As a little test this week, I have attempted to use ONLY my MacBook for my day-to-day computing needs. It has been an interesting week to say the least.

If you think about it, you can separate out the tasks you preform with a computer into a couple of different broad categories. My challenge this week was to compare MY work experience on a Mac to that I had with Windows.

Here are some of those broad categories:

Web Surfing and RSS Reading

Accounting and Bookkeeping

Communications

Scheduling

Entertainment

Creation of Information or Data

Management of Information or Data

Web Surfing and RSS Reading. For both Mac and Windows I use Firefox as my web-browser. So using a Mac this week was not that big of a change. The interface was about 90% the same, and my favorite add-ons and plugins still worked. The big difference was RSS reading. On my Windows system, I use Feed Demon, on the Mac, NetNewsWire. Of the two I found NetNewsWire to the easier program to use.

Accounting and Bookkeeping. I use Quickbooks for doing my business financial management. When I first started it was hard for me to get used to the ideal that Quickbooks was JUST a bookkeeping software package, and NOT a comprehensive consulting firm management solution. So my use of Quickbooks is straight forward. However, while there is a copy of Quickbooks for the Mac, I was unable to move my data from Quickbooks Premier 2008 to Quickbooks Pro 2007 for Mac. In the end I still have to use Quickbooks on Windows.

I also use a program call Stamps.com to print my postage. Sadly, stamps.com is Windows only.

#### BIG EDIT #####
(this is why I love visitor feed back )

I’ve just been told that there IS indeed a postage system for Macs, http://mac.endicia.com/. It’s priced on par with Stamps.com ($15 per month plus postage). I’ll be downloading this and giving it a try. It also has a Windows Version as well.

Thanks William!

Communications. This is a big category. To me communications is everything from E-mail, to phone, to VOIP, to Blogging.

I’ll start with VOIP. I use Skype to communicate with my clients and friends in Europe and Africa. Skype is about the same on both Windows and Mac, but the Mac hardware make Skype so much easier.

Blogging on Windows was done with Word 2008, which has a simple “post to blog” feature. On Mac I used Mars Edit. It’s hard to compare the two, Mars Edit is a comprehensive blog management tool, while Word is a VERY powerful text editor. In the end, Mars Edit wins out because while Word is great at editing text, you cannot use those features on a blog site.

Phone, Contacts, and Email are touchy subjects, and perhaps (along with Quickbooks and Stamps.com) is the largest single failing on the Mac. In Windows with Exchange and Outlook, my Contacts and E-mail (with schedule) are all kept well synchronized. There simply is not a comparable solution on the Mac side. While there is the up and coming “Mobile Me” from Apple, it is not doing well, and requires an iPhone, which does not have all the features I need on a phone. I am hoping that Google’s Android platform will address this failing VERY soon. If I can get a truly open smartphone platform that supports syncing my Contacts, Email, tasking, and Schedule with my phone, an online source, and my computers, I’ll jump on it.

In the end I still have to use Outlook on Windows.

Scheduling. As I said, on Windows I used Outlook. However on my Mac there is iCal, which I am now using with Google Calendars “CalDev” feature. My website also is current with my Google Calendar via Wordpress Plugin. I like iCal a lot, and want to use it as my primary Scheduling system.

Entertainment. For me, the Mac wins hands down. I do not do a lot of high end computer gaming (I have consoles for that). However, simple games and quick diversion are great on my Mac. I can also play my old emulated games on my Mac (which I can do with my Windows system, but it’s so much nicer on my Mac). But with my Apple TV and iPod, the true Media entreatment winer is Mac, hands down. Yes, I know Apple TV and iPod will work with iTunes for Windows, but the integration is so much cleaner and nicer on a Mac.

Creation of Information or Data. This is anything from Word Processing, to Programing, to Photoshopping, to Web design.

I have office for the Mac, which is pretty much like Office for windows, except Entourage is a poor reflection on Outlook. So the spread sheet and word processing experiences are petty much the same.

Ironical, I’ve been using a port of a Mac product on my Windows Box for Years. In WIndows I have use an editor call “e”, which is just a clone of a really good pseudo IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called Text Mate. I do not really do any hard core programing, so I cannot comment to those.

Photoshop is photoshop.

On Windows when I needed to to a quick HTML page, I would use Front Page, (later the awful Expression Web), then cut out the bits I needed with e. I’ve not really found a good WYSIWYG html editor for Mac. I’ve played with Nvu, but I was underwhelmed. Oddly, I am moving away from webpage editing in favor of using Content Management systems like WordPress. So my days of coding HTML may be on the decline anyway.

Management of Information or Data. Here I found Macs to really come through. The default way Windows Manages data files is very klugy. With Mac, Images are managed by iPhoto, Media by iTunes, general files go in Documents, however you want. I never really understood how Windows Media Player managed music. There are even some great plugins to allow me to upload and publish data to the “cloud”, like Picasa, Youtube, and my Blog. There is also very little “support” files cluttering up the place. In windows an application gets installed into Program Files, but bits of it can get put all over the system. On a mac, 99% of the time an application is a single file (yes I know it’s really of folder), in the Applications Directory. Need to move it to another Mac? Just drag and drop the file.

In the end, I still have Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac. I simply cannot operate without Outlook, my Phone, and Quickbooks, and at the moment to keep all the features I have now, those have to stay on Windows. The first 4 days of the week were spent trying to find alternatives to Windows on the Mac. Next week I will try living with BOTH Mac and Windows side by side, and see how that goes.

All Work and No Play Makes Mack a Dull Boy…

I admit it, I’m a child of the 80s. My love of technology came from those jumbled days, and I spent many happy hours playing with what was then cutting edge tech.

Of course the cutting edge of tech to a kid in the 1980s was Nintendo, Sega, Commador, and Apple. I had a Sega Master System (SMS), my brother had a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). So allot of my childhood was spent in his room.

Now that I’m grown, I still plays games as a form of personal entertainment. I can remember being told as a kid, that playing Mario 16 hours a day would rot my brain, but I guess they were wrong.. oh well, I still love you Mom. Of Course, my current game playing is not the 2/3 of my day it was when I was 11.

Gaming today is a rich involved experience, and a multi-billion industry. However, while I have played and loved current games, my heart is still warmed by 8bit Mario and Zelda. So come with me to the world of Emulation…

Emulation is a fairly strait forward concept. Not all computers or computing systems run on the same hardware architecture. So if you have a bit of software from one hardware architecture that you want to run on a another type of hardware architecture you basically have to options. One, you can rewrite that software and this can be time consuming. Two, you get an “emulator” that mimics hardware architecture A on hardware architecture B’s platform. This way you can take software written for hardware architecture A, place it in the Emulator on hardware architecture B, and the software thinks it’s running on hardware architecture A.

The downside to Emulation is that it takes a good deal of system resource to run. So for a hardware architecture A Emulator to run will on hardware architecture B, hardware architecture B has to be significantly faster than hardware architecture A. Confused? Don;t worry, it will be clear in a second.

Now the NES from 1985 was a hardware architecture platform. Computers today are another type of hardware architecture which is a thousand times faster than the NES. So rather than rewiring software (i.e. Games) produced for the NES to run on todays computer hardware, it’s much easier to run those Games through an Emulator. So today on your PC or Mac is it quite possible (and very easy) to play games from a wide variety of old Console Game Systems, AND Coin Operated Arcade Machines.

Now Emulators are a wide and diverse thing. So while just about every Game Console can be emulated on a PC, likewise many old gaming hardware architectures can be emulated on current hardware architectures such the PSP, Xbox, Playstaion 2, and my current favorite, the Nintendo DS.

The Nintendo DS is quite a remarkable device. For about $100 you can get a two screen, touch screen, duel ARM processor, mini-computer with WIFI. The device is also VERY hackable. For an additional $40 you can get a Ninjapass game cart which takes a simple, widely available, Mico-SD card. On this Mico-SD card you can load software which allows you to do MANY things.

One of these things that you can do is load backup copies of your favorite DS games onto a the SD card. So, rather than carry around 10 or 15 game carts, you can “backup” all your games to a single SD card, and still have TONS of space left on the SD card.

Another thing you can do with this setup is run “Homebrew” software. These are programs writen by indeviuduales, for the DS. Think of it as freeware, or open-source, for the DS, just like there is freeware and open-source software for PCs and Macs.

Some of these homebrew programs are Emulators that allow games from older systems to be played on the DS. So right now on my DS I have my entire collection of NES games, SMS Games, some games from my old Super NES games, Gameboy, and even some old favorites like Zork.

In the end, my DS is a nice distraction when I’m stuck on a plane or waiting around. The fact that for a brief moment I can recapture some of my childhood is also kind of nice.  If anyone in interested in doing the same, contact me, and I help you get started.

After my adventure with the Bluetooth Headset and Apple today, I was pondering why I still feel so bound to Windows.

As I said, I’ve spent the last several weeks deep in development using only my MacBook. I’ve also said that I have found nothing really that has held me back specifically about OSX and the software I am using on OSX. So why do I still feel such a need to use Windows?

I have broken it down into a few large scope ideals, which I feel might better explain not only my tie to windows, but also other peoples tie as well.

Outlook/Exchange/Windows Mobile. This is a powerful trifecta. The fact that my desktop calendar, contacts, email and tasks are all kept synchronized between any desktop computer I use, and my mobile phone, is something that I feel is a “must have”. Once you have had this experience, you soon learn that anything less would not be acceptable. This setup does also allow for working in groups, so that each person can see and arrange each others calendar, contacts, tasks, and email. Unfortunately this experience is needlessly tided to Windows. First, while Microsoft does make an Exchange client for the Mac (called Entourage), it is quite frankly abysmal when compared to Outlook on the desktop. This is not officially sanctioned Exchange client for Linux, through there are some that get pretty close to working. Also Microsoft has licensed this connectively to other mobile device platforms (most notably the iPhone), it remains to be seen if this will have the same grand unified experience that Windows Mobile has.

I have yet to find a platform that will give me this same level of conveyance outside of the Windows Ecosystem.

Needing to keep current. I have a fear, perhaps an irrational fear, that is I leave the Windows platform, I will start to lose some of my skills in fixing it. My line of work requires that I be out on the sharp end when it comes to knowing how to fix things. If I lose those skills, I lose my livelihood. Using Windows day-in and day-out at least means that I am exposed to it, and through that exposure I have to keep current on the goings on.

I do have a bit of a bad opinion with it comes to Mac users. In my experience, I find that the typical Mac user knows LESS about their computer and how it works, than the typical Windows user. The reason for this disparity actuality lies in superior nature of the Macintosh Operating System. In my experience, hardware fails at the same rate on both Apple and PC, but hardware failures make up only a small fraction of all the problems encountered on a computer. Far and away most problems on a computer are caused my software, and most software problems are caused by “third party” software. I.e. software that did not come from or is not core to the Operating System. The Macintosh Operating System handles problems caused by “third party” software better than the Windows Operating System. As such, Mac OS fails at much slower rate than Windows. But this slower failure rate has a bizarre drawback. Because the Windows user has to deal with more problems than the Mac user, the Windows user is forced to learn more about their computer in order to keep it running.

We can make an argument that the Mac user is better off, because one should not have to know how to rebuild and engine just to drive a car. But I have seen more often than not that a typical Mac user will freak out at the slightest problem with their system, because they are not used to dealing with problems.

Linux Users have the exact opposite problem. They’re computers NEVER run quite right, or more precisely they never leave them alone to run right. As a result they are all de-facto experts on hardware and software. I’ve been using Windows, DOS, and Mac OS all my life, I’ve never had to recompile their Kernel to make my printer work . No, Linux has it’s advantages. It’s an oder of magnitude more secure than Windows, and once running is more stable than OS X.

Quickbooks and Third Party Software. Windows for the past 15 years has been part of a positive feed back cycle. People had Windows, so software vendors wrote more software for Windows, so people bought Windows because more software was available for Windows, etc, etc. There is NO reason why a software developer could not write ANY software for a Mac. Apple hardware running OSX are just as capable as HP hardware running Windows Vista. Intuits Quickbooks is a perfect example of this. Intuit could write a decent version on Quickbooks for Mac, but they really have not. There’s no reason why they couldn’t, they just haven’t. The same could be said of Microsoft and them not writing a good version of Outlook for the Mac, but because they make a sell Windows, I think there is a vested interest there to deny good software to the Mac OS.

Possible Solutions. For the Outlook/Exchange/Windows Mobile problem, I’m hoping that Google will step up soon with services like improved Gmail and their new Android smartphone OS initiative. Apple is trying to do something like that with Mobile Me and the iPhone. So if these two services can come online, there we will have a viable alternative to Exchange.

Quickbooks and Third Party Software most likely is going to become a moot point. With more and more desktop software moving to the “cloud” (meaning it’s software run from a web browser off a server than from a program off the desktop), it would seem that soon only the most basic computer will be needed to run advanced software. Even mighty Quickbooks has a Web 2.0 version which runs in the cloud. Half the features at nearly twice the cost, who wouldn’t jump on that.

I know that Needing to keep current is my own irrational fear. No mater what OS i use on my desktop, I will still be working daily with all three of the major systems. As such I’ll have to keep abreast of what’s going on.

In the end what frustrates me most about Windows is not Windows itself, but the fact I feel like I am forced to use Windows. If I had a genuine choice I don’t know that I would leave. But more and more people are starting to feel as I do, monopolized.

I had an experience today that has once again sent my mind on an anti-microsoft path.

For the last several weeks I’ve been working on an indepth project for the Community Advisory Board of Cumberland County. This project is set to debut in 10 days. As an experiment I decided to do all of my development on my MacBook pro, using only native Macintosh software. I have to say that for the most part I am happy with how the project is turning out. I can honestly say that I have not found using OS X to be any detriment. I only wish that I could find a better WYSIWYG html editor, but I’m not really happy with the ones I’ve found on Windows either, so I can’t not claim that to be much of a hold back.

What has inspired this resent round of anti-microsoftisum actuality has nothing to do with the project at all. As the project is coming down the wire, I have been using my laptop in place on my desktop, hooking it directly into my desktops Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse, for convveniouse. Well, at one point this afternoon I needed to make a Skype video call to a colleague in middle Tennessee. This is not all that unusual for me to do from either my MacBook or my XP Desktop. However I did want to use my wired headset to make the call, and at the moment I needed to make the call it was firmly entangled and attached to my desktop.

Anyone who works with technology nows that the stacks of papers that once was the blight of offices in the 1970s and 1980s have been replaced with the blight of snake nests of tangled cabling. Honestly I’m not sure which is worse. I am by nature a lazy person, and I dreaded having to exert the effort to divorce my headset from the mess so as to use it with my MacBook.

On a whim, I decided to try something. In my ear was my trustily bluetooth headset, one I normally use with my phone. My MacBook has bluetooth, so perhaps they could be used together. Now this concept of pairing and using a bluetooth headset with a computer is not new to me. I have been trying with limited success off and on sense 2004 to use a bluetooth headset with a computer. Honestly, i’ve never been able to make it work consistently. The first stumbling block I encountered was that Windows XP did not have native support for bluetooth functions until service pack 2. Before that, those of us on Windows had to use the Widcomm bluetooth stack and associated programs. Now the Widcomm stack as not half bad, but because it was not core windows some of the functions, like headset support, where/are quite spotty. When Microsoft finally decided bluetooth existed, they forced on us a substandard stack with fewer features and less capable associated programs. I have never been able to make Microsoft’s bluetooth stack in XP work with a headset. I have read conflicting reports that it is or is not possible, however in my experience, I was unable to.

When Vista came out, the Bluetooth stack supported headsets, but again, while I could “pair” my various Jabra headsets to Vista, I could never make them work. After a while, one learns that some things are not possible, regardless of what the hype/manuals/wikis say. So I just stopped trying. \

But, I’ve never been one to take “no” for an answer very well. So in my moment of dread for that tangle of cables, I tried to use my bluetooth headset with OS X 10.5.

It turns out that I did not have to even take the headset off of my head. I simply paired my MacBook with my Jabra BT500 (OSX has a specific headset option in Bluetooth), and within 20 seconds I was making my call via Skype with my bluetooth headset. Now in the interest of full disclose, I did have to tell Skype that I wanted to use the bluetooth headset in place of the system speakers and microphone, but still after 4 years of disappointment with Windows and Bluetooth, it was incredible to have that up and going that quick. I had a nearly hour long conversation, without any hiccups what so ever.

I guess it remains to be seen if my headset will continue to function with my MacBook under various combinations and situations, but for today, I have to say Apple scored another point in it’s favor with me.