1. This is a nerdy post.  I’m not even going to try hiding that.   Apologies to readers who are not even slightly interested in nerdy posts.  I promise to write something less nerdy next time.
2. I am primarily a Mac user, and I fully expect this to influence my opinions to a certain extent, despite my attempts to be unbiased.
3. I am using Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 on an HP laptop with a 2GHz dual-core AMD processor and 3GB RAM.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into what, for many people, is probably old news.  Vista has, after all, been around for some time now, despite its monumentally slow and cautious uptake (mainly due to the shocking support for old hardware and software).  It’s worth putting it all in context though, and consider what other products Microsoft brought out before and what their competitors have been doing.

When Windows XP was released we all rejoiced.  It was more stable than previous versions of Windows, it looked prettier, and boasted better performance on the same hardware.  It was easier to use, more accessible to people who had never used a computer before, and was quickly adopted by home users and businesses alike.  Around the same sort of time Apple released its Mac OS X, which was built on a solid Unix framework and looked pretty.  It caught on quickly with existing Mac users, but didn’t catch many PC users because it was still just that little bit too alien to make the transition easy.  XP was the overall winner of that initial battle, and Microsoft kept its market share with ease.  Then we entered ‘The Great Silence’ in the Windows world, where we heard little more than security updates, despite Apple bringing out version after version of new Mac OSes, each one better than the last, each one slowly but surely eating away at Microsoft’s supporters.  And when Vista finally did make it out into the open, it was slower than its predecessor (hence the need for more powerful hardware to run it) and didn’t deliver anywhere near the full compliment of promised features.  It broke established software, caused all manner of problems, and as a result businesses and home users are still sticking with XP in defiance until someone can convince them that Vista really is worth the bother.

That brings us up to date on the history, and brings me to the operating system I am now sitting in front of.  My reasons for buying Vista are covered in my previous post, so I won’t repeat them here.  The title of this article pretty much sums up my first impressions – it’s shiny.  From the instant you see the logon screen it’s as if it’s shouting “hey, look at me, I’m shiny too!”  So much of the interface feels like it’s been copied from Apple’s groundbreaking innovations, even if it is in a trademark Microsoft way.  The Vista installation still had those annoying factoids about the system, telling you what it was good for – as if we needed telling what it was we had just bought, just in case we thought it was actually a toaster.

Vista Home Premium uses the funky transparent windows theme that everything but the Home Basic version comes with.  That means that the background shows through the title bar and the windows borders.  The point of that is… well, actually I have yet to find a good reason for that.  No doubt someone said it might be fun, and when no one said it wasn’t possible they threw it in for the sake of the WOW factor.  Sure, it’s pretty, but so what?  You can’t see enough to see what is actually underneath, and it does tend to muddy the display slightly with inconsistency.  Interestingly they turn that transparency off when the window is maximised, because clearly then you don’t want to see what’s underneath.  Again, I’m still not sure of the reasoning behind that styling feature.  Window shadows I can understand, that gives you the impression of depth and brings the frontmost window up more clearly in front of the rest, and glowing close buttons makes sense too.  The Start button is another oddity though – they’ve replaced the word “Start” with the Windows logo, which makes sense I suppose, and made it round, but slightly too big for the taskbar so that it shows over the top of everything else just a little bit.  Sure, it’s nice to know it can do it, but again – what’s the point, exactly?  Theme creators will doubtless be dancing in the ailes, but for an everyday user I’m not sure it’s a styling feature that’s really better than a normal button.

And that’s really where things come to a crux – is Vista actually better than XP, or is it just different?  Sure, XP did look a little “Fisher Price” with its bright colours, but it did the job effectively.  The transparent windows in Vista is eye-candy, nothing more, and to me smacks of Microsoft trying to hit back at Apple’s undeniably beautiful interface, which has always sported a subtle use of transparency and shadows.  Vista takes that idea, boosts it to the max, and hopes people are impressed.  Like a teenage yob seeing a Ferrari with a spoiler and then gaffer taping three on his own Micra and standing next to it as if to say “beat that”.  Yes, Microsoft, very clever.  Now grow up.

I can’t be completely critical, however, as there are some very good points to Vista that are worth mentioning, even if only superficial (I’ve not focussed on benchmarking or performance as I have no way of testing that scientifically).  The minimise, maximise and close buttons are good – they’re clear and easy to use, arguably better than in XP, and certainly bigger and easier to get to than in Mac OS X.  And the glowing of those items when you hover over them is a useful addition and a good bit of user feedback.  Similarly, the new Explorer (which, curiously, no longer appears to have a name at all) is very nice to use, and in particular the unifying of the icon and the text label in one clean box is a nice visual touch that I’ve not seen anywhere else but which I can confidently say is better than the rest; subtle highlight colour, subtle border, subtle rounded corners – and all round a fantastic job.  Controls for quickly and easily changing the thumbnail size is a handy addition too, although the largest setting is only really useful if you’re viewing a folder of photos, and then it’s almost not big enough.  My favourite part of that whole file management interface though is the location bar, which shows you your position in the file tree and allows you to click each component to go back several levels at once, like a breadcrumbs trail found on many web sites.

So, is Vista better than XP?  And, almost as important now, is it better than Mac OS X Leopard?  Well, as with all technology that is widely used, that’s debatable.  My own personal preference is that despite Leopard’s rather clinical feel it’s still a much more mature interface than Vista’s, which feels like it’s trying its utmost to show off to its friends.  Vista is shiny.  Very shiny indeed.  But it still feels like Windows, and in that respect it still fails to impress me or reassure me that it knows what it’s doing, or that it’ll leave me to it if I’m confident I know what I’m doing.  Maybe more time will persuade me, maybe I’m still too in love with Apple to see how great this operating system is.  Time will tell.  In contrast to Vista’s Window’s Sidebar which is insisting on telling me the time, in addition to the clock in the taskbar…

I’ve not actually owned a laptop since my first year at uni, which was when I bought my very first computer – a bottom of the range Novatech notebook with a 366MHz AMD processor, 32MB RAM, Windows 95, and very little besides.  It was £600 too, which on reflection wasn’t actually the bargain I thought it was at the time.  Still, I got a good year of use out of it, getting it to do all sorts of things it wasn’t supposed to be capable of, like running all sorts of Windows 98 programs and running a skinning addon that made it look like Windows XP (which was very new at the time).  Since then I’ve only had desktops, and most have been Macs.

This new laptop (which I’m writing this blog post on, sat in my lounge on my comfy sofa), achieves two primary uses, plus a few other smaller ones.  Firstly, it replaces my old PC, a 1.2GHz tower running XP very slowly indeed, despite a recent reinstall and a very minimal set of programs.  Clearly the hundreds of security updates to XP have taken their toll and made a once powerful computer into a walk through treacle.  So this laptop will enable me to continue being able to test web sites in Internet Explorer (which isn’t available on the Mac).  It’s second main purpose is that I can potentially take it to meetings – after all, it’s good for a web designer to be seen to have a computer!

Of course, there are other perks to having a laptop, which have already surfaced this evening.  I’ve already enjoyed the luxury and novelty of being able to sit downstairs and use the computer, which is slightly more sociable than hiding away in the study.  Ellie and I have also tested out the built-in webcam by Skyping my parents and having a nice half-hour video chat with them.  Lots of fun!  We were going to try the same with my Grandma immediately afterwards, but I don’t think she was actually in front of her computer at the time.

My next job will be to give an evaluation of Vista.  Yes, I know every Tom, Dick and Harry has already done that, but I haven’t.  I do of course have my own pre-conceived ideas and prejudices, especially because I’m primarily a Mac user now, but this is my first real experience of actually using Vista, so I figure it makes sense to muddy the waters with my own opinions on what it’s actually like, now that the hype has died down almost completely.  But I’ll leave that for another post.  Maybe the next one.

I also have an old Palm m125 which I’ve been carrying around with me to act as my diary, syncing it to my Mac when I remember to.  It does the job, just about, despite being older than the PC (it would have been new in 2001).  I say it does the job, actually it’s been throwing tantrums just lately, refusing to switch on and then losing everything in memory and thus any changes I’ve made since the last sync.

Then there’s my mobile phone, a Motorola L6.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as old as the aforementioned relics, but I did buy it back in 2006, so it’s a few years older than your average mobile.  I still reckon it’s got at least another year of use in it though, despite the paint coming off the bottom, a dodgy battery connection (sort of fixed by stuffing some paper between the battery and the cover) and a dead camera.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I’ve been looking at laptops this afternoon.  My poor old PC really does need replacing, and a laptop would actually be useful now.  I’ve steered clear of them in recent years, simply because I’m not mobile enough to warrant having one, but now it may serve a purpose.  There are occasions when being able to take a laptop to meetings with clients would be an advantage.  So it would be a case of combining the need for a new computer to test web sites on with the ability to take stuff to meetings.  I’d need something cheap, small, able to run Vista, XP and Linux.  Vista is important for future-proofing, allowing me to continue supporting stuff in years to come, while XP is needed so I can continue to test sites in IE6 (although I have found some software that emulates IE6 that works in Vista).

The Palm will probably be taken out of service before too long, though hopefully replaced by my mobile phone rather than another palm-top organiser.  All I really need is my diary synced to a device I can carry around with me, and if I get a Bluetooth dongle I can do that with my L6.

Of course, then there’s the question of what I do with the old technology.  I’m not even entertaining the idea of just throwing it away, far too much goes to landfill as it is.  Thankfully I’ve found several organisations that will take at least some of my relics away for either recycling or reuse.  My PC can be reconditioned and resold, as can the two CRT monitors gathering dust in the study, and hopefully some of the other bits and pieces can go the same way.  Only a small amount would need disposing of, like my old Epson printer which can’t be fixed.

So, that’s the way the future’s looking for me – out with the old and in with the new.  Although, knowing me, it’ll probably happen in reverse order.  Still, it’s a good plan, especially given that we’re planning on moving house in a few months’ time – the less junk we have to transport the better.

EDIT: I have now purchased a new laptop!  Yay!  Should be here within 5 working days.  It’s nothing too fancy, more for business than anything else, but should give me everything I need.  It comes with Vista, which is important from a support point of view, and I’ve discovered that I can run IE6 on Ubuntu via the Wine emulator, so hopefully that should mean I don’t need to install XP as well – which is good because licensing restrictions mean I can’t install the version I’ve already got.  No doubt I’ll post an update once the laptop arrives and let you all know what I think of Vista.

This morning I went to do the weekly food shop at Tesco, but on the way I stopped in at B&Q – that’s when I first noticed things were different.  After all, B&Q is not a child’s playground.  It’s more of a grown man’s playground, full of power tools, electrical items, things that need assembly, all manner of things that most people don’t recognise and wouldn’t know what to do with, and generally a lot of stuff that makes you feel more like a man.  I went in to buy a pack of staples (no, not for a stapler) for hammering into our decking (more on that in a moment), and ended up coming out with a wireless doorbell and a keyring torch as well.

At Tesco I took advantage of the good weather and got my car cleaned by the nice Tesco staff in the car park while I went and did the shopping.  It was quite busy, so they were only just about to start on my car when I wheeled the shopping trolley back to the car half an hour later.  So I sat in the car listening to Classic FM while they all worked around me.  A luxury I would never have entertained in the Mini – I wouldn’t dare let someone with a scary pressure washer near my beautiful and fragile Neddy!  I was pleasantly surprised that even though the Ford Escort is considerably larger than a Mini it still classed as a ’small’ car to them, so the whole wash was a very reasonable £6.

Back home I put all the shopping away, had lunch, and then prepared to get down and dirty in the big outdoors.  Some of you may know that our decking is a bit of a death-trap in winter – the slightest bit of moisture and the surface becomes slippery as ice.  So, following the advice of the plumber who came and fixed our heating on Friday, I laid some chicken wire over the top to provide a grippy surface.  Hence the need for the steel staples.  I actually used the chicken wire that has been lying in a corner of the decking since the summer, and which used to be a protective cover for our vegetable patch.  It was just the right size, when disassembled, to create a path from the kitchen door to the concrete path, including the little step at the end.  It took a good hour or so to do, what with all the fighting with chicken wire that wanted to sit in a different position and bent staples, but it was all finally hammered down and it looks very professional.  And with another cold snap on its way I think it’s good timing – it should be a good test to see how it fares in properly icy conditions.

While I was out in the garden I also took the opportunity to put out some more bird food, as we’ve been sadly neglecting them the last few months, mainly because Ellie has been at work all the time and I’ve not really noticed or had the inclination.  We don’t have any fat balls at the moment, so that’ll have to go on the next shopping list, but I put out a fresh lot of peanuts and wild bird seeds, some fresh water, some old bread and a few handfuls of dried mealworms scattered around the garden.

With that done I went back to the garage to look at the car, checking all the fluid levels.  Everything looks good, although I still can’t tell how much window washer fluid I’ve got because I don’t know how big the reservoir actually is.  I poured 2 litres of water in, but it’s still not full, and I can’t see the water level, so I can only assume it’s a massive tank hidden away somewhere.  So I moved on and cleaned the inside of the windows and the dashboard, and scrubbed a load of mank off the indicator stalks (a build-up of dead skin and sweat over the last several years – nice).  I also figured out (I think) why the car makes an odd rattly sound when we go round corners (sometimes).  It sounds like something is loose in the boot, but I’ve checked several times and there’s nothing there but a tightly secured spare wheel.  Today I had a brainwave and had a look underneath the car, and sure enough the car has a hollow fixed beam rear axle; the most likely cause is a stone that’s managed to get inside and can’t get back out.  There are holes pointing to the rear of the car to let water out and suchlike, but it’s angled in such a way that it would be pretty much impossible to get a stone back out without taking the axle off and shaking it out.

Then it was the turn of the doorbell.  The bell part plugs into a normal electricity socket, so I’ve put it upstairs on the landing because we don’t tend to use that one very often.  The button is a wireless transmitter with a little button battery inside, which needs to be screwed to the outside wall.  That means drilling into either the brick wall or the wooden doorframe (I haven’t decided which yet).  Unfortunately my cordless drill batteries were dead, so they’re currently on charge in the kitchen.  Once they’re charged I’ll go out and fit the button, but since it’s already beginning to get dark I think that might have to wait until tomorrow.

And now I’m back at my desk, blogging away and reinstalling Windows XP on my PC.  It had been painfully slow, so I decided the time had come for it to be wiped and a fresh install put on, and only install the programs I actually need at the moment.  I did have games and applications and all sorts on there, but since I only use it for browser testing now I’m only going to install web browsers and hopefully that’ll keep it nice and lean and fast.  Every little helps.

So, all in all a very productive day, but not an ounce of chocolate and certainly not enough frivolity.  I shall have to remedy that with something wild and outrageous this evening… any ideas?

For those not in-the-know, VNC is basically a screen sharing protocol.  When I was ChapAss I would load up my VNC program, tap in the IP address of my computer at home, and VNC would show me my own desktop and allow me to use the computer as if I was physically sat in front of it.  The benefit for me at that point was that I could use all the programs I was familiar with (which were far better than the ones the uni computers provided) and keep all my files in one place.  It worked really well, apart from when my computer crashed – then it meant phoning the house to see if anyone was in who could restart the computer.

Now, working from home, I have no need of VNC in quite the same way.  However, I do have two computers and only one monitor, so it still comes in handy sometimes.  My Mac is my main computer, on which I do pretty much everything.  But I also have a PC dual-booting XP and Ubuntu, mainly for testing purposes – it’s good to know that my web sites work on ‘normal’ computers too.  And Linux.  So rather than connecting a keyboard, mouse and monitor to my PC, taking up valuable space on my desktop, I VNC into the machine when I want to use it, using both computers from one monitor and set of controls.

Of course, there is one small problem that needs to be overcome for this to work properly, and the root of that problem is that traditionally Mac mice have only one button.  With only one mouse button, how do you right click on an operating system that depends on it?

So far I’ve been using JollysFastVNC, which is a pretty good VNC client for the Mac.  Right-clicking on the Mac operating system is usually accomplished by holding down the CTRL key and clicking, and JollysFastVNC translates that to a right-click nicely.  So all is well.  Until, just recently, an update to JFV meant that I couldn’t hibernate Windows any more.

I use hibernation quite a lot on XP, and I have to admit I miss that on the Mac.  To hibernate, one holds down shift while pressing the Sleep button in the shutdown box.  That worked fine until recently, when the Shift key stopped being sent from JFV.  Not good.  Right-clicks still worked, but shift was just being ignored.

Thankfully, Leopard actually provides its own VNC client in the form of its Screen Sharing accessory.  I say accessory because it’s not in the main Applications folder, but hidden away somewhere that’s not exactly easy to come by.  The idea is that you initiate Screen Sharing from the Finder, and Leopard goes off and finds the Screen Sharing app for you.  But of course that only works if the PC in question is showing up on the network.  Which mine isn’t.  Silly PC.  Thankfully I can enter the IP address of the computer and go in directly, though that does require me to remember the IP address.  And I can choose to keep the Screen Sharing app in the dock so I don’t have to go looking for it each time.

In actual fact the Screen Sharing app is pretty decent.  It’s faster than JFV, the mouse is more responsive, and the screen refreshes more intelligently.  All in all, a fantastic piece of kit, and one that is set to replace JollysFastVNC outright.  Except for one small niggle.  Screen Sharing doesn’t know what to do with right-clicks.  Holding down CTRL and clicking sends a CTRL-left-click to the other computer, which isn’t exactly what I want.  Solution?  Plug a two-button mouse into my Mac.

Now, to Mac purists, this is undoubtedly blasphemy.  Macs have always had single button mice.  It’s what’s always set them apart.  After all, why have two or three mouse buttons when you can do everything with one?  Still, Apple developers appreciated that not everyone was a purist, so has kindly provided support for pretty much any USB mouse, regardless of the number of buttons.  So, out came my PC’s mouse, with two buttons and a scroll wheel (that’s one thing I have missed).  Firing up Screen Sharing showed that the right click was being correctly sent via VNC as a right-click, as you’d expect.  And right-clicks in Leopard are interpretted as right-clicks, or what would have been produced by CTRL-clicking before.  My only problem now is getting used to having two buttons – I’m finding myself right-clicking by accident, because I’m so used to pressing the whole front of the mouse down.

So, it looks like I’m going to have to retrain my hand to use a two-button mouse again.  It still feels wrong, somehow, like trying to ride a motorcycle with 6 wheels.  I may have to look into getting a MightyMouse, maybe that will feel more appropriate.

Anyway, a byproduct of that temporary glitch was that I started looking into getting Linux working again.  I say again, it wasn’t actually broken before.  I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy on the PC over a year ago and never really used it because I couldn’t get it to recognise the wireless dongle I had.  However, having got Windows back online with a CAT5 cable I decided to see if I could persuade Ubuntu to go online too.  And that’s proved to be a mammoth operation, and I’ve got little work done today so far.

The first hurdle was to get Ubuntu to use the ethernet connection to access the internet.  Now, I wouldn’t call myself a hard-core geek.  Maybe a soft-core geek.  Whichever, I have never really played with Linux much before, and it’s all still rather foreign to me.  Last time I tried to get it online I spent ages looking through forums randomly typing commands into the terminal to try to get it to do things, and had no idea what any of the commands were.  I have a feeling that probably contributed to the difficulty I had today trying to reverse whatever it was I did last time, which I’ve completely forgotten.

In the end I think I managed to completely remove the wireless driver and all reference to there being a way onto the net via a wireless network.  I think.  A little more tweaking and gentle prodding finally yielded some positive results – Firefox jumped into life and started showing web pages!  Hoorah!!

Of course, that wasn’t quite enough.  6.10 Edgy is actually quite old now, and I needed to upgrade to the latest distribution.  Now, on most other operating systems this means buying the install CDs and either wiping your hard disk and starting afresh or upgrading your old system to the new one.  But because Linux is open-source it’s all free to download.  It’s like upgrading from Windows XP to Vista over the internet, or even Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard.  It’s a pretty hefty operation.  And it wasn’t working.

Ubuntu has a clever little system for installing software.  Rather than going to the provider’s web site and downloading an install program, all the available software is available from a central list, and you just click it to install it.  Ubuntu takes care of giving you the most up to date list of programs, downloading all the files needed for the software and installing it for you.  Nice.  Except that for that to work it needs to know where to look to find all these programs, and that’s what wasn’t working for me.  Neither could it upgrade the main Ubuntu installation, because none of the upgrade files appeared to exist online for it to refer to.  I would type in ’sudo apt-get upgrade’ and it would complain that all the files it was looking for were not there – all of them gave a 404 error.  A quick check in Firefox showed that it wasn’t lying – the files really weren’t in the place it was looking.

After a lot of searching on various forums I found that the Edgy files had been taken off the servers because it was old and not supported any more.  That makes sense I suppose.  And after all, I didn’t want to upgrade to Edgy, because that’s what I already had.  I wanted to upgrade to Feisty, which is the latest release at the moment.  Finally I found someone telling me that to upgrade to Feisty I needed to change the locations in /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Feisty instead of Edgy.  Sounds simple?  Yeah, I thought that too.  I did manage to find someone’s blog post that went through it step by step though, giving the process of updating the sources.list file, so I did that.

Thankfully at that point it all started to work.  Or at the very least appear to work.  The apt-get update command found all the files it was looking for, and going back into the System Updates screen showed a whole list of updates that weren’t being shown before.  To begin with it tried to persuade me that I needed to upgrade to 6.10 Edgy, which was actually what I already had, so I cancelled that and went back and told it to upgrade to 7.04 Feisty.  Right now it’s downloading all the files, which is all very positive.  It hasn’t complained so far, it’s found all the source files it needs, and it’s connected to the internet.  Good stuff.  Whether it finishes the installation without any problem is another matter, but since the whole process could take a couple of hours I’ve got time to spare.

This all begs the question – “why do I need Linux?”  Am I turning into a geek?  Well, not really, because I was already almost a geek.  Almost.  I still wouldn’t call myself a geek really, not in the truly geeky sense.  I still have no idea what most of the commands are that I’ve been typing in, nor what their effect has been.  And it’s not like Ubuntu is going to become my primary operating system either, because it’s on the wrong computer.  If I installed it on my Mac it might be a different matter, but then I wouldn’t be using my Mac.  I like my Mac.  It’s fun.  In all honesty Ubuntu (if it works) will probably only get used for testing purposes so I can check that web sites look all right on Linux machines.  The plan will be to set up a VNC server on it so I can remote desktop into it from my Mac.

There is one quirky little thing about Linux I just find hilarious though, and that’s the command ’sudo’.  I’ve no idea what it’s meant to mean, but as far as I can tell its main function is to override various security measures.  For instance, if I wanted to edit a system file it wouldn’t let me, unless I sudo it.  It’s like the following conversation between me and Ubuntu:

“Do something.”

“Hah, no chance.”

“Sudo do something.”

“Oh, all right then.”

However, it wasn’t long before I grew tired of the plastic look of XP, and started modding my desktop with all manner of programs, making it look very little like Microsoft designed it to be.  Eventually I found myself themeing everything I could lay my hands on to make it look more like a Mac, striving for that perfect interface.  It was no surprise then when a few years later I bought my first Mac, a second hand G3 Blue&White.  Although originally it would have been only 450MHz the previous owner had stuffed a 1GHz G4 upgrade chip from Sonnet in there, which made a big difference.  In terms of numbers it should have been slower than the PC it replaced, but in fact it was still faster and smoother and certainly more satisfying to use.  Hooray for Apple!

Of course, avid blog readers will know that my little G3 didn’t last forever, and eventually ceased to switch on, at which point I bought the cheapest Mac I could lay my hands on at short notice – a 1.42GHz Mac Mini.  In terms of raw processing power the Mini was a little faster than the G3, but I noticed that it was still struggling under the weight of everything I was asking it to do.  It got there in the end, but lack of memory really bogged it down.  Clearly, 512MB of RAM just isn’t enough to run the 101 programs I use on a daily basis.

So, after some saving up and some careful eBaying, I finally took delivery of a G5 2GHz Dual Processor PPC running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.3), with a whopping 2.5GHz of RAM and two 180GB hard disks.  This is actually the first time I’ve owned a high-end computer, and it makes such a difference.  It may not be brand spanking new, and it may be running on a PPC chip rather than Intel, but it rocks nonetheless.  So I thought I’d share a few of the highlights with you, along with some short reviews of the software I’ve been using so far that I haven’t reviewed already.

Mac OS X Leopard

At first glance the OS looks more or less the same as Tiger.  Everything is in much the same place as before, it works in pretty much the same way, and visually it’s all still very much recognisable.  Unlike the whole XP/Vista thing.  But it would be a mistake to say that Apple haven’t done much to release Leopard.  It’s all those little things they’ve done which add up to something quite spectacular.  The interface is mor consistent, the way the Finder works is a little more polished, the Dock has a bit more sparkle and fun in it, and there are some extra built-in apps that make life just a little bit simpler than they were with Tiger.

I actually spent quite a lot of time on Tiger trying to emulate some of the new features Leopard brought in, such as the unified interface (courtesy of UNO), backups (with a little help from iBackup), even Stacks (by simply putting a folder onto the Dock).  I’m pleased to report that the Leopard versions are the original and best.  Time Machine really is a one-click setup; I plugged my firewire drive in, Time Machine recognised it and asked me if I would like to use it for backups, and that was it.  I did look for extra options, but there weren’t any.  It just works.

The Dock was something that caught my eye when Leopard was first demoed by Steve Jobs.  No longer just a flat semi-transparent panel (as cool as that was), the new Dock is more like a shelf, complete with reflections of both the icons and the windows on the screen.  Very cool.  Not exactly a boost to performance or efficiency, and no doubt the novelty will wear off after a while, but it’s one of those little extras that make the whole experience just that little bit more satisfying.  It’s like finding that the cup holders in your car also have a slot for holding a stirring spoon.

I’m not quite so entranced by Stacks, though, I have to admit.  Sure, they look pretty sweet and have cool animations, but are they really necessary?  To my mind they’re a fun feature, but one that I would prefer to be able to turn on and off.

Another useful feature found in Leopard is the screen sharing option.  With another computer on the network you can log in and share the screen of the other computer, which apparently happens courtesy of the VNC protocol.  I’ve been unable to get this working seamlessly so far, unfortunately; I’ve got my Mac Mini on the network still, but I can’t directly log into it, I have to ‘ask permission’ and wait for it to be confirmed on the other computer.  That’s fine if your other computer has a screen, but my Mini doesn’t at the moment, so I have to either unplug the keyboard and monitor from the G5 and plug into the Mini just to confirm it and then plug it all back again, or use another VNC client to log in a different way.  I’m sure there must be a solution there somewhere, I just haven’t got to the bottom of it.  Incidentally, screen sharing with a PC works just fine.

Other built-in apps have also been given subtle make-overs, including Mail, iChat, Address Book and iCal.  Oh and the computer came preinstalled with iLife ‘08 too, plus a few other useful packages that nicely upgrade what I had before.

The G5

Right, I ought to say a quick something about the computer itself.  To start off with, it’s heavy.  Not just compared to the Mini, but compared to any other computer I’ve known.  That’s largely thanks to its metal case, but it also stands considerably taller than my old G3 Blue&White (which I still have, gathering dust).  Still, what makes it stand out even more than that is the sheer quality of it.  I took the side off and found myself looking at the most tidy and well thought out inside of a computer I have ever seen.  Beautiful.  Gorgeous.  Stunning.  While most PCs look like the inside of a Radio Shack back room, the G5 looks like an executive jet.  There are no random wires connecting odds and ends together, no unnecessary big empty spaces, no mess of IDE cables.  Just pure, simple elegance of design.

Unfortunately I had a reason for looking inside the case, beyond the basic intrigue.  The CD drive wouldn’t open; it just clunked and did nothing.  Further inspection showed that the drive must have shifted in transit and was sitting a little too high so that the tray was hitting the casing and not coming through the gap.  Corrective surgery was needed, but thanks to the G5’s marvellous interior designers this proved to be easy as pie.  No screwdriver was necessary, just flick a couple of latches and the whole CD unit unlocked itself and became free.  I was then able to reposition it, relatch it, and it all worked fine.  Nice.

It’s also got an Airport wireless card, Bluetooth, and a selection of USB and Firewire ports.  Which are all very useful too.

Firefox 3

I know this isn’t quite on topic, but I thought it was worth a mention anyway.  While installing all my usual programs onto my fresh Leopard I found that Firefox was offering its release candidate of version 3.  I had previously been a great advocate of Camino, what many would call the Mac version of Firefox, and had an alpha release of Firefox 3 for testing purposes.  There were problems with it though, and I stayed with Camino for the sake of stability and consistency.  However, now that FF RC3 is out, Camino hasn’t been used here much at all.

FF3 is a marked improvement over FF2 on the Mac.  Although FF2 remains arguably the best browser for the PC, on the Mac it was awful.  It was slow, it forgot where it put its memory (ah, the irony), and looked hideous.  FF3 promised a lot, and seems to have delivered on most of its early promises, giving Mac users a browser that looks good, feels responsive, and gives Safari some serious competition on the performance front.  And on top of all that you get that huge repository of addons just in case the basic functionality isn’t enough.

So FF3 is set to become my primary browser for the time being, even though it is still on a Release Candidate (which basically means it’s not completely finished yet, but they’re happy for people to test it for them).

The end

Yep, that’s it for now.  Of all of that, only FF3 is actually new news, the rest has been common knowledge for a while now, it just hasn’t been on my desk until now.  Still, it’s so nice to finally have a computer that is more than capable of running everything I throw at it.  I’ve got iStat meters in my menu bar showing what my two processors are up to, and so far they have yet to break a sweat…

Despite being newer and having a faster processor (1.42Ghz rather than 1Ghz) I have to confess the speed increase wasn’t particularly noticeable. In some ways it was much better – its graphics capabilities were much higher, allowing it to do the funky Quartz stuff – but it still struggled on occasions, especially when running several large programs at the same time. That, sadly, is just the way my work goes though – it’s a rarity if I have less than 10 apps running at once, and that could well include several browsers, Photoshop, e-mails, RSS client, FTP client, calendar, address book, word processor… when I’m in full flow it gets rather crowded! In fact, that’s on reason I’m using a virtual desktops setup, giving me the ability to put different programs on different virtual screens, keeping things a little more organised.

I discovered today (or rather, confirmed) that the likely cause of the sluggishness is the lack of memory. The old G3 had a nice 800Mb of RAM, which was enough for the design work I was doing (it was the processor power that held that computer back most of all). My PPC Mac Mini only has 512Mb, which apparently isn’t enough for what I want to be doing. I checked out the memory usage with vm_stat today, and discovered that a fair amount of effort is going into performing page ins and page outs, where the physical memory is so overloaded that the OS has to swap stuff in and out of hard disk space to keep going. Not only is this an extra strain on the processor and hard disk, but it takes time – hard disks are much slower than RAM.

Upgrading a Mac Mini isn’t going to be easy, but it is possible. The most I can put in is 1Gb apparently, and the hardest part is getting the case off. I’ve found a few tutorials on how to do this, and a new 1Gb RAM chip (it can only hold one at a time, unfortunately) will set me back about £30. So that may be another expense to put through the business accounts soon. I’ll let you all know how it goes. Assuming the computer survives the ordeal…