Thought Patterns

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.

My iMac’s specs:

• OS X 10.5.7
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• 320GB HDD

Cameron Operating Systems, Uncategorized, Web Development iMac, OS X, Virutalization, VMWare Fusion, Windows XP

I know that my blog posts so far have been very Mac orientated, so not to break with tradition here’s another Mac related post. A colleague at work who’s a web/graphic designer gave me a link today to very neat program. This program shows a floating preview of incoming mail so that you can determine whether the message requires your immediate attention.

Mail.appetizer is a plug-in for Apple’s Mail and the current version is a beta, but so far a very stable one. There is also a panther version available.

Cameron Operating Systems, Software Mail.app, OS X

I decided that I needed to change the default search provider in Safari from Google-US to Google-UK. I thought that this would be a five second trip to Safari preferences, how wrong was I.

For some strange unknown reason Apple has decided to hard code the search provider (Google US) into the Safari application itself. I found various guides on the internet on how to change the default search provider, but they all required use of the Terminal and the not very easy to use editor Vi. Not forgetting that if you make any mistake when editing, it will render Safari completely useless.

After almost giving up I did one last search on Google and came across an excellent Safari plug-in AcidSearch. This plug-in not only lets you change the default search provider in Safari, it also lets setup multiple search providers which you can search on via a handy drop-down menu.

It seems development on AcidSearch has ceased and no longer works with latest version of Safari. All is not lost though as I have found a worthy replacement. Introducing Inquisitor! Inquisitor does a lot more than just allow you to change the default search engine, it completely enhances the entire search experience.

Website: http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/

Cameron Software Browsers, OS X, Safari

One of the things that you’ve been able to do in IE on the PC for years is run multiple versions along side each other on the same machine. But Mac users wanting to do this with Safari have been out of luck, that is until now.

Today I stumbled upon Multi-Safari which claims to work round this problem. You have to install special packaged versions of Safari which can be download from the site. Each version contains the relevant version of WebKit and the Safari web browser. Installing these special versions of Safari do not overwrite the main WebKit, so you can safely install these without fear of damaging the main Safari installation.

Cameron Software, Web Development Browsers, OS X, Safari