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.

Have no fear, your computer is simple to operate. It’s true. In most circumstances, being baffled by a computer, be it a Mac or a PC, is generally a sign that you don’t know how to use the bloody thing. Most tasks on a computer are fairly simple to perform, even if you don’t know how to do it.

My father just made the big switch from Mac to a PC, and he’s finding that he has to relearn how to do basic tasks. This can be a major pain in the ass. There’s no doubt that there is a learning curve between Mac and Windows, however it gets far easier to deal with once you understand why your mac works the way it works.

Just to be clear, this is a ‘Macintosh for Idiots’ guide, however Mac OS X doesn’t have a monopoly on all of these features. Every modren operating system is designed around graphical metaphors, and if you learn to understand their meaning, your life will be a lot better.

So, let’s begin.

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Somewhere, on some IRC server that only folks who are hardcore in some Usenet Group would know about, there are a group of people plotting the take down of Microsoft. Sure, there’s probably several groups that fit this description, but only one of them have a chance at succeeding. These people work for a company called Canonical, and they are the makers of Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu really isn’t much different than the bazillions of distros of linux that tens of hundreds of people use religiously. It runs the solid Debian kernel, it comes with the familiar and pretty ordinary Gnome Desktop Environment, and it’s standard bundle gives you all the usual open-source suspects like Open Office, Pidgin and Firefox.

No, there isn’t hardly anything unusual about Ubuntu Linux at all. You pop in the disk, install it, and you’re up and running. All your drivers work, everything is just as you’d expect.

This, my friends, is hardly usual in a Linux Distro. Ubuntu’s Device Compatibility trumps Windows XP’s, and I would be willing to bet that it rivals Vista.

I’ve been an avid fan of Ubuntu since those Dapper Drake days, and I have to say, inspite of a few glaring flaws in their blue tooth implementation, namely having to drop to the terminal to pair my Bluetooth Mouse, it’s finally getting to the point where Microsoft should start worrying.

Even before Compiz forked in to Beryl and Desktop Compositing was new, Ubuntu was far better than Vista as far as graphical features were. It’s not as pretty as Windows Vista, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a billion times more usable, freer, and just as impressive looking when you show it off to your friends.

It makes me wonder, though. My father, who just discovered Expose and Dashboard earlier today, might decide that such features aren’t really necessary for being productive in front of a computer.

I figure, though, that once he realizes how useful visual aides are in turning a shit computing experience in to the best one he’ll ever have, he might just realize why Mac OSX and Ubuntu beat the hell out of Micosoft’s Windows.

You know, I always suspected - but the PST database, however the hell it works, must not be very reliable. Look, I don’t know exactly how Microsoft Office Works, I didn’t write it. I wasn’t even in the same state at the time.

No, I’m a lowly computer guy. I want to get contacts from Microsoft Outlook into Apple’s Contact Book. It shouldn’t be hard. In theory, you go in to Outlook, and follow the Import/Export Wizard in the File Menu and dump you out a CSV or a Tab Delimited Text File, and go import that motherfucker on your Mac.

Kid, in his ongoing endeavor to switch from Windows XP to the exponentially more awesome Mac Platform sorta needs to get his shit from Outlook to Address Book.app.

You’d reckon, since Outlook can export text files, and Address Book can read text files, this would be perhaps one octive above trivial. No, it doesn’t work that way at all. First off, even Microsoft Excel can’t figure out what the hell Outook’s trying to portray in the bloody file, and even when you can screw with the contents of the file so that maybe you could import it, No. There’s no telling why it won’t work, just that it doesn’t.

So, you start scratching your head wondering what in the world you’re going to do. Then, it hits you - vCards! I know! I’ll go to my contacts list in Outlook 03, Select All, and go to the Actions menu and forward every damn one of those to Kid’s e-mail.

No, that won’t work either. Kid uses AOL’s IMAP service for his e-mail in Outlook (which, BTW he has used probably once… their IMAP implementation is exactly as advertised though - kudos AOL… I still hate you, though) and AOL auto responds with the e-mail being to complex to send. I guess that’s what happens when you have like 300 Contacts.

In an attempt to seem witty and cool, I try to bulk save the 300+ Attachments to a folder so I can get them on the Mac and import them. Outlook 2003 doesn’t have that feature. So, I try to save the message, complete with the attachments, so I can extract them on the Mac. Couldn’t find a way to do that.

So, I head off to Google to find an answer to my woes. Somewhere, I found a blog post claiming you can install Thunderbird on the PC, Import the files, then export them to an LDAP file and finally import that in to Address Book.app.

I can’t really say that it didn’t work - but it mangled his Distribution Lists, so by the time you got it imported you’d have to spend the next six years fixing all of the problems.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is exactly the way Microsoft intended it. These are those switching pangs people bitch about as a reason not to learn a new platform. Shit like this. It doesn’t even make sense, either. Why would you reward Microsoft for their total, utter, inexplicable ineptitude? I say, when Micosoft makes an application that is totally uncooperative when your trying to accomplish some task, you don’t reward them by still using it.

You say ‘You know what, Microsoft? Fuck you’, you start from scratch - if for any other reason than to finally have something that doesn’t reak of suckitude, and you punish Microsoft by taking away from their market share.

Remember, it doesn’t hurt Microsoft if you quit using Windows. It hurts them when you switch to their competitors.

I know what you’re thinking. But Doug! Starting from scratch is hard! Do you know what I did when I switched to Linux just to find out that Media Player 11 took it upon itself to override all 7000 MP3’s on my hard drive with it’s incompatible bullshit ID3 Tag implementation? First, I sought a program that would salvage it. When that didn’t work, I started over. In the process, I discovered Amarok; it’s like iTunes, but better and for Linux.

Sorry Apple, Amarok is king of the MP3 Database. Having said that, when I imported my Amarok library in to iTunes when I switched, I even had album art. When I copied my iTunes Library to my Ubuntu laptop this weekend? It worked fine. Literally, I copied the file over, opened amarok and intel took it from there. Pretty much, if you want some shit to work, it will - just so long as your not dealing with Microsoft.

So, Kid finally hosed his 50th Laptop. Well, I say hosed, it really works just fine - he just dropped it and the charger doesn’t work and it pops in and out of the charging state if you move the laptop.

It works fairly well if you just keep the bloody thing still, but my dad hasn’t used a desk since I was in high school. You see, most desks face some kind of wall, and he isn’t down for staring at a wall all day. If he’s going to work on a computer, that computer’s going to be laying on his lap while he’s in a recliner, staring at a TV. Kid loves him some Judge Judy.

So, sometime in the not too distant past, he dropped his laptop or something and broke the AC adapter dongle. I say he broke it, but it still gets the job done. You just have to be careful with it.

So, being that I’m a hardcore computer geek that he bugs constantly with all of his “Why does my computer get viruses” and “what’s this thing with the blue sky and the green field? and why do I have pictures of vanilla folders on it?” questions, he asked me about what kind of laptop I’d get if I were him.

Seriously, he asked me! It’s like asking Henry Ford what kind of car he’d buy.

So, anyways, he got his 13″ White MacBook friday. It’s kind of strange, you see Kid’s a PC. An unproductive, style less, install-every-screen-saver-and-browser-addon-on-the-internet-then-complain-his-system-gets-viruses PC. Since the day I got my Mac, and before then with my years of GNU/Linux game, about how Windows was like the only OS on the planet that I’d never use on a computer that I wanted to run.

He was on the fence about buying a Mac for like two weeks. He had all the common questions, i.e. ‘Will it run all of my applications?’ - ‘can I use Microsoft Office’ - ‘when I send e-mail attachments, will people be able to read them?’ all of which the answers are yes. I had to convince him though, the boy didn’t believe me… but he finally came around.

So, he gets his computer Friday, and the first thing I do, after installing Office 08, is throw a copy of Parallels Desktop on it. I haven’t used Parallels since my brief stint as a Mac user with the original Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro’s. Christ oh’ mighty, it’s gotten better.

Parallels has a nifty environment migration tool that literally mirrored his running Windows XP laptop, and built a bootable disk image on his mac. If you’re thinking about trying it out but would like to hear a user testimonial…

Kid has no idea what virtualization is. He doesn’t understand that with virtualization, you can run a sandboxed operating system within another operating system. These concepts are alien to him. I did manage to show him how to click a dock icon (after a lengthy explanation of how to click using the Apple Mighty Mouse - total junk), and with no more preparation than single click, he managed to launch his old laptop on his new laptop.

Clearly, this astonished the old bat. After about a day of him asking me virtually no questions about how to use his strange new machine, I walk in to the living room and see him playing Spider Solitaire. Microsoft’s Spider Solitaire.

I asked him what he thought about his new mac, and he looks up at me and says ‘I can’t tell the difference. You said this thing would be different.’ I’m like, Kid, you got to leave Parallels.

I’ve got to admit though, and this isn’t an exaggeration, his old laptop was an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1.6GHz with 1GB of RAM, and his MacBook is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB’s, and his Windows XP experience is like 30% faster. In a virtual machine. He didn’t even have to reinstall his printer drivers. He literally can’t tell the difference.

I imagine, after a few weeks of getting confused with the whole ‘desktop within a desktop’ concept, he’ll yell at me and demand that I turn off all the crap that he doesn’t need… i.e. get rid of OSX and just run Windows. Especially since he’s convinced that now that he’s running on a Macintosh, Windows is now impervious to viruses. I’m like ‘Kid, it doesn’t work that way’, but I know he wasn’t paying attention.

More as it develops…