Today I was amazed. I was using Microsoft Office 2007 on my PC at work to document one of our products. I tried to perform a routine edit operation on some text when Office crashed. Kindly it re-launched and recovered my work. So I attempted to perform the same edit operation again. Guess what?… It crashed again. But this time not only did it restore my work but it also displayed this dialog:
Is it just me that thinks any program that needs it’s own version of Norton Diagnostics built-in and powerful document recovery is probably just a badly written piece of software? Why should end-users have to put up with this nonsense. No program should require a built-in diagnostic suite. I wonder what my Mum would make of this screen if it popped up when she was working on her essay?
Everyday I use my iMac and I am more and more convinced that Mac’s are indeed better than Windows based PC’s. Having spent most of my life being a PC nerd I feel I can say this without bias.
As a Web Developer I have to make sure all my websites work on all web browsers. I have to make sure that the site I have designed looks great in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE6, IE7 and IE8! Obviously IE is not available on the Mac so last year I decided to purchase Windows XP Professional and VMware Fusion. Taken from the VMware site about the product:
Seamlessly run your favorite Windows applications and devices, on any Intel-based Mac. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion is the easiest way to switch to Mac—letting you bring all of your Windows applications with you, making the most of your Windows software investment, while providing the perfect safety blanket for the switch.
What is great about VMware Fusion is that it is not entirely an emulator. The CPU is not emulated but instead uses virtualization. This means that Windows running under VMware is getting full power from the CPU. What is even better is as my iMac is dual core, VMware Fusion gives one core to OS X and the other to Windows. This results in almost now slowdown on the host or client operating systems.
VMware Fusion is built on the industry’s most mature, and powerful virtualization engine, under development for more than a decade. This powerful technology delivers the speed and stability you expect, with low impact on your Mac, letting you enjoy the full power of your hardware.
Using VMware Fusion allowed me to installed two copies of Windows XP one for IE6 and one for IE7/8. I then ran both versions of Windows XP at the same time each occupying one of OS X 10.5’s spaces (virtual desktops). That’s three OS’s at the same time! I was amazed at how smooth they all ran and how little impact running two XP’s had on OS X. I could switch between OS X, Windows XP (running IE8) and Windows XP (running IE6) seamlessly. I was even editing a large file in Adobe Fireworks in OS X and playing music in iTunes.
I challenge any off-the-shelf PC to do better. This is just one more thing that makes me realise why I could never go back to owning a PC.
Google have just announced that they are entering the Operating System market.
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
This is sure to ruffle some feathers at Microsoft and Apple. It seems that it will first be targeted at Netbooks and then at full desktop PC’s.
