is free. It is in beta, however, and most of the other software on their site seems to involve charges so I wouldn’t be surprised if they went to a commercial system in the future.

Another feature I really missed from OSX was the popular free app, Quicksilver. While it was possible to get by without it by using Spotlight, it never worked as well and as intuitively as Quicksilver did, and didn’t have all of the extra plugins. The closest thing I’ve found to Quicksilver for Windows is an app called Launchy. It works in basically the same way as Quicksilver, and you can customize your hotkeys. Launchy also supports plugins and different skins, making it both a useful and beautiful app to use. It’s definitely a must have.

For the Spaces/Esposé experience, there are a few choices. Switcher and iEx are free apps which mimic these sorts of features, but there are also some commercial packages such as AnthaBounce (formerly Winplosion) which aren’t horribly expensive. Personally, I’d go with Switcher if you need this sort of functionality. You can change the behavior and style of windows, set different hotkeys or screen areas for activation, and it really does work very well.

For more must-have Windows apps to make your life more bearable, you should check out my post on My Top 25 Must-Have Free Windows Apps. I’ve written it from the standpoint of having just switched, so it should be useful for you. Other than that, stay tuned for more tips as they come to me.

5 Google Wave Invites – Round 2

I’m giving away 5 Google Wave preview invites. In order to enter, just leave a comment after this post. I will select winners from 5 random comment authors and the winners will have an invite sent from me to the email address provided in their comment.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Wave is, it is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” which integrates social networking, email, wikis, and instant messaging. I’ve used it for a little bit, and although there is a bit of a learning curve involved, it has been quite an enjoyable experience. Third party clients are popping up, most notably Waveboard for the Mac. While I don’t think that Waves are going to replace email altogether, it is definitely worth taking a look.

I’ll let comments collect until 1600 (GMT) on November 30th, 2009 at which point I will begin randomly picking the winners. Good luck!

***EDIT***

Well, since only 2 people commented, they’ll both get invites. Congratulations to Deb and Eduardo. Your invites are on their way.

5 Google Wave Invites

I’m giving away 5 Google Wave preview invites. In order to enter, just leave a comment after this post. I will select winners from 5 random comment authors and the winners will have an invite sent from me to the email address provided in their comment.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Wave is, it is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” which integrates social networking, email, wikis, and instant messaging. I’ve used it for a little bit, and although there is a bit of a learning curve involved, it has been quite an enjoyable experience. Third party clients are popping up, most notably Waveboard for the Mac. While I don’t think that Waves are going to replace email altogether, it is definitely worth taking a look.

***EDIT***

I’ll let comments collect for 24 more hours, so at 1600 (GMT) on November 18th, 2009 I will begin the randomly picked winner selection process. Good luck!

***EDIT***

Contest is finished! The lucky winners are listed below.

eman
Kurt
Loopy
Shubh
Silv

Congratulations, I’ll send your invites off right away. Remember, you won’t get them immediately, as Google’s invite process seems to take a while. To quote directly from the invite wave, “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”

Also, stay tuned for more invitation giveaway contests. We should be having another one within a few days.

3 reasons to use Firefox instead of Safari

When I first got a Mac, I was all for using Safari. I liked its integration with Keychain, the way it looked and the way it operated. Those things haven’t really changed, and in fact Safari has been getting better and better the longer I’ve used a Mac. I use 1Password now to manage my identities, passwords, forms, etc. and once I switched back to Firefox for a while, I started to notice that I had begun to use it differently than I had in the past because of some of the powerful tools available. That being said, Safari isn’t so far behind. There are really only a few reasons why I continue to use Firefox instead of Safari and I thought I’d share them with you.

1. The Awesome Bar

Mozilla likes to call the location/address bar the “Awesome Bar” and I’m not really going to argue with them, because I use it constantly and I do think it’s pretty awesome. When I do happen to find myself in another browser, I tend to try to use the address bar in the same way and inevitably end up annoyed. This is generally the first feature I miss. Basically, in Firefox the bar uses your browser history, sites you may have bookmarked with tags, etc. to autocomplete addresses. This means that I can often find things incredibly quickly just by typing in a series of very vague words into the bar. For example, when I’m sweating away at my keyboard and am contemplating taking action against the heat and want to remember that site I read about homebrew air conditioning, instead of looking it up on google or searching through my bookmarks, I just type in “homebrew ac” to my Awesome Bar and hit enter, and it brings up the site I want. On a similar note, it even seems to find things that aren’t in my history, I assume by using Google. I use this often when I know something’s not going to be hard to find, for example if I wanted to look for Robin Hobb’s Wikipedia entry, I don’t have to type it out or search for it on Wikipedia. I can just type “wiki Robin Hobb” into the Awesome Bar and Firefox brings me there.

2. Add-ons

With Safari, I just don’t have this option. There isn’t a huge group of people doing awesome things to add to the functionality of Safari, but with Firefox, that is all very easily accessed. Sometimes I just like to head over to the Add-ons page and see what is new or popular to try them out, but right now I’ve got around 10 installed. Most of them are tools for web development or productivity tools, but I’ve also got a couple in there for social networking/bookmarking as well.

3. Ubiquity

Technically, Ubiquity should be considered a subset of the Add-ons section, but it is so important to the way I choose to do things that I thought it made sense to have its own description. Ubiquity is something like Quicksilver for the Mac. If you’ve ever used it, you’ll start to get an idea of what I’m talking about here. Essentially, Ubiquity is a hotkey activated tool which performs actions within the browser in a quicker, more effective way. It’s hard to describe in exact terms what Ubiquity does, because it could potentially do anything with in the browser, given the chance. You can write your own commands and UI for it, but generally the idea is the same. It pops up quick activated, and awaits your input. You can use it do update statuses on social sites, translate chunks of pages, look up maps for selected addresses, look up wikipedia entries, do searches, perform mathematical calculations, get reviews, perform browser tab actions, format text, interact with webmail and calendars, check weather, and lots of other things. It is quick, uses fairly plain intuitive language, and is under active development and continues to improve. If there is one Firefox Add-on you should install, it is this one.

My Top 10 Mac RSS reader picks

I recently decided to take a look at the RSS aggregator/reader market for the Mac and see if I could come up with a better reader than the one I’ve been using for the past couple of years. I started reading some things, downloaded a bunch of them, and started to sort through them one at a time. This post sort of details how I did that and what my results were.

First of all, I narrowed down my choices to a list of 10 RSS readers. I did this mainly be reading reviews and asking around about preferences people had. I tried to get a sense of them and what sort of experience they offered, so I wrote very abbreviated ’strength blurb’ for each of them. This is what I came up with as a starting point, in no particular order:

	1.Vienna Very intuitive interface, functional and simple RSS viewing.
	2.NewsFire Pretty interface, good search functions, great with just a keyboard.
	3.Shrook Intuitive customizable interface with a wide view, learning folders, synchronization.
	4.NetNewsWire Clippings, good search, good flags and folders, smart lists.
	5.RSSOwl Open Source, cross platform, highly customizable.
	6.Attensa Convenient publishing, email and tag buttons, synchronization with del.icio.us tags.
	7.PixelNews Looks nice, creates a sort of continuous news stream.
	8.Times Newspaper design, multiple pages, easy on the eyes, shelf for storing articles.
	9.Cyndicate Great tagging, label and visual customization support.
	10.NewsLife News bin for saving articles for later, very simple and easy to understand.

Ok, so at this point I already had some idea of which RSS readers weren’t going to work for me, but I wanted to pin down features I wanted and didn’t really need. I should also mention at this point that my original reader of choice was Vienna and that at this point it was still in with a chance of winning, maybe because the interface was very familiar to me and works perfectly well. I made this list:

Things which are not important to me:

1. Growl notification – I don’t want growl notifications distracting me from something else I’m doing. If I want to read my news feeds, I’ll read my news feeds when I get to it, not when Growl annoys me enough. I’ve made the mistake in the past of enabling growl notifications for too many things and ended up really hating it and ignoring Growl altogether, which doesn’t really make it a useful tool.
2. Cross platform support – I usually read my RSS feeds on my Macbook. Since I take my Macbook with me when I go away, I don’t really need an RSS reader that works on other platforms at the moment. There may be a point in the future (if I get a netbook or something and run Linux) where I may want cross platform support but at the moment it really doesn’t matter to me.

Things which are important to me:

1. Cost – I don’t have a lot of money to spend on something like this, and I’d prefer a free product.
2. Blogging/social network support – I’d like to be able to easily blog on topics I find in my reader or post them to social bookmarking sites, social networks, or microblogging services.
3. Email forwarding support – I’d prefer to use an RSS reader which allows me to easily forward article contents or links to friends or family quickly so I can’t have to do it manually.
4. Synchronization – This isn’t a huge deal to me at the moment, but if I ever decide to get another home computer, chances are it will be an iMac and I’ll want to be able to sync my newsreader between my home machine and the Macbook I have with me when I’m out and about.
5. Keyboard Navigation – I hate clicking on things unless I have to, and I’d always rather have an RSS reader which I can navigate easily with the keyboard, whether this be through the arrow keys and spacebar or hotkeys.

At this point, I made a spreadsheet in Google Docs so that I could easily keep track of which reader had which features. I’ll stick it below here with Google Elements so you can see:

As you can see, PixelNews was really not what I was looking for here and the two which really seemed to shine were Shrook and NetNewsWire, followed by Vienna, NewsFire and Attensa which were only missing out on sufficient synchronization features which I wouldn’t be using right now anyway. I really enjoyed Shrook’s interface but I did see a potential problem in that it is obviously best viewed on a quite wide screen and may not be great when I don’t have another monitor and am just walking around with my little Macbook. I tested it out and I actually found my Macbook screen quite capable of pulling it off and I think I’ll be giving Shrook a chance. I’ll probably still use Vienna here and there, though – until I actually have something to sync.

Just a note before I go – in terms of the best keyboard navigation, I’d say that NewsFire was pretty great. On the other hand, in terms of the best overall design and idea, the best choice is Times. If I had money to blow and didn’t mind clicking occasionally, Times would be my choice hands down. It looks fantastic, is incredibly easy on the eyes, has good social network/bookmarking features and has a quite cool ’shelf’ to store articles for later. Also according to the site, “Times shows you the entire story regardless of source” which “should work with most (but not all) major news sites.” Check out the demo if you get a chance.