Category: My Mac

Chronicles of my virtual home.

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More Great News for AAPL

VMWare, the operating system virtualization powerhouse has just released Fusion, their virtualization machine for OS X. To my mind, this is huge news for Apple, Inc., because this means that Apple is gaining market share rapidly.

It also means that the suspicions of many that Apple has been gaining market share from the Unix/Linux segment of the market is also true. VMWare is clearly betting that OS X will be the dominant Unix flavor in a very short time. VMWare’s entry into the OS X market also means that they fully expect Apple to gain market share from the Windows segment of the market as well, and VMWare is all too happy to make quite a few bucks in this process.

The list of features in Fusion is impressive. Seamless integration with existing Boot Camp Windows installations, full Directx support for games, full USB device support, full networking, and seamless integration of Windows into OS X. It’s almost as if they figured out how to do what neither Windows nor Apple could do: tame Windows!

If you are holding AAPL, as I am, hold on a while longer. The next few months are going to be very interesting. In fact, Apple’s announcement of new iMacs tomorrow (August 7, 2007) promises to be very interesting.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is big. Check this out.

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Browser Wars on Windows: Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer

There were many who believe that the browser wars are long over, but this is simply not true. With Apple’s entry into the Windows browser space and Mozilla’s spectacular capturing of Internet Explorer’s market share, there is little doubt that the browser wars are back on! Comparison of Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer on Windows XP

How does one decide? It was quite easy for me. On the Windows platform, Internet Explorer simply cannot compete with Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The collection of themes and extensions (collectively called add-ons) make Firefox indispensable.

But, not everybody needs or wants to have all of the amazing extensions that block ads, help with html code, script, and manage online social networks. In those instances, one wants pure browsing enjoyment, and the absolute latest Safari beta (3.0.3 as of this writing) delivers. Safari provides this pleasure in three ways: fast beautiful rendering, elegant interface and a good collection of basic and desirable features.

The first surprising thing about Safari for Windows is its speed. In my experience, it renders pages far faster than Internet Exploder and Firefox. In addition, it offers Apple’s own brand of font smoothing in the appearance tab of Safari’s preferences. If you click the thumbnail above and click again to see the full-sized image, you will see what a huge difference this makes. The pages rendered in Safari do not only appear faster, but they appear crisper. The graphics are much more alive and the text resembles written text in finish.

The aesthetics extend from page rendering to the interface itself. Safari is made to look exactly like iTunes in order to leverage iPod’s popularity to push Windows users toward Apple’s services (iPhone and iTunes Music Store) and user interface. (This is Apple’s way of encouraging people to switch, and Apple’s way of building a revenue stream on Windows to make money from users who don’t want to switch.) Some people think iTunes looks drab, but it has an elegant design in as much as it places all the right buttons in the right places. After all, many users who don’t have iPods like iTunes because it is as easy to use as a CD player: press play, and listen to music. Safari’s user interface is similarly spartan, neat and functional. Like iTunes, it’s ready to go on installation.

Safari is not nearly as feature-rich as Internet Explorer or Firefox, but it need not be. It has all the features one wants. It has a terrific popup blocker, which politely asks you if you want to turn it on upon the fist popup encounter. It has a spell checker that checks what you are typing as you type (this is not activated by default, however). It has a very elegant tabbed browsing scheme (also not activated by default), and a superb forms manager that really takes the pain out of entering forms over and over. The “private browsing” feature allows you to conceal your tracks on public terminals. Like most Apple products, it has everything you need, though not everything you want.

So, Firefox is the best browser on the Windows platform, but if all of the bells and whistles of Firefox are making you dizzy, get Safari and enjoy internet surfing in its purest form. Until they let you out of the office, this could very well be your only source of pleasure.

PS If you are curious to make Windows XP look like OS X, read this. PNM

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Mac Aqua Look on Windows XP

After nearly fours years on a Macintosh, working on Micro$osft Windoze XP has become quite a chore. Fortunately, given time and administrator privileges, one can remedy the Windoze GUI doldrums by making the Micro$oft interface pretty.Apple OS X Panther Aqua Look for Microsoft Windows XPThe process is not for the faint of heart, but it could be made easier if all the right information was in one place. Hopefully, I will achieve that here.

First things first. Microsoft prevents you from installing any themes of which it does not approve. In other words, they insist that you install the drab garbage that survives their pathetic design department. So, the first thing you need to do is remove the Windows XP restrictions on installing third party themes and visual styles. You can do this with Uxtheme Multi-patcher. It does not work with 64-bit Windows, and it is recommended that you be on Windows XP SP-2. (In other words, make sure that your operating system is up to date.) At first, it looks scary, because a lot of strange things happen to your computer when this program does its thing, but just follow the on-screen instructions, and after rebooting, you can go ahead with the next step.

C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Now, you can download and install the themes and visual styles that you want. I recommend going straight for the visual styles because themes present a pain that is not justified by the payoff. Download the Tiger visual style from devinatart.com, and place the Tiger theme folder inside the C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\ folder as shown in the screen capture to the right.

How to Activate a theme in Windows XPNow, to activate the theme, right-click on your desktop, click “properties”. First, go to the “Themes” tab and make sure that themes are “enabled”. Then, go to the appearance tab, and choose the Tiger theme that you want from the drag-down menus. Lastly, be sure to hit the “effects” button and enable “Clear Type” font smoothing to get the prettiest picture you possibly can.

I assume that you know how to change the desktop background, so add the coup de grace with an Apple wallpaper, navigate to the same Tiger folder, then go inside it and go to the “wallpapers” folder, and choose the wallpaper that turns you on. Strangely enough, I chose one of the standard Windows wallpapers on my computer. I guess not everything that Microsoft provides is crap.

And, that’s it. Now, you have made your ugly Windows XP desktop into this ravishingly beautiful Macintosh OS 10.4 Tiger desktop. Isn’t the Aqua graphical user interface beautiful? Now, you are well on your way to making the final switch to Macintosh. Everybody should. It’s the only way to force Microsoft to be original.

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New Uptime Record

New uptime record of 28 days Immediately after the first recorded high uptime, came this one. It was recorded just before the next OS upgraded prompted me to restart my trusty, crusty old 867 MHz G4 Powerbook Macintosh (Titanium).

As always, many, many software packages were compiled and installed by fink. The various browsers, Firefox, Omniweb and Safari were opened and closed hundreds of times, the abominable programs Word and Excel (by Micro$soft) were run numerous times, and many photos and graphics were processed via iPhoto and Omnigraffle and imagemagick.

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First Official Record Uptime

Uptime on February 15, 2007Over 22 days may well be the current record. My lovely 12″ 867 MHz Powerbook has now served me faithfully (even though the factory hard drive did not) for three and one-half years. I cannot justify buying a new Mac because save for occasional speed problems, this baby stays up and running without reboot no matter how much punishment I dish out: working with 20 megabyte data files, compiling hundreds of megabytes of software, closing opening and closing and opening applications over and over, having Microsoft programs (and Apple programs on occasion) crash, installing new software and moving daily between a wired and a wireless networking environment. Never a hitch, never a hickup.

On this day in February 1997, the streak had to end because new operating system updates required a reboot. 🙁