Because, I’ve got a tad bit of a confession to make. About my HacBook… yeah, I’m calling it a Gateway again. As it turns out, the OSX86 scene isn’t really developed enough to make my gateway a good hacbook pro. It kept overheating, the device support was spotty (especially bluetooth and ACPI) and it was gutting my battery life.

Since I’m a fan of computers I can actually use, I have decided to dust off my actually legit copy of Windows Home Premium, suck it up, and run Vista for a while.

If you’re a patron of my crazy ass rants about the majesty of desktop operating systems, you’d know that I will never use Windows XP, ever again. And, since my little Gateway NX260X will run Windows Vista just as well as anything else, and not to mention the fact that I’m a sucker for eye candy – even when its second rate – I’ve decided to abandon my Leopard build and go with Vista on my primary partition.

Net Gain? Windows Live Writer, better battery performance, and at least I can depend on my hardware. I’m not saying I won’t install Linux in its place tomorrow, especially since Microsoft products have an annoying tendency to ruin my life, but one of the main tenants of my whole Leopard strategy is that it just flippin works. Leopard on a Gateway is the opposite of my mantra. However, Vista on gateway? Oh yeah, it’s going to work. It might convince me to abandon my plans to use it as a workhorse for web design, but at least I can use it when I want to.

Actually, I’m probably going to download a couple of different builds from a few different circles and play around with Leopard on my spare drive. Especially since, when it works, it works like a mathafuckin champion. I just need something a little more polished than what Kalyway 10.5.2 and combo upgrades and a drive full of Kexts can provide today.

Anyways, stay tuned – There’s no way I’m done trying to turn this thing in to a Mac.

I was trying to figure out what to do about all these Microsoft browsers that destoy the prettiness of my theme. I’ve decided that i’d keep the astetic rolling in IE7 as it supports PNG transparency, but you folks who insist on using Internet Explorer 6 can just quit bitching and go home. I’m sick to death of people with Internet Explorer 6. It’s like, yeah - we get it - you don’t know how to use a computer. Get off the internet.

What I did was gut all the drop shadows, uglifiy the theme so at least it wouldn’t bother me in the future, and give you something I’m going to call Safe Mode. It’s like regular mode, except uglier and hastilly thrown together. I figure it’s only fitting, since I’m doing it for Microsoft user’s sake

So, I have, on my spare 80 gig drive, a running copy of Windows 7 Build 6801. This is a post PDC 08 build that still doesn’t have all the pretties Microsoft’s internal build’s got. It looks a lot like Windows Vista, except for a few slight differences that make this a right decent little beta build, as far as Microsoft OS’s go.

The first thing you’ll notice is that, unlike the M3 builds Microsoft were boasting about with the conspicuous dock-like Task bar replacement that we’re suppose to believe wasn’t copped from OSX, we’ve got something that looks an awful lot like Windows Vista’s Taskbar. It’s OK, though - there’s a few new features that are worth noting.

If you’ll look to the left of the system clock beside the tray, you’ll see a small glass panel. If you click this, it clears to your desktop. If you right click on it, it’ll give you a context menu that offers you the abbility to ’show desktop’ or ‘preview desktop’. As of this build, they are exactly the same thing. I assume, however, that when finished, the preview desktop feature will remove the window elements from the glass windows decorators so you can see your desktop while keeping perspective of the windows you have in play.

I don’t, for the life of me, understand this feature. You can sort of see what Microsoft’s going for with the new Windows Management feature, which I shall call draggable hotsides.  I don’t know what Microsoft’s calling it, so I shall name it here.

Basically, and let me see if I can’t get a screen shot of this, when you are dragging a window, if you drag the window to the top of the screen, where your cursor actually touches the screen edge, a glassified outline of the window will fill the screen. when you drop the window, it will maximize. If you drag the window to the left or the right, the outline will take up only half the screen, pinned to whichever side you drug it to. In this way, you can easily tile vertically two windows so that you may compare them. Dragging the window to the bottom does nothing, and you can restore a maximized window with this method as well.

It’s kinda obvious what Micosoft’s looking to achive here. Between Compiz (Linux) and Quartz (OSX), Aero just doesn’t offer the world anything new. With 7, they are trying to play catch-up and offer us a few ‘Windows Exclusive’ features that people will use. I haven’t seen anything do the split window hot-sides, however Compiz can do the maximize-restore effect, and then some.

Between this, the Live Thumbnail features that are also not in this build, and the pre-existing Flip 3D stuff they had in Vista, I think Microsoft looks at this as a slam dunk. Sorry, Microsoft. You’re wrong. You want to sell me a copy of Windows 7? Add Expose. Call it whatever you want, pretend you did it first, I don’t care. Just add the fucking thing. Expose is the single most useful feature in this history of Graphical User Interfaces. Windows is the only OS I can’t do it in. I know, there’s 3rd party apps that do a terrible emulation of it, but I want something native and fast. It would go a long way in making a de-switcher out of me.

The system tray has gotten a nice little re-vamp as well. Instead of hiding the system tray icons, and showing them with a spread-out button, they have a pop-up windowette that contains all the hidden system tray icons. I imagine this will be far better when they implement the WinDock.

The Start Menu has also recieved a few nice touch-ups. Start menu searches now take up the entire start pane, the transparency effects are now more glass-like, which looks a lot better. Oh yeah, maximizing windows doesn’t remove the transparency effects like it does in Windows Vista. I hated that, it made the OS seem plastic and cheap. At least now, I’ve got more pretty glass on the screen then I ever even really cared to.

Which, brings me to my next point. Has anyone noticed that Glass really isn’t all that pretty? It looks good with specific desktop backgrounds if you tweak it, but overall I actually prefer the opaque nature of my Windows in Leopard. That goes for Windows Vista as well. I’m sure they’ll rape the Visual Style by RC1, so maybe they’ll get a lot of my nagging problems taken care of.

That’s all for now. They’ve finally added some of the apps they were promising with Longhorn, and some of our old favorites have recieved a much-needed revamp. More in part two.

You know I’m a Mac Guy at heart, right? So, when I tell you that I’ve got to download, install it, and figure out how Microsoft’s going to knock it out of the park with this whole Windows Vienna thing, don’t be confused. I fully expect Microsoft to ruin this, but it’s not going to stop me from oogling the new pretties all over this blog.

So, let’s discuss for a minute what Microsoft needs to with Windows 7. I’ve read a few articles about it, however I don’t hold them as gospel. The truth is, Redmond is filled to the brim with bumbling idiots. I believe, however, that with the kind of money Balmer’s undoubtedly dumping in to this product, somebody might just surface that can keep the Windows Team on track. So, let’s assume for a moment that Microsoft hussles up a Steve Jobs like character, let’s assume that with this release, Microsoft finally gets it’s shit together.

Microsoft needs to make Windows smaller. They don’t need to do it with the scalpel, either. They need to take a butchers knife to the bloody thing. They need to get rid of all legacy code, they need to clean up the codebase and chop support for every application that’s not designed by the latest developer tools.

‘But Doug - This will mean that I won’t be able to run Word Star for Windows or some other rediculiously obscure application that I cling to because I’m afraid of modern software’ - Too bad. Install Parallels. Your idiotic need to run software that no one in their right mind would still use has been holding Windows Back for a decade now. It’s time that Microsoft breaks backwards compatibility and builds a better mouse trap.

Surely, you must be saying to yourself, they need to do more than break backwards compatibility. You’re right. They need to radically redesign their operating system. From the ground up. I would say they should pull an Apple and use UNIX as the codebase, but Microsoft has a vested interest in developing their own in-house tools. Besides, MinWin probably isn’t too bad. It was a good idea; compartimentalize the the Operating System, make the kernel small and flexable. Make the User Experience built on top of that kernel as small and flexable as they can. Compartimentalize the OS, take a good hard look at their competition, and steal every single one of their ideas with merrit.

I think the conventional wisdom about a total revamp of the OS, and why many of the more astute technical pundits think Microsoft’s going in a different direction (Vista Version 2), is that this will only serve to anger the people even more than they already are. They’ll run in to migration problems and head-aches and might then switch over to the competition.

I happen to think that it’s exactly what Microsoft Needs to prevent people from switching to the competition. Microsoft needs their next operating system to outclass OSX. It needs to be brilliantly designed, it needs to position itself so that it can finally stop playing catch-up and start innovating. Most importantly, Microsoft needs to stand up and start boldy controlling the direction computer makers head with its software. It needs to challenge them to build better products, it needs to enable OEMs to build these products with a new generation of cleanly designed, functional tools and software from Microsoft, and it desperately needs to make an ecosystem of competition between five or six fierce companies trying to find the magic formula that knocks Apple down a few pegs.

It’s plainly obvious to me that if Microsoft’s game plan is just a code clean up of Windows Vista, developers are going to start taking matters in to their own hands. It’s already getting to the point where the power users are jumping ship. After a while, developers are going to want to start doing things that your OEM copy of Windows won’t be able to do. Drivers will be slow and cumbersome, system speed will degrade to the point where nothing good can be ran on it… The era of monolithic kernels should be coming to it’s end.

With Virtualization and an incredibly fast x64 platform provided by every major player in the processor market, Microsoft has an opportunity to start the glacieral process of changing the public perception of the software it designs. Instead of doing it with clever ads and superficial changes, like they did with Windows Vista, they need to change public perception by stepping up to the plate and releasing a solid product.

Here’s to hoping. I doubt Microsoft has it in them; but I hope they do. Trust me, nothing would make me happier than finding an operating system that’s better than Leopard. I’m always looking for the next big thing. But, somehow, I expect ‘7′ will be the final nail in the Windows coffin. I figure, five or ten years from now, Microsoft will only be able to sell a copy of WIndows when somebody wants to run it in a virtual enviroment.

Yeah, so you know that post I just wrote about why Leopard’s better than Vista?

Keychain is the password manager for the Mac. I have passwords on everything  I do: Websites, Changing Settings, accessing my files, all of which I want to keep private, all of which I loathe typing passwords for. Instead of how Windows handles this very important task, which is to say barely at all, Mac’s store all of your password in an encrypted system in a part of an adanced UNIX operating system that’s far to scrutinized and well designed for a bunch of idiots with Visual Basic to exploit. And, based on how you want it to roll, will make your life online far easier… or more secure. Whatever, that’s what keychain does.

I had a need to enter Keychain just now. Lowenbehol, the little bastards all in Japanesse. Since I don’t read japaneese, nor really understand what exactly happened right there, I’m kinda stumped as to what to do. What caused it? I bootlegged OSX and it’s running on a Gateway, that’s what. Nevertheless, I still need to get in to Keychain.

What to do? I’ll tell you. Launch Finder, and connect to Kid’s MacBook. You click Connect As and login with his user account. Then, you double click the icon that says Macintosh HD. Then, you  click on the icon that says Applications. Then, you click the icon that says Utilities. Then, you drag the icon that says Keychain Access on to your desktop. Then, you click on the new icon that says Keychain Access.

As it turns out, his Keychain Access program will work on my computer without a problem.  That’s my point. It’s better designed. I’ll tell you what, watch what happens the next time one of your windows application gimps out for some reason. What I managed to presicely describe in detail in a short paragraph will involve backing up all of your data and three hours of work on Windows Vista.

I just wanted to point that out. Thank you for your patronage.