Vista made me a switcher

… is QuickSilver. It’s just UNBELIEVABLE.
Just a few hours I spend investigating QuickSilver and it actually saves me a lot of time doing boring tasks with mouse-juggeling and so on. Still being a QS newbie, I can talk about the cool features I already investigated. At first, QS is Plugin aware. There are plugins for all and every program in the Mac-world - so most of them can be used in automation tasks.
If you’ve opened up the website of QS, you might have seen a ql layout and a nice looking page, but maybe not know what the hell QuickSilver will do for you.
At theappleblog you will find some interesting screencasts with the functionality of QS - but here is my short abbrev. about the features I use:

• QuickSilver is a launcher. So you’re pressing a command shortcut and it will open. Per default this is “alt + space”. Then you can type any word-combinations like “itu” and QuickSilver will find any “catalog item” containing this letters. This can be “itunes” as application as well as “My Itunes Directory with a lot of mp3s in there”. Then you can press Tab or “arrow right” to decide a command for the found item. This can be “open” or “browse artists” or “copy to clipboard”. A lot of commands are stackable, so you can do this: “Find a file on the desktop, select it and send it per EMail to Dirk”.
• “Find a directory, open one file in there with a specific application”
• “Select a song in Itunes by searching by artist and play it”
• “open a pdf, print it, afterwords delete the pdf file”

And the best of all, this are so short commands, all of them above are done in less then 3 seconds!!!

The first job I’ve done was to migrate all my user profile data to the Macintosh (is Mac still called Macintosh?).
Following is my most important profile stuff:

• email accounts
• itunes library
• eclipse settings
• firefox configuration

For making it not harder as needed, I decided not to switch applications if they are available for OSX. So I never started Safari or iMail or Camino (Camino is a Mozilla Browser with more OSX look and feel then Firefox. The only sucess in favor of Safari is using the Mozilla Rendering Engine).
I’ve installed MS Office 2004 (one year newer then my Windows Version :), using “Entourage” (It’s just the renamed MS Outlook for OSX but with much more features then the Windows Version). Importing the Windows Registry in Entourage seems not to be working, so I needed to reenter my account data - very fast done.

ITunes was god’s sake available for Macintosh :)))) I copied the directory with the settings, opened up the xml file and replaced with a small regular expression all network share references to M: with a smb-unix-share. Opening up iTunes, all was in there. WOW That was easy.

Eclipse I even never tried to reuse my .metadata directory. As the SVN checkouts differ between unix and windows (because of CRLF) I just started from scratch. This is still a building lot and one of the most importants for me.

As Browser I installed Firefox - so I can use my plugins and all my settings from my windows version, I thought. After fuddling around with the profile I’ve seen some problems with the browser window. So I migrated most of the settings, bookmarks and saved passwords to the OSX Profile and reinstalled the known Plugins. Firefox is almost working like the Windows Version - and because I’m using del.icio.us it is still pretty easy to exchange new bookmarks between my three Computers, even if one of them is now a Macintosh.

Here it is, my brand new Mac Pro. A case of aluminium, rock solid and strong, 4 Intel Xenon cores (2x dualcore), 3GB RAM and some harddrive. (It’s almost funny for me to see on the inclosures of big electronic malls the size of the harddisk pilloried. Does anybody interest if there will be 200 or 250GB space left?)

Stating up the engine!

Yes, I’ve got it!
Wow, I was so happy to get the new MS OS and immediately started to install it in a different partition on my PC at home.
Some details about my home PC:

• MSI NForce 4 Mainboard
• AMD Athlon64 CPU
• 2 Discs in RAID 0 using Intel onboard chipset
• NVidia Geforce 6800GT Graphics Card

Sounds good for me, PC was almost younger then a year. (but the VIsta-rating of 4,6 tells me, that I’m a nut)
It tooks me one day to get Vista installed on the RAID 0 - no driver support, no final NForce driver, no driver from MSI, just some notes in newsgroups and an iso-image which I found to boot before inserting the Vista DVD - and it works.
On the next day I tried to get the next things working: Windows domain logon on my Samba fileserver, mapping “My own files” with the network share and install all of the business software I need for work. (Quest TOAD (Oracle Tool), Oracle OCI ODBC / JDBC driver, Java 6, Eclipse, MS Office 2003, OpenOffice,…)
But let’s start at the beginning - there is no “My own files” in Vista anymore. In the home directory of the user you will find a lot of directories like “My Documents”, “My Images” and so on. After fuddling hours around I found a way to map them to a network share. I don’t want to sync all my Images in the domain profile. Next - I tried to install WinRAR. WHOO, does not work. Then, MS Office - uh - “unknown device Z:”????
Again fuddling around several hours I’ve seen, that MSI-based installers on Vista doesn’t like mapped network devices in the homedir.
Fuck, do I always have to switch this? Isn’t the installer for MSI files part of the operating system? Do they don’t fully support the new way in Vista to match “My own files”?
Next, I tried to install other stuff, TOAD, Oracle and so on. NONE of this Enterprise Software is actually working under Vista. What the hell are they doing there? Don’t they had a chance to build up their software and fix it using the Vista Betas since over a year?
The Vista look and feel - I’m afraid to say that I wished me the XP look and feel back. The windowbars are so nasty, all black font is rounded up with some white flieshit. Sorry about that, but seen VIsta before on paper magazines I thought this comes with the low DPI of the magazines. It looks nasty in my eyes and loving the XP look and feel and the colors the black in Vista makes me mad. I switched back to Windows 2000 theme in Vista, the only option.
However, the list of disappointments is long, so what to do. Reinstall Windows XP? Is one option. But it annoys me, that anyone I have to switch to Vista, just because Microsoft will stop the support of Windows XP.
I tried to switch to Linux several times, my wife is always working with a SuSE Linux thin client box connected to my server. This is fine, she is using Kolorlines and OpenOffice, so all important tools are available. But whats about video cutting, dvd burning and so on. I love to work with computers, but in my previous company I killed my Windows from my harddisk and started to use Debian Woody as my primary development machine. It was a pretty cool time and I never learned more about Linux then these days. But I must admit, that about 20-30% of my working time wasted for “getting things working”. Thats pretty neat, that it was possible to do so, but I have to work long for my daytime job, a wife and a daughter and don’t want to waste time more then needed for stuff that won’t bring me a personal advantage. My primary use for computers is developing software, so it’s better for me to use that kind of time to learn new API’s, new languages, new script-languages and kind of that.
So I ordered a Mac Pro and throw out my Windows XP PC machine.

I’m using three Computers. I’ve a company desktop for development purposes, a company notebook for visiting customers and developing software on the road and a computer at home. My computer at home is used for developing, managing private pictures, cutting private videos and burning them and a lot of other things. Most of the stuff Im developing is written in Java, I’m also using a linux server at home for SMB sharing.
Since about half a year the Windows XP Installation on my PC at home was broken, always I had to press the reset button after a cold boot during startup phase to let the PC come up.
Also Outlook wont save my settings (display position, items in toolbar, and so on). I decided to reinstall the Computer - and because I’ve to less time and I need the PC for being productive, I thought to wait for Windows Vista.