Well so much for getting a Sony Viao. I bit the bullet and bought a new Santa Rosa 15″ Macbook Pro in the end. After a patient 18 day wait between ordering and delivery it finally arrived last Friday.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m no fan of OSX so I also picked up a copy of Windows Vista. For the 48 hours I’ve used Vista it doesn’t seem to be too different. It does feel like there’s now an additional click to get everywhere, a lot of things have been moved around (but in a methodical manner).

A lot of the nerdy stuff has been hidden, Add Hardware is not an easy spot unless you switch to classic view in Control Panel. Simple things like disk defragmenter now has no graphic display on it’s fragmentation. It feels as though MS has swept this stuff under the rug so the focus on productivity instead of maintaining the OS, which is fine but I imagine for “Power Users” this is annoying.

I digress, what I wanted to mention in this post was an issue I’ve had with Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) and running Eclipse. Each time I started Eclipse, Vista would prompt me with a “Open File - Security Warning”, informing me the program I am executing has an Unknown Publisher. Despite unchecking the ‘Always ask me about running this file’ option, it would repeatedly do so.

(eclipsec.exe pictured)

After some Googling I thought I’d found an answer. Check file properties, at the bottom of the General tab, click the Unblock button. No joy. Once I’d clicked OK, if I returned to the properties screen the file was blocked again. It turns out the problem was downloading Eclipse using IE7 and NTFS’ ’streams’.

I tried the suggestion of running Sysinteral’s streams and deleting the stream information but I encountered an ‘Access is denied’ message as well. Copying eclipse.exe from my system drive to my USB flash drive and then copying it back again sorted the issue.

I am still alive but I’ve not really dedicated much time to blogging this year. Last Friday was my last day at Evolving Media. I enjoyed my time at EM, and they produce some quality work but I really want to move on to using more robust development practices. Namely using a versioning system again, when I first started there it felt a little bit like walking a tight rope without a safety net with no CVS.

I was also in denial about how much of an OO zealot I’ve become, the trouble is I’m not writing enough OO code to progress as quickly as I’d like. Not employing OO was basically a huge road block for starting test driven development, automated testing (continuous integration) and automated deployment. All of which are nice to have but come at the cost no one could afford at EM - time; victims of their own success in that regard.

As I’ve mentioned before, one thing I never really settled with was working on a Mac. It was doing my head in going to work on Mondays and hitting CTRL instead of the Apple key and pressing those retarded page up and down keys that aren’t (they only scroll your screen and not the cursor).

I’d have the reverse situation at home where I’d keep hitting the ALT key instead of CTRL in Windows, ALT + right for End, ALT + left for Home and @@ for “”. As developers we use # symbols more than most and ALT+3 just isn’t convenient dammit. Apple keyboards, pha!

I think a six month run on OSX was long enough for me to decide I’m still a Windows fanboy, there’s some dev tools for Windows I’ve grown up on. I never found a decent replacement for Regex Coach (I even made a long over due donation the other day as a thank you!).

So where am I off to next? On May 21st I start at Alexander Street Press, an academic publisher with US roots who focus on the humanities. I’m looking forward to it; the two guys I’m working with, Paul and John, seem really knowledgeable, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.

I’ve a week to myself this week to tie up some loose ends (private work namely). I’m hoping to get some more posts up here this week. In an ideal world I wanted to:

• Push my new blog layout live (3 columns tagged up with microformat goodness)
• Make a start on Groovy in Action
• Read more of PHP in Action
• Ditto for Agile Web Development with Rails
• Finally get Zend (PHP5) certified

But I can’t see me squeezing that all in…

This was my first week in my new job and on an iMac. I was looking forward to trying out OSX, I’ve seen OSX grow in popularity over the last year or two in the development community - a lot of the screen casts are done on Macs.

I was told by others in the office that I’d be sold on Mac within the first day or two because “its much better than Windows”. After a week on it though I still find OSX gets in the way. I find myself using the keyboard more on OSX than Windows. My biggest gripes about the platform:

1. Where have the HOME, END, PAGE UP, PAGE DOWN and INSERT keys gone? What are these useless keys in their place?
2. I now have MORE keys to press to select a line of code and remove/cut/copy it. Apple + Shift + Left arrow to select (if at the start) and then Apple+C. Windows is just Shift + END and CTRL+C.
3. Everything in Mac OSX is Apple + this, Apple + that, well not in a Terminal, you wanna kill that process? That’ll be CTRL+C, you wanna use Nano, that’s the CTRL key again.
4. I miss not having a Taskbar
5. I like to maximize my windows - this is not the done thing on OSX. The “+” button appears to be random/useless at resizing your app. Double click the app title bar - minimizes to dock
6. I’d like to resize my app window, MORE mouse clicks required, lets move the window left a bit first then go the bottom right corner to resize.
7. Minimise an app, then try to Apple + TAB to restore it back to the foreground - where is it? Still hiding in the dock.
8. Close all open windows of an application - ALT+TAB, it’s still in the app list - wtf? Select it, nothing… oh it’s in the top menu - I have to Apple+Q or Exit from the menu.
9. My mighty mouse might look cool but I keep right clicking in Firefox bring up the popup, or jumping to Dashboard/Expose accidentally when I want to left click.
10. bbEdit’s comparision isn’t as good as Examdiff
11. bbEdit’s multi-file search is slow compared to UltraEdit on Windows
12. No Regex Coach on Mac
13. I prefer Outlook to Apple Mail
14. Who really needs 16 function keys?

So half of those are about the hardware interface - can I change to a regular USB keyboard and mouse on Mac? Does the Windows key map to the Apple key?

There are some things I like about OSX though:

1. Expose is useful and is a saving grace for not having a Taskbar
2. Apple Mail junk filters are good.
3. It’s nice to be able to jump into a *nix shell at the push of a button, Windows command prompt sucks in comparison.
4. Dashboard is handy for quickly getting to Calculator
5. Quicksilver is cool, I’ve got to get into the habit of using it though!
6. Interface is cleaner - drag and drop is more common place than Windows apps. Mac Office looks very Microsoft, lots of toolbars and buttons which is out of place compared to most other Mac apps.
7. Interface looks cool - novelty fades quickly though

At the moment for me OSX is just another platform and I’d still take Windows through choice.