Breaking Windows

I don't have time to write a full comparison, but here are some opening bullet points. These are basically mental notes that I will use for future articles. You can be sure Matt and I will be covering Tiger 07 in detail in the coming weeks.

Today I played Tiger 07 for the PS2. I have not played a PS2 game in some time, so maybe I am a bit jaded, but my god was that a steaming pile of crap! It is amazing what we were used to dealing with before the Xbox 360.

A while ago I read on Digital Press a thread about DS v. PSP collections. Since DP is going through some growing pains... or something, and I cannot search or post, I will post here.

Without even counting, I am sure my PSP collection is bigger. This is just for the fact that I just recently bought a bunch of used PSP games at rock bottom store-closing prices. So lets take a look:

1UP has a feature comparing the Dreamcast to the Xbox 360. The 23 parallels between Xbox 360 and the Dreamcast are indeed quite eerie. Some are stretches, but most are dead on scary. I am not sure about the American debut on MTV for the Dreamcast, but pretty much every point is spot it. Favorites include:

• Sleek white console following in footsteps of bulky, black console.
• Peter Moore spearheaded the marketing.
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi worked on highly anticipated First Party title.
• Highly anticipated First Party racing game from Bizarre Creations
• Crazy rich bald guy spotted at several promotional events leading up to launch.
• Metal Gear Solid trailer stole much of its next-generation thunder.

Like I said, scary.

1UP also put together 10 reasons why the Xbox 360 will succeed where the Dreamcast failed.

Square-Enix and Electronic Arts support from the start is a boon to the 360. Final Fantasy XI beta will come with all 360's sold in Japan - a territory that needs to latch on to the console if Microsoft expects to make any money this time.

Could you imagine the 360 launch without Madden, Tiger Woods, or NBA Live? Neither can I. The 360 would not survive long without EA.

To be fair we do not know if the 360 will have backwards compatibility. It is planned. This is great in theory. But with less then two weeks until launch there is still no backwards compatibility list. But then there is no official list of launch software either.

Oh and by the way, only 12 days, 4 hours, 22 minutes... until launch.

Well, I had half an editorial written on the comparison, but then I seen this and it sums it up. Now, it's not that the PSP is better because the cross-platoform games (Ridge Racer included) are better, this is just a good example of how the PSP can trounce the DS in multiple areas. Everyone needs to remember that the PSP will never have something like Feel the Magic which is where the DS excels. Unfortunately, not many developers seem to be figuring that out.

Relations between the users of Apple and Microsoft computers have never been particularly cordial. Windows users claim they've won the war for the desktop: all you have to do is look at the numbers and you find the most of the world using a Microsoft OS. Mac users point out a near total lack of security problems, along with a bombproof operating system that never seems to crash. (Then they sneer at the Windows masses.)

Source: Yahoo

Patrick Norton (a moment of silence for The Screen Savers please) has written this comprehensive look at what's to come from both Tiger and Longhorn. Oddly I could not find this on the ExtremeTech site, even though it is credited as such.

X vs. XP puts Mac OS X and Windows XP Pro/Home side by side in a huge multitude of categories ranging from usability to appearance to video playback. As you read the comparisons, you get a nice understanding for what goes into operating system design.

Source: osViews

I have been meaning to post about this site for some time. It has a mostly unbiased look at all aspects of both operating systems. They keep adding more all the time. They also have a pretty good forum.

This issue came up as an OT thread on the BlueWord InDesign Talk list. Since I decided to add my branch to the fire, I figured I should post this here as well. Enjoy. I hope to hear from any of you who have opposing, or similar opinions.

Ahh, this is a wonderful debate. Always has been, always will be. General assumptions of market leaders aside (Windows & viruses, Internet Explorer & bad standards compliance), Dreamweaver (DW) is far superior to GoLive (GL) in many ways. DW is a market leader because it gets the job done, period. It also happens to have a great UI. The UI of DW allows me to work faster then the UI of GL. I have used both since it was called GoLive Cyber Studio (I looked at version 1 but did not use it until version 2) and Dreamweaver 1.2, and I like both, I just find DW much easier and faster to use. GL used to have database connectivity, why oh why did they take it out? Was it because it never worked? I never tried database stuff in GL, so I cannot say. I have used the database tools in UltrDev and DW for a while now, and am pretty comfortable with the features and limitations that MX and MX 2004 bring to the table. It has been said, and I agree, that GL is a page designers web tool, and DW is a code junkies web tool. I spend half my web dev time in BBEdit anywho, so I think I fall into the code junkie stereotype. I never liked how things are done in GL. I have always preferred the DW way of getting it done. It just feels more natural to me, GL makes me do things all bass-akwards at times. Live Objects in GL rock, but I will get to those in a minute. Multimedia PDF in GL rocks. And the best feature of all in GL is the extensive support for QuickTime content. One summer I worked with streaming QT Servers and LiveStage Pro and GL could handle ANY type of media I threw at it. Even QuickTime VR. It will handle (and has a QuickTime Editor UI to create/tweak) any type of QuickTime media track. Embedding Poster Frames and all the needed QuickTime code is so much easier in GL. There is a nice behavior for DW for Poster Frames, but its pretty lame compared to GL. I like Live Objects but I do not love them. If I want/need to edit a graphic I will go into Photoshop etc. and make the change and re-export the file(s) for the web. I like doing it that way. Being able to place Photoshop and Illustrator files in InDesign and then update the links is different. Live Objects tries to do that for the web, and I do not think the the parallels for web and print are there. Live Objects is not a selling point (for me.) The insane amount of QuickTime integration in GL, that is a selling point. GL 6 was not that impressive. It felt like GL 5 that worked in OS X. Was it GL 5 that had the database functionality, or was that GL 6? I cannot remember. GL CS has some nice improvements. It is faster then 6 was, I think that is its best new feature. InDesign Package for GoLive is an interesting concept, but so far I do not like the results when the InDesign layouts get spat out for the web. The new CSS editor in GL CS is nice. I however think the new CSS features in DW MX 2004 are rock solid (Relevant CSS panel), and a lot nicer then what is available in GL CS. I also prefer the CSS editing window in DW over that of GL. On the hand coding side, of which I like to do a lot of in both DW and GL, I prefer DW again. The HomeSite like features added in MX and improved upon in MX 2004 are wonderful. I always wanted HomeSite on the Mac, and while the Windows version of DW has a few more HomeSite like features then the Mac version of DW, it is still really handy to have those drop down menus in code view. To GL's credit, it too has this feature now. GL CS has a much improved UI over GL 6. I really like it. I prefer the DW UI, but the GL UI is now much easier to work with. I just wish GL, Like all the Adobe apps in the CS Suite, worked the same. Namely, I wish they all worked like InDesign CS. I wish I could make my palette a one row horizontal bar, I wish I could collapse my palettes to the sides of the screen, I wish the Keyboard shortcut editor was identical in all apps, I wish, I wish, I wish. The CS thing would have meant so much more if all the apps involved had the same palette structure. That being said, GL's redesigned Object palette is very useable now. Both GL and DW can produce some pretty horrid spaghetti code when they are all done and ready to publish to the web. I find DW the lesser of the two evils, but it is still not as nice and clean as if I just did it all myself in BBEdit. But we use DW or GL so that our fingers do not turn into bloody nubs. So I can put up with some spaghetti code if it lets me develop a site quicker. I have given GL a try on a few occasions, developing a site from start to finish, and I keep coming back to DW.

I am going to take a look at the differences in price of comparable systems from both Dell and Alienware.

I am not about to add Apple's online store into the mix. No sense in comparing apples to oranges. I will say this however:

Apple hardware costs more. It is made by Apple, or it is made in collaboration with Apple. I am glad it is only made by Apple. The quality is higher, the price is higher, and not as many people buy it. I like being a user of the minority Operating System. Ask any *nix user how they feel about being a minority user. I am sure at some point they will have something positive to say about not having to deal with viruses and spyware. Mac OS and *nix might not be more secure by design, but it is more secure based on usage.

Back to the Apple's online store: Apple knows simplicity. Their online store is just nice to use. It is not cluttered with a gazillian options that you do not care about. I would vote Dell's online store to be the most overwhelming of all. It is a nightmare.

Based solely on my opinion, I like the Alienware store a lot more then the Dell store. It is easier to choose your options on the Alienware site, and Alienware does not try to shove software and other hardware down your yapper like Dell does.

* At the time of this writing, Dell has 10% off their Desktop systems.

Dell Dimension XPS vs. Alienware Area 51: These are Intel Pentium 4 based systems. They could both be called gaming systems, they could both be called graphics systems. I call them workstations. They are used for web design, multimedia, 3D modeling, gaming, etc, etc. In other words I do not see the Alienware as more of a gaming rig.

Some might say these systems are configured with too much horsepower, and it is not worth the price. It is true you could cut down on anything and save money. I however do not like to compromise. And I have seen the bad things that comes from compromising on computers and I do not like it. In general I want to be able to throw more then I usually would at my computer and see if it will crush under pressure. I like to see it perform above my expectations because I know that if I stay with a system for a while those performance benchmarks will be decreasing exponentially every year. My computer before my 500 Mhz PowerBook G4 in 2001 was a PowerMac 6400/200 circa 1996. If I am happy with a computer (unlike my Alienware rig) I will use it for a while.

Here are the specs of the Area 51 and Dimension XPS in no true order. It is interesting to see how one or the other store has the same options plus or minus $10 here and $5 there. I am not comparing the specific prices. I left out all the extra crap that both online stores tries to push on you.

3 year Tech Support P4 3.2GHz 800 Mhz FSB
Windows XP Pro
1 GB DDR RAM
128MB DDR ATI RADEON™ 9800 Pro
250 GB Hard Drive
CD-RW & DVD-RW
Sound Blaster Audigy 2

Dell: $2,346 (theoretical price w/o 10% discount is $2580)
Alienware: $2,488.00

These differences in price are negligible in my book. It always depends on what month or day or hour or minute when you buy from any of these online stores because you never know what type of special deal you might get.

A sliding puzzle. A calculator. A clock. A little notepad. Tiny little applets — little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time. Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea. Which, of course, would be the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh... Source: Daring Fireball John Gruber has a great look at Dashboard and why it is not a rip of Konfabulator. Sure they are similar. But from reading David Hyatt's blog I see where the differences are.

There are three pieces of software out to view iChat log files. Only one shines. The rest have problems. Logorrhea (great name, huh), iChatViewer, and iChatAnalyzer are the three apps looked at this comparison. iChatAnalyzer 0.2.1b VersionTracker still lists this app as beta. This app makes a line chart of your chats! Wow. What is this for? It relies on iChat to actually view the log files. The search function is slow, and when I double-click on an entry in the search results window it will NOT open the chat. This app might be better to look at once it has matured a bit. In the Read Me it does state that this is the developers first OS X app. I hope the future releases have more to offer. The two reports that can be generated are not useful, not formatted in a friendly manner, and IMO contain way to much information then I want to know. iChatViewer 0.5.1 This app is a little better. It tells the begin and end time, With this data there should be no problem adding the total chat time on the UI, because that info is not there yet. I really like the simple UI of this application. That is its best feature. It too also needs to use iChat to view the log files though. I don't really like that. Show in Finder is also a nice feature. The search also uses the same UI, opening the results in a new iChatViewer window. The only thing I would like to see in this app is inline log file viewing. That and the elapse time of the chat, in big, bold, numbers. Logorrhea 1.2.1 Now this is a polished application. The main reason I like this app over the rest is it shows the chats inline, not having to use iChat to view them. The search also highlights the search term in yellow, which is a very nice feature. Great Job! Logorrhea also can reveal a chat in the Finder. You can export chats out of Logorrhea but it seems that it exports all of them, not just the one that is selected, this a bummer. Concatenating all the chat data into one large text file does not make any sense to me. I wish it showed the begin, end, and elapsed times of the chat like iChatViewer. That would be my only suggestion for this wonderful application. Maybe in a future release. Also posted at BlogCritics. UPDATED 09/30/03 iChatBrowser 0.2 just came out, It is a work in progress as I encountered some strange behavior when trying to use the Export Chats feature. It handles inline viewing of chats as well though which I like. It does not have a find feature, but the read me indicates that that is a planned feature. This is another one to keep a lookout for in the future.

Both Safari and Mozilla have tabbed browsing, form auto-fill and password management. Mozilla is based on gecko, Safari on KHTML. I honestly cannot say which layout engine I prefer. I would say without a doubt both engines are better at standards compliance then the engine that Internet Exploder uses. I say this more as a web developer then a web user though. As a web user I don't care what the layout engine is, just as long as it makes the site look correct. The general user interface of both browsers are equal. It is nice to have a Search field to the right of the URL field in Safari. Although it is just a little different in Mozilla. You type the search term in the URL field, hit the down arrow, then hit enter. It is still really nice to have a dedicated field. The forms auto-fill feature of both Safari and Mozilla I find to be similar, and I see no differences in the two of them. Tabs In the tabs bar in Mozilla there is a button to the left to create a new tab. This is nice and but could be done with Command+T in either Safari or Mozilla. Sometimes I don't want to have to use the keyboard shortcut. The New Tab button is a nice touch Mozilla has. The innovations that Apple has put into Safari's tabs are really wonderful though. You can close a tab without going to it with the little 'x' on the left of the tab. On the right of the tab you see the status if the page is still loading, I really like this feature. Password Management Mozilla has a very nice Password Manager that shows all the stored passwords. Safari on the other hand uses Keychain Access. Either one is fine by me. There are however passwords that cannot be stored using Mozilla. These passwords can be stored using Safari. I do not understand why they can but they can. And that is what matters to me. The only innovation that Safari has to its own is the Snap Back feature. It is by far the best thing to happen to web browsing since tabbed browsing and, well, password management. Blocking images from a specific server is a nice touch that Mozilla has. Now if Mozilla could block SWF files from a server, that would be a killer feature. But still even without the ability to block ad banners I still use Safari as my main browser Mac OS X. I only open Mozilla or (gasp) Internet Exploder if I am forced to. On Windows I use Mozilla full time. I only open Internet Exploder if I am forced to, or I want to visit a site that has some Flash I want to look at.

Kung-Log is the best desktop blogging app out yet. It surpasses w.bloggar for the simple reason that it uses the built in Mac OS X spell checking. w.bloggar does have a spell checker, although I have found it to be very bad. w.bloggar is much more of a robust WYSIWYG editor. The options available are nice for sure, but I do not need all that when posting to a blog. The customizable HTML menu in Kung-Log is very nice, even allowing you to assign keyboard shortcuts. Where the customizable HTML tags feature takes a really nice turn is the ability to insert things from the clipboard. So all you do is have a URL copied, then select the text you want the link wrapped around. Once you select URL from the HTML drop down box that link is made from your clipboard. This is VERY NICE. It saves the paste step altogether. Since I have the Textile plugin installed it shows up in the Text Format popup in the Settings pane. This is another reason I like Kung-Log over w.bloggar or NetNewsWire. I can choose between using MT's text formatting or not. Kung-Log can grab info from iTunes. Thats a novelty, but cool none the less. I am listening to this right now: The Last DJ from the album "The Last DJ" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers The way Kung-Log handles the way you handle linking things in your entry is unique and I think is the best feature it has. The preview window does a great job. Being able to select installed Text Formatting plugins is nice. And the very customizable HTML tags drop down menu is very cool. Kung-Log takes advantage of the great spell checking in Mac OS X, and this is a huge help for someone who cannot spell that well. These features all add up to the reason I will now be doing all my blog posting on my TiBook. I just figured out that I can select multiple categories for a post. Nice touch. Editing a previous post works well. I found problems in editing posts in NNW. I am very impressed with this software. The full version of NNW costs $40, this is donationware. I will donate for sure! Kung-Log has a feature for uploading files. I will have to play around with this and see how it works. I will use MT to do this as it has a template setup for this, and the server makes the thumbnails automatically. Just to see if it works I have used the built in image upload and thumbnail creation ability in Kung-Log. I am not sure if it using the Perl module to do the thumbnail or not but it works.

This was a subject that came up at the X vs. XP Forum, and I thought I would post what I wrote here as well. I still prefer using the Finder to Windows Explorer. And in response to the open-two-windows-of-the same-location thing - this is a very useful thing to do, and can be done with much less than some describe. I have a number of AppleScripts for file management that I use. One is to open a window clone. I find no such thing in Windows. another thing I grew to love in the Mac OS and have been miffed at in the 4 months I have been using Windows on a daily basis is the concept of Labels, coloring the folders for organization. Some people say this is hogwash but putting things in specific colored folders is a great thing. Not only that but replacing a folders icon in Windows is not the ease that it is in the Mac OS. If I want a folder to stand out, I put a custom icon on it. Not a very quick thing to do in Windows. There is a utility for Windows called Rainbow Folders that will replace the icon with a colored one, not the slick way of using metadata like the Mac OS does, but I can put up with extra .ico files to color my folders. i'm not kidding coloring a folder a specific color is very useful. Rainbow Folders is not a breeze to use, and is not quick to be able to color a folder, but it does the job, it just takes longer then Labels in the Mac OS. In the Finder in OS X there are icons for the 3 views, you can click on them to change the views. I would like to see something like that for the various views in Windows Explorer. So I can click from Thumbnail to Details and all the ones in between. Windows Explorer lets you cutomize the toolbar with a very limited amount of options compared to the toolbar in the Finder. I have a number of my file management AppleScripts in my Finder toolbar for example. I very much miss column view from OS X now that I use XP for most all my work. The tree view in XP is OK, but it does not let you drill down the heirarchy of your HD like Columns view does. spring loaded folders are also a big help in file management. If you want such a thing in Windows you have to get the entire Open Desktop package ($50 subscription) to get a rather small utility from the good people at Stardock named SpringFolders. There is no free utility that does this. You can spring load folders in Windows Explorer tree view finally, but not in list or icon view. Since there is absolutely no difference between browsing your files and browsing the web (in Windows), Windows cannot seem to keep the two separate. For example if I have the Google toolbar showing in Internet Exploder and I go to root through my My Documents folder it shows the Google toolbar right there above my files in the Windows Explorer window. This is poor design. And if you have any other IE toolbars installed they work the same way. Windows Explorer cannot save the information as to how you look at a folder, be it in icon view or detail view. It stores this information in the Registry, and this information is only kept for a few specific folders such as My Documents. The rest of the views go back to the default once closed. Even My Documents gets set to the default view sometimes. So if you go back to a folder it will probably not be in the view you want it in. Mac OS X uses an invisible .DS_Store file to control these types of settings. Having a folder the way you left it is something that helps a great deal in file management. For example, Save dialog boxes in Windows do not remember were you were last. That information is *sometimes* saved in the registry but gets overwritten even if the developer is smart enough to code this functionally in. I for one like my Save dialog boxes remembering were I last was. these are the observations I have had so far with Windows Explorer file management. I don't loath it by any means, I just prefer using the Finder over Windows Explorer. I think that over all file management under OS X far exceeds that of what XP has to offer. And for that matter I use Path Finder is OS X because it far exceeds what the Finder does (not because of file management mind you, but because of other very handy features).

Both of these bayesian spam filtering packages do a great job. i use SpamSieve on my PowerBook G4, and use POPFile on my PC.

i have to say that the process of training POPFile is a lot less of a hassle than training SpamSieve. in Entourage X you have to run an AppleScript in the Scripts menu to tell SpamSieve if it is a good or spam message. you train POPFile via a web page, a much nicer way to handle this IMO. having the entire UI for POPFile web based makes editing settings a lot easier. i really like the "magnets" feature of POPFile, wich allows you to setup whitelists and blacklists in a snap. i use magnets for all the listprocs i am on, so they always go to the correct bucket.

if i were still using my PowerBook G4 for my email full time i would install POPFile on it. i think i have had POPFile installed for 3 weeks on my PC, and its just hit 90% accuracy, and i am pretty happy with that.

i think more mail applications need to incorporate bayesian filtering. Apple's Mail now has bayesian filtering, it would be nice to see others do the same.

I plan to update this as i find new differences between Dreamweaver for the Mac OS and Windows. i have never used Dreamweaver on Windows. Like FileMaker Pro and Photoshop, Dreamweaver is a program i spend a lot of my time in.

the addition of HomeSite features to Dreamweaver MX (DWMX) like the auto tag completion features was one of the best parts to the upgrade to MX. i have always liked the HomeSite/ColdFusion UI. and the auto tag completion addition to DWMX is great. so why am i bringing this up if it is in both the Mac and Windows versions of DWMX. well with the auto tag completion, the Windows version of DWMX got what Macromedia (MM) calls "HomeSite/Coder-Style" the Mac version does not have this, and it is a shame. The "Coder-Style" puts all your pallets on the left side instead of the right (big deal) it also gives DWMX a SINGLE document window with small tabs at the bottom representing the open documents. holy cow talk about productive! this is a much nicer UI to work with. the Mac OS might not have this option because of its use of the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) model. MM could have still added a tabbed UI for the open documents, they have a tabbed UI for the Insert pallete.

More things i figure out when i figure them out (good or bad) pertaining to the Windows version of DW.

here we go. head to head Entourage for OS X and Outlook for XP. i am in a bit of shock that a thing that is so basic to an email app is handled so differently in both of these MS apps. i think this shows the differences between the MacBU and the MS Office development teams very well (or not very well, as the case may be).