I've been coding at home.. with my iMac.. only, using Windows XP 8)

While learning new OSes and new development environments or even new languages (Objective-C !) can be a great thing, my current focus is really mouse about graphics that application interfaces or multi-platform development.
I'm also so much used to Visual Studio (.NET 2005, using VC6 key mapping) and Visual Assist X.

I'm only now managing to get a decent setup and here is a list of things that are helping me:

VMWare Fusion

Fusion can actually display single application windows mixed with the OS X windows, but personally I prefer to leave it in a single window, better if full-screen.. because I can get OS X windows on top of it (basically full-screen means "maximized", though there is no "maximize" in OS X).

One problem I had, is that the cursor stays the Mac one, meaning that I get a black caret on my black background code editor windows 8)
For that I went to change cursor type on the Windows side.

Another key factor is having 3GB of RAM..

A Real Mouse !!

With one button one has to use the Control key to simulate right click. Which is fine, until you try to do Control+LMB 8)

Only today I discovered that Apple's Mighty Mouse (standard for iMac) can actually handle a right click !! Great ! ..not really: it's very easy to accidentally do a right click while trying to do a left one. A very frustrating experience, possibly worse than the unwanted side buttons clicks, the scroll ball/nipple getting stuck and sometimes the inability to click at all. What a crappy mouse !

My solution was to plug a regular 2 buttons + Scroll Wheel mouse.. much better now.

Key and mouse mappings

I set the middle mouse button (clicking on Scroll Wheel) to show "All Windows" (see Expose' video). The "All Windows" view is actually very useful.

Then I swapped Control and Alt (Option on Mac), because on the iMac keyboard Alt takes the place of Control which is too much an important key to try attempt relearn it's position (when I'm not at work !)

...And ?

My smallish "computer desk" is still lacking. Must get rid of it, but trashing old furniture and housing large furniture does require a certain will power if you live in Tokyo 8)

I wish I had two smaller monitors rather than a large 24 inches one. In the office, I like how I can maximize Visual Studio in the left monitor while doing something else in the right monitor.

Still, I'm much happier now. I can use the same computer using applications from both OS X and Windows.
Interoperability is great. Copy and paste, drag and drop works both ways.
Keyboard and mouse are just too important, and while I can tolerate XP not recognizing the Japanese layout (could overwrite a DLL for that, but I prefer the English keyboard layout for code anyway), I definitely needed to remap the Control key and to get a decent mouse.

I'm writing this with an editor on the Mac while the Windows screen saver runs in the background. Putting an x86 processor on the Mac is the best thing Apple could have done for the machine at least for those of us that can't get into serious relationships (with operative systems 8)

woooo !!

So, I got a new notebook... Acer Aspire 5580. A nice piece of hardware with Core 2 Duo, GeForce 7300 and 2GB of RAM. Not too bad, considering that I need to use M$ Office :)
So HW is nice, but I could not find ANY notebook that I could buy with Windows XP. I just had to get one with Vista and this already scared me at the beginning. Every shop was showing me how good is Vista, that it can play DVD and also run videoconferencing AT THE SAME TIME!!! :)
Anyway... I am disappointed. Vista gives me nothing that XP was not giving me, but gives me headache.. HW is good enough but the system (bare and clean!) is constantly messing with HDD even being idle and with 2GB of RAM. IE7 crashed on me a few times... so replaced it with Firefox.  read more »

Steve Jobs goes with his Safari Browser to Windows. First Bill G. went with his IE5 to Mac (nota bene better port than original Windows version) and now Apple heads the other direction.
I really do not understand it clearly as Safari is not the best browser out there. It has many issues, it cannot render pages well and even on OS X it is better to use Firefox.
The only reason for me is to validate the WebKit on the wider amount of platforms before integration of iPhone. Seems that iPhone must be somehow behind it and as iTunes were just a great choice for iPod user on Windows (who would use iTunes on Windows if not forced?!?!) then probably all this Safari thing is going to be some jump platform for iPhone integration on different systems.
Anyway... I do not really feel like going to be lab rat for Apple's Safari. Even on OS X I will stick to Firefox :)

... However Usually It Does.

I just got inspired by comment of Davide San that Mathematica and MatLab are much superior to any open source or free tools. Recently more and more I get this feeling for all kinds of open source tools. It usually applies to big projects. The bigger project the more sure that it will really suck compared to paid counter part. I do not really say that the tools should be paid only because then they will be good. I personally use a lot of open source or free products and I am very happy with them. However when it comes to corporate level, it is harder and harder to accept compromises caused by open source.

Let's see for a while in different ranges of applications:

Bitmap graphics:

Gimp sucks compared to Photoshop. Gimp color management is one big hell. Try to be a photographer and do things without decent color management. Good luck...

Vector graphics:

Adobe Illustrator or even CorelDRAW are superior to anything open source. Inkscape is not bad. But it's going nowhere. Xara has been recently released as open source, but I have not seen it yet and I am not sure what stage it is. I believe Xara lost many years ago anyway.

Office:  read more »

Microsoft with Visual Studio 2005 and their .Net 3.0 went together with their Side-By-Side assemblies (WinSxS) which should make life of deploying applications to different Windows system easier. So far I have been only having a big problem with it, because no single program compiled with VS2005 can be used on a system where VS2005 has not been installed. Of course, one can somehow download SxS redistributable binaries, but how to find them on MSDN website is a one big mystery. Another thing is that applications do not complain what is wrong, they just do not start at all. Or sometimes they say "A program could not be started". Great!  read more »

Recently I was fighting with computers a lot, crash of my notebook at work, huge problems with computer at home. Then a new machine at work and multiple troubles with Linux on it. So finally in my desperation I decided to give MacOSX a try. Since I am going to buy a new notebook and I was already thinking MacBook (for it's build quality) and that it can run WinXP.
Anyway, I decided first to try MacOSX on PC since I was reading many people tried. However, I was still very skeptical about it, since my thinking was that there is not really enough apps for mac.  read more »

For a few days I have been running Linux on my machine at work. More because my laptop is gone and I was forced to use different computer. Anyway, Linux is not the way to go, but I wanted to talk about something else. Just because I do not like Linux and this machine can be reinstalled I was thinking about giving Vista a try. Finally sooner or later we all will have to switch to Vista. Because I do not have license to do it I was going to look at some websites to see how can I pirate it so I could test it. Finally I understood that you can try Vista for 30 days and then you need to activate it or it's features will be fading away. So I will go this way, but there is more to that...  read more »