My mock up should be self explanatory, when an app has multiple documents open it’s position in the dock should open out and list the documents, click on the titles to switch between them. Too avoid over-use it should only be apps which would benefit which get support for this doodad.

Whatdya think Steve?

Ha, I’ve just noticed, my mock up thinks pages documents have psd extensions.  Silly mock up.

Here are 5, possibly obscure tips for people switching from windows to mac (I intended to do this months ago but forgot)

1. When you drag a folder over another folder of the same name windows will essentially merge the folders, anything inside the destination folder which doesn’t match a file from the source folder will be kept as is. You’ve come to expect this as normal behaviour, it would not make sense to do it any other way. Well then, you better pay close attention when using mac os x’s finder. When you move/copy a folder on top of a folder of the same name finder will obliterate the destination and all its contents first. To put it another way, after the action is complete the destination folder will be exactly the same as the source folder. Still don’t understand? Just be careful thats all I can say. If you need to merge a folder the unix commands will do it as windows does, so open a terminal and poop “cp -rf source_folder/ destination_folder/”. When I asked Jobs why finder acted this way he belched and blew the burp smell into my face.
2. There’s no registry database on the mac. Thank fuck for that. Instead there is ~/Library (”~” is a shortcut/alias for your own user area). This folders windows equivalent is rather like a combination of the registry database and the folder c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data. Most applications will store their settings in a file similar to ~/Library/Preferences/com.supersoftware.teaspoon.plist The actual filename at the end there is rather like a website address only backwards. You open the plist file in an app called Property List Editor. Data files such as your address book go into ~/Library/Application Support and usually a folder named after the Application. Handy tip, if an application screws up somehow, you can usually get it back to year zero by deleting it’s plist file and its folder inside Application Support.
3. Most mac applications are downloaded in .dmg files. These are essentially the same as an .iso file, or a cd image. Double clicking a .dmg will mount it and it will appear as a new drive, in there, the application will be the file with a cute icon. You don’t have to install mac applications, you can even run the app where ever it is. And if you like the app and want to keep it, drag it into /Applications. Or anywhere on your HD, it doesn’t actually matter. When you run the app for the first time it will create all the preference files in ~/Library that it needs to without you knowing about the fact. If you no longer want the app, just delete it. There is no uninstall/Add Remove Programs. You will still have some gumph in ~/Library but usually we’re only talking a couple of K. That Application you’ve been running is actually a bundle, or in other words a folder. The equivalent to the .exe is actually inside it, right click on an application and choose Show Package Contents and you’ll soon get the idea.
4. Windows has quite a nice method of managing services, all listed in one place where you can stop and start them at will. On the mac services can get quite confusing. The main place where things like web servers are launched is /System/Library/StartupItems/ in there you will find such gems as apache. How it works is thusly, when the mac boots it goes through every folder inside here and runs any script it finds with the same name as the folder. To control a service find its folder inside /System/Library/StartupItems and run the script with a switch, for instance in Apache’s folder poop “./Apache start” or stop or restart. Alternatively you can use the SystemStarter utility by pooping “SystemStarter start Apache”. Oh yeah, I still haven’t a clue how these services determine whether they should start on bootup or be disabled.
5. Windows users tend to think of the window as the app and vise versa, on the mac an Application is conceptually something slightly different. An app just is, or at a push, the entry point of an App or even its very existence is the menu bar right at the top of the screen. What this means is that closing the very last window an application has open doesn’t mean that it is no longer running. You’ve probably just closed the document. So there :-p You can probably work the rest out yourself. But, don’t go mad feeling the urge to exit every single running app you haven’t a document open in. Most when sitting around won’t have an impact on your overall system performance, and hey, they’ll already be waiting for you next time you do need them.

Windows Starter 2007 – Vista without Aero, probably meant for developing nations.

Windows Vista Home Basic – Basic Windows Vista for your single PC fam, doesn’t sound like much going on here. Analagous to XP Home.

Windows Vista Home Basic N – European version of the same, but without Media Player (because of antitrust rulings against MS in the EU).

Windows Vista Home Premium – This is the one we’re all probably gonna own. It’s got Media Center functionality, Cable Card support, the whole home-media shebang.

Windows Vista Business – Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista.

Windows Vista Business N – Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista, but Euro.

Windows Vista Enterprise – Business version of Vista with numerous enterprise features, like Virtual PC, volume encryption, etc.

Windows Vista Ultimate – Love that name. This one does all of the above (and more); what else do you need to know? It’s ultimate Windows..

What a confusing mess. What I want to know is, which is the one for developers? Which is the one you have to get if you need a IIS server for asp.net testing? Anyone? Or maybe they will do the right thing and make the web server functionality free like with every single other OS on the planet.

I was bored so I installed a copy of vista build 5270 (yeah? what? I don’t care) and I cannot say that it was a pleasant experience. I must be getting old, I used to love trying out beta OSs but now it’s just hell of earth. Never again. Vista experience summed up in bullets.

• OK, started with the install. You still need a stupid RAID/SATA floppy to provide the installer with a driver, there’s a whole DVD half empty, why the hell can’t they provide all the SATA drivers? There can’t be that many? Ubuntu manages it. It’s a nuisance because I don’t keep my floppy drive wired up inside… I mean, whats the point these days? So I have to connect it all up just to install windows.
• Wasn’t this release supposed to have a super fast installer using some new fang-led technique? Well, it took freaking hours. It was largly unattended though, so I guess that’s a plus?
• It took me straight into the super cool graphic mode with transparent everything. However, I was a tad disappointed with speed. Some things were nice and fluid, windows appear on the screen in quite a tasty manor, they zoom towards you a teensy weensy bit all whilst fading. It’s effective. But, the usual test of dragging windows around the screen is a bit on the jerky side. I have a 6600GT with 128MB so I figured it would be able to do quite a decent job. This is in 1600×1200, which shouldn’t be too tricky in this day and age. I hope nVidia have still a lot of optimising to do.
• I occasionally saw corruption on the screen. Black lines appearing over the top of firefox’s toolbar was a common one.
• There’s a severe shortage of compatible drivers. And even vista drivers seem to refuse to install. I couldn’t get the beta of creative’s sound blaster driver to install at all. I had to use the KX Project driver, which despite working kept throwing errors.
• Almost all the software I use on a regular basis had issues. Nero wouldn’t install at all. Video apps have a huge problem with the graphic system, you can set apps up to trigger the new graphic system to turn off when they run, but even then the only video app which worked properly was VLC. Others were stuck with software rendering… blocky with lots of sheering. And windvd, if you enabled hardware acceleration would crash and you couldn’t load it again. Nice.
• WinDVD was unable to provide Media Player with DVD functionality. I then noticed that it was supposed to be able to play DVD’s straight off this time, albeit with a free software update from microsoft. But, windows update told me there were no more updates to install. So I was left scratching my head.
• It moans at you even more than XP! It keep popping up messages for every teensy little nuisense thing. Things like No virus checker (even though it has that defender thing built in). Oh and it kept suggesting that there was a problem with my hardware! The cheek! It got me to do a long drawn out memory test the next boot, and despite my machine passing it with flying colours it kept nagging me to do it again. Jerk.
• This might be a me thing rather than a Vista issue, but I found the sheer number of changes they’ve made to it to be quite daunting, even for a person who’s used PC’s as long as I have. Especially to explorer (the folders and files viewer I mean) and control panel, and display properties and all that gubbins. A lot of the changes seem a tad unnecessary too. And sometimes the organisation is untidy, especially control panel where it feels as if microsoft aren’t quite sure where to put things. They have to make a great deal of use of the sidebar panel to give shortcuts to other options because they don’t know where to categorise them.

So in the end vista stayed on my machine for less than a day because it keep making me cry. If this is the sign of things to come, all these driver and software incompatibilities it will probably be at least a year after vista’s release before I’d have a smooth ride with it.

Any no more being a guinea pig.

Look at this with your eyes. It’s funny, when I used to play WoW (properly, not the recent short lived mac revival) I kept my sexuality to myself for several reasons, those being it’s no-ones business, it’s supposed to be a fantasy game & the majority of players are children who, as we know are probably the most homophobic demographic of all. Despite this I would now and again say the odd risque thing within the guild, nothing too offensive and mostly just stuff that you would have to know to find humorous. Thing is, the guild owner was female and bizarrely despite being the owner, none of the other members were female. So one day, whilst I was in a comical mood and was coming out with stupid double-entandre’s verging on camp she pm’d me with “Are you gay?”. She’s a nurse so her gaydar is quite high andway, so I came clean, and suddenly despite barely speaking to the guild owner since starting the game I was all buddy buddy with them from then on. So take that blizzard.

Yeah that was a great argument.

I’m sure I’ll have won them over.

I’m hugely hugely pissed with my brother, he told a friend of his whose dad is having PC trouble that i’d take a look at it for him. Without asking me first. My bro phoned a week ago to tell me and I said straight out that I wouldn’t do it, that mending ppl’s comps is the most hideously painfully boring irritating thing in the whole world and besides I barely know his dad… infering don’t you know who I am, you’re my brother for pete’s sake you should know I have shyness issues god damn you bastard.
So yeah, you’d think after all that he’d get back to him and say I couldn’t do the favour. Then this morning who turns up at the door…. yeah you guessed it. I couldn’t say no when confronted so now i’m stuck with it. Some really freaky things were wrong with his windows install too, you couldn’t access anything that relied on the RPC Server, such as disk management. And ‘net start rpcss’ resulted in a not a valid win32 app error. Weird huh? Windows file protection restore scanner doo-dar command line wotsit came up blank so i figured all you could do was re-install. Fun.

Ppl who aren’t technically minded should be forced into buying macs. For the sake of everyone else. And I’m seriously buying that T-Shirt that says ‘no I will not fix your pc’.

I feel pretty confident that the mac will have its time soon. Reason I say this is because, as a lot of people are saying now, the pc is becoming less and less of an attractive gaming platform, what with the 360 now being released, and the pc game designers have done their level best to ensure that PC owners are disenfranchised by with their ensessent pursuit of the newest and bruitelist hardware, producing games that only run properly on the latest 400 dollar graphics hardware. Within months of upgrading a PC it’s deemed obsolete and Quake 4533 runs at less than 10 frames per second. Hardly worth-while is it?

And as everybody knows, the only reason people buy PC’s is the opportunity of playing games as a relief to being driven to insane boredom by office.

So as more and more people give up on PC’s because of having to spend 400 dollars every 6 months, and developers giving up because of the rampant piracy, the more people will think about getting a Mac with an xbox as a side dish. After all, even PC owners acknowledge that macs are better at everything except games.

Splishy sploshy…

It only got more depressing because today I decided to put my geforce 6600gt back in so that I can see if games work. Turns out they do, and Call of Duty 2 is absolutely incredible. It was the first thing i tried, so i figured ah, the 6600 must be working again now then. But sadly it isn’t, video files’s still cause stop errors, whether i try vlc, bsplayer, or windvd. They also hang the pc even if i tell the apps not to use the video overlay (also sometimes known as hardware/video acceleration). BUT, if I boot into ubuntu and try a video in there they work.

So, the evidence…

• No problems at all if the 4200ti is plugged in instead of the 6600gt
• In windows with the 6600gt all videos, however played and in any video app hang windows.
• Games work fine, including recent hardware intensive ones irrespective of the graphic card.
• Video’s play fine in ubuntu irrespective of the card plugged in

You would conclude from the evidence that the problem lay with windows and that a fresh install would fix things. This is where it gets depressing, I’ve spent the majority of the day re-installing windows yuck. Even worse, the problem persists. So somehow the 6600gt is broken, and somehow the fault only affects video’s and only when played in Windows.

I can’t even remember where I bought the damn thing.

Will someone please buy me a nice shiny new iMac g5, the bigger one please. And take this damned beige heap of junk away with you.