Rob's Rants

It’s been about a week now since I traded in my trusty Dell / Windows Vista PC at work for a new MacBook. I have accumulated a few additional thoughts on this transition.

Entourage is not Outlook. This is an understatement. Entourage is a poor substitute for Outlook and Microsoft should be utterly ashamed of themselves for allowing the Mac Office suite to ship without a proper corporate e-mail client for this long. I have finally read that Microsoft will be releasing Outlook for the Mac in late 2010, but come on … to go without a real corporate e-mail client this long is a traveshamockery! What’s missing in Entourage? For me, primarily the ability to effectively manage my e-mail via Auto Archiving, using the setup I wrote about here. Entourage has no real archiving capabilities, and it can’t even read .pst files, so my old Outlook archives are worthless. Holy crap, Microsoft … if you’re going to use a non-standard format (PST archives) for one of your flagship products, at least have the decency to support the format in the rest of your stuff. (And I know I can use programs like EEAX to archive messages in Entourage, but it’s still a pale imitation of Outlook’s built-in capability.)

The other thing I miss from Outlook is the ability to color-code messages based on parameters. In my case, having message where I was in the “To” address come in colored vs. messages where I was only CC’d.

I miss my HDD activity light. I never thought it would be that important, but I really miss seeing the blinking drive light telling me the system is at least doing something. I can’t tell you how often I think the Mac has frozen. Maybe I’m just conditioned to Windows and Mac people don’t ever think that the system has locked because it rarely does … but I still need some reassurance. The HDD light is like my Windows security blanket; as long as it’s blinking, I know my little machine is working.

One Note & Visio, I miss you too. I’m sure there are Mac equivalents for these programs — maybe even better ones. But right now I miss both of these programs enough to be extra thankful for Parallels so I can have them running. Especially One Note. And I know many people say that OmniGraffle is better than Visio, and they may be right. But I am much more a technical drawer than a creative drawer, so Visio works great for me.

Ability to Run Internet Explorer. I know, I know. Firefox is my default browser for all things personal. But in my work life I am a Product Manager of a web-based tool that is used by a large community held hostage to Internet Explorer for various reasons. So I need to run IE to test this site frequently. Currently, Parallels allows me to do this, but going through the trouble of installing a virtual machine and a whole second OS is something that even most moderately advanced users aren’t going to do.

Parallels Desktop kicks ass! This is one well designed piece of hardware and running Parallels on it is truly a pleasurable experience. If one is willing to go through the very minimal hassle necessary to install Parallels and a second OS, the payoff is well worth it. Hell, this MacBpok runs Vista Ultimate as fast (if not faster) than my Dell while running OS X and Mac applications. I am truly impressed.

What the f*&k is a ‘COMMAND’ key? I know it’s been around since the dawn of the Apple personal computer, but let’s face facts … the ‘CONTROL’ (‘CTRL’) key won the war. Like VHS vs. Beta, one is victorious and the other deserves to be thrown to the dustbin of history. ‘COMMAND’ and the little clover symbol had a good run but it’s time to pack it in. Hell, even Homer Simpson figured out what the ‘CTRL’ key did.

The backlit keyboard and auto-dimming screen are great. As someone who types on dark trains a lot, I am very appreciative of the auto-dimming screen. On dark sections between train stations the screen doesn’t singe my retinas, but when we pull in under the lights, it brightens so I can still see it. Brilliant! It took a bit of time to get used to it, but now I think it’s an awesome feature.

That’s my take after a week … I admire the Mac very much as a piece of well designed hardware. But I’m not sure I’d spend my own money on one. Honestly, though most things work well enough, there isn’t really that much less tweaking required for the Mac versus a PC. I’ve had a great time configuring virtual machines and other features over the last week, so the idea that a Mac will just come out of the box perfectly equipped for anything you might want to do is complete rubbish. In a real corporate world, you’d better be prepared to tweak it.

This is an issue that infuriated me about Vista. Overall I thought it was a good OS and a decent improvement over XP. I never had the stability problems that many reported so I’ve been pretty happy. Except for one thing that annoyed the heck out of me — at random startup intervals Vista completely rearranged the icons on my desktop. And that pisses me off!

I haven’t found a fix that stops Vista from doing it, but I did find a way to quickly repair the damage. Apparently, back in the Windows NT days, Microsoft had a similar problem. And instead of fixing it, they released a simple set of DLLs that add a “Save Desktop Configuration” and a “Restore Desktop Configuration” option to a system right-click menu. Turns out they still work!

The simplest implementation I found is located at http://users.rcn.com/taylotr/icon_restore.html. The web page was last updated in 2003, but who cares — it’s installed and working on my Vista Ultimate machine.

Two quick notes about useful stuff I’ve found this week.

1. Lorem Ipsum text in Word
2. Running programs as another user in Vista

First, I needed a placeholder in a document and I usually use Lorem Ipsum text (see http://www.lipsum.com/ for an explanation and a text generator). I had forgotten, but thanks to Google and the authors at How-to Geek remembered, that Word 2007 has a built in Lorem Ipsum generator. It is simply inserted like an Excel function with the syntax: =lorem([paragraphs],[sentences]). Note that both parameters are optional so a simple =lorem() gives you 3 paragraphs of 2 sentences each. Sweet

The second issue was that I was running as one user on my laptop and I needed to run a program as another user. In XP and prior, this was simple — there is a “run as” command in the context (right-click) menu for any program icon. But that was removed in Vista (probably too convenient). A quick search reminded me of the ‘runas’ shell command which you can run from the command line. That worked for me in this instance. But I wanted something more convenient. My searches turned up this article on Groovypost which explains one way to get your content menu command back. Double sweet.

Just thought you should know.