Penmachine

John Gruber points to this article about PC upgrades by Marco Arment:

The upgrade market for average PC owners is dead. We killed it. [...]

In 1998, when everyone was happily using long filenames and browsing the internet and playing their first MP3s and editing their first scanned photos to email to their relatives, a five-year-old computer couldn't easily do any of these things.

But what common tasks in 2009 can't be accomplished by a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Windows XP SP2 and a cable internet connection—the average technology of 2004? Not much that regular people actually do.

That reminded me of something Geoff Duncan wrote at least five years ago, which I can no longer find anywhere online:

Your average PC user doesn't update anything. They just throw the computer away when it stops working and buy a new one, then don't change the software on it either for fear of breaking something.

Things haven't changed much, but we'll see if enough people need new computers in the next little while to give Windows 7 a boost. Microsoft's new operating system comes out this week.

Labels: geekery, microsoft, windows, windows7

Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte have used my tune "More Red Than Red" as theme music for their Windows Weekly podcast since 2006. But on their latest episode, they thought about maybe replacing it with the title track from the album "Enigma," by Microsoft's retired chief of Windows development (and longtime guitarist) Jim Allchin. So I tried to dissuade them at the Penmachine Podcast:

The "Turrican Van Halen" reference is part of the Windows Weekly show—it refers to the old Commodore 64/Atari/Amiga game "Turrican."

I made this available as Inside Home Recording TV Episode #5. You can also download it (H.264 video) or watch it at Viddler, Blip.tv, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo. Licensed for you to share and reuse, as long as you give me credit.

Labels: insidehomerecording, leolaporte, music, penmachinepodcast, podcast, video, windows

Back in the fall of 1995, after quitting as a full-time musician, I got a job at a magazine whose entire workflow ran on Microsoft Windows—something that was, and still is, unusual in publishing. I was someone with a long-time geek heritage and a passing familiarity with IBM PCs—as well as Unix, CP/M, and even TRS-80 and mainframe computers—but who had used only Apple II and Mac machines at home for more than a decade. So I figured I'd better get up to speed on Windows before I started the job.

My dad kindly loaned me one of his desktop computers, freshly booted up with Windows 95, which was then current and shiny new. The machine was underpowered, with only the minimum amount of RAM to install Windows 95, but I got the general gist of the operating system, and soon enough was the go-to technology guy at the office for many things. I returned the Windows box to my dad, and we haven't owned anything but Macs in our house ever since—10 or 11 of them over the years (I've lost count). Six are still actively working today.

So this view comes as a bit of a shock:

That's the screen of my MacBook, and you can see both native Mac programs (like Safari and the Finder) and native Windows programs (the Zune application and AVG anti-virus) running at the same time. I'm using Parallels Desktop to run both Mac OS X Leopard and the new beta version Windows 7 simultaneously. I can also reboot the MacBook into full native Windows 7 for extra speed and some additional interface eye candy.

Why did I do such a thing, and why install Windows on my Mac on January 22, the 25th anniversary of that famous Mac "1984" ad? Well, mostly because the Windows 7 beta is free (though if you want to get it, today is supposedly the last day), and it will work until August. I wanted to see how the new version is shaping up.

Because, honestly, I was falling a bit behind. After that magazine job, I worked at a Windows software developer for almost five years using Windows 98 and NT 4, then as a freelance technical writer working with NT 4 and Windows 2000. I only had a Windows laptop briefly when I first started at Navarik in 2003, then went Mac at work again. I never really did much with Windows XP, and I'm not sure I ever used Windows Vista at all myself, though I've seen others use it. As I said, our home was a Mac zone the whole time.

I needn't have worried. Windows 7 is a tweaked, improved, more secure version of Windows with better fit and finish, but it's still Windows. The Taskbar and Start menu and Windows Explorer are still there. So is the dreaded Registry Editor. As a listener to the Windows Weekly podcast since it began in 2006 (hey, I should listen, since I wrote the theme music—on a Mac), I knew how to get the beta version working best for me, and what to install for best results (Windows Live Essentials and Live Mesh, for instance).

In this new Internet age, with Macs more popular then ever, I have less reason than I did in 1995 to run Windows. But I like to keep current, and it's a bit of a thrill to see my MacBook boot up Windows like a real PC. Ahem.

Labels: apple, geekery, macosx, memories, software, windows, windows7

I like what the Mozilla Foundation developers are doing with the user interface for the upcoming Firefox version 3 web browser: matching the interface elements to the operating system:

While Firefox looks good now...

...sharing a general appearance with other applications in Windows or the Mac OS will make it a better experience, and I think it's a good investment of developer time.

Labels: apple, design, firefox, macosx, microsoft, software, web, windows, windowsvista, windowsxp

While there was neat information about Apple's new Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" operating system, coming in October, there wasn't all that much amazing or unexpected during the company's keynote presentation about it today. No new computers or iPods, for instance.

What was unexpected is the new beta of the Safari browser, which is suddenly available not only for the Mac, but also for Windows XP and Vista for the first time.

UPDATE: Macworld discusses some key features of the new browser. The new Find command is awesome—finally I'm no longer hunting for the result in a sea of text. That and the draggable/tear-offable tabs are worth the upgrade in themselves.

Labels: apple, browser, design, macosx, safari, windows, windowsvista, windowsxp