Times have changed since then, of course.  Now I’m running Mac OS X Leopard on a dual-processor G5 tower.  Not new by any means, but it still beats the pants off Vista on my laptop.  Of course, Google has had its part to play in driving things forward, revolutionising web searches and pretty much anything we do online.  They’ve even brought out their own web browser, but sadly they didn’t think it worth while to port a PPC version of it, so I can’t use that.

However, I can trick out my Firefox to do some of the same things that make Chrome such a fantastic browser.

There are several key areas where I think Chrome has got it spot on.  Firstly, it’s simple.  Really simple.  In the same way that Google revolutionised web searching by stripping away everything but the search box itself, Chrome gives you only the controls you actually need.  The result is a user interface that is streamlined, uncomplicated and easy enough that a chimp with one eye could work it without hesitation.

Tabs are also rather cool in Chrome.  Putting them at the top actually does make a bit of sense, because it associates the location bar with the tab more logically.  It’s perhaps swings and roundabouts with the rest of the controls, admittedly, but I personally like the look of it, and find it easy to use.

Then there’s that insanely wide location bar.  Why is it so wide?  Oh yeah, there’s no search box.  Firefox thought they were so clever when they put a search box next to the location bar.  The rest of the competition quickly followed, keen to take advantage of people’s newfound love of searching for stuff.  But Chrome took it away again.  You might think that was a step backwards – after all, every browser before Firefox, including IE6, had one big location bar too – but Google built in a powerful search tool there too, so that the same box does two things.  Again, a nice bit of streamlining there.

Speed is another great arrow in Chrome’s quiver.  So great, in fact, that it’s left all the other browsers quaking in their boots and wondering what they’ll have to do to keep up.  Part of it, I’m sure, is a psychological thing: it looks simpler, so it must be faster.

And all of that is all very well, but I don’t actually have Chrome.  Because it won’t run on my Mac.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy some of the benefits that Chrome introduced.

What you see in the screenshots above is not Chrome, nor is it Safari.  It’s Firefox 3.6.3 for Mac.  With bells on.  Courtesy of a few clever addons, this is how I’ve got it set up:

• Tabs on top, courtesy of the GrApple Crisp theme.
• Mac OS buttons and controls, also courtesy of GrApple Crisp.
• Combined location and search bar.  I removed the search bit from the toolbar so that the location bar extends to the whole width, and the CyberSearch addon allows me to search right from there.  Almost as clever as Chrome’s.
• Formatted URLs, thanks to the Locationbar² addon, which greys out the bits of the URL that are not the domain, and basically makes it clearer where you are.
• Combined stop/refresh button, made possible by the Smart Stop/Reload addon.  More functionality with fewer buttons makes me happy.
• Tab close buttons on the right, and a whole load of other little tweaks provided by Tab Mix Plus.

That’s what makes my Firefox look the way it does.  I’m loving having my tabs up top, I love the clean, streamlined layout, I love that I can search from my location bar, and I love that I still have all the power of Firefox under the hood when I’m busy working.  Okay, so Firefox isn’t as fast as Chrome, but no addon is going to solve that one.

Of course, I do have a few other addons installed, either to make my life more bearable or to help me out as a web designer and developer.

• Web Developer.  This gives me an indispensable array of tools for inspecting web pages, tweaking features and bug-testing my web sites.  Couldn’t live without this.  Although at the moment I’ve not got it displayed as a toolbar, because I like the clean interface I’ve got at the moment, but thankfully it’s still accessible from the menu.
• SEO for Firefox.  I don’t use this often, but it’s a nice tool to have every now and then to check how web sites are performing on Google.
• Screengrab.  This little baby takes a screenshot of a web page.  It can grab a selection, everything you can currently see, the whole web page (including below the fold), or even the entire window.  And it’ll either save the result as a file or copy it to the clipboard.  I use this quite a lot.
• FoxTab.  That’s the little icon on the far right of the tab bar.  Clicking on that gives me an uber-pretty wall of thumbnails of all my open tabs.  Which is very nice.
• Flagfox.  This neat little plugin puts a flag in the location bar to tell me where the server of the web site I’m looking at is physically located.  It also gives me more information if I click on it.  Nice.
• Fangs.  If you’re blind or partially-sighted, you’ll know all about JAWS, the industry leader in screen reading technology.  The Fangs addon shows me what JAWS would make of a web site, by rendering textually what a traditional screen reader would read out.  Useful for making sure my sites are accessible.
• Extended Statusbar.  Gives me some useful information in the status bar about how long each page is taking to download, how big it is, and suchlike.  A bit like Opera.
• Download Statusbar.  Puts the page load progress bar at the bottom of the window, so it’s out of the way.  A bit like Opera.
• DOM Inspector.  The DOM is the Document Object Model, and is basically the structure behind a web page.  This is a useful addon that helps me debug web pages by seeing how each element relates to everything else and what properties it has.
• British English Dictionary.  Because there are times when even I make spelling mistakes.
• Adblock Plus.  Because no one likes adverts.

So that’s my Firefox.  It’s not as fast as Chrome.  It’s not even as fast as Safari.  But it looks rather dashing, it’s fun yet professional, and gives me everything I need to do my job.

My job means sitting in front of a computer all day, playing with the internet.  There are of course times when I leave my desk, or need to use a different computer, and then it’s nice to still have the same tools to hand.  So I’ve put my diary onto Google Calendar, so that it’s available wherever I am.  Nice.

Oh no, wait a minute.  I also need that same calendar on my mobile phone.  So far there is no bridge directly between Google Calendar and my Motorola L6, unless I load up Google Calendar on my phone’s browser – but that costs me money because I’m on a PAYG tariff and I don’t get any free data, so that’s out of the question (not least because it’s far from instant, even using the incredible Opera Mini browser and its clever servers).  So, that means having the calendars on iCal as well, so that I can use iSync to copy everything across.  And here’s where it all gets rather complicated.

There are two ways to get a Google Calendar onto iCal.  One is to subscribe to it, using the address that Google Calendar gives you in the settings.  Unfortunately that’s a read-only solution, which isn’t all that useful.  The second option is to set up iCal to use Google Calendars as a WebDAV server (I’m not going to go into the details here, just search around for “iCal WebDAV Google” or similar).  That’s a much more satisfactory solution, as it means that you can make changes on iCal and have them copied across to Google Calendar.

Today I came across a slight additional problem, however.  In setting up the iCal WebDAV thingy, I had the main calendar showing up fine and then all the other calendars showing up in iCal under a folder called ‘Delegates’.  Initially I didn’t think that was going to be a problem, but when I opened up iSync it couldn’t find those delegate calendars.  Poo.

The solution (yes, here it is, eventually) was to subscribe to those other calendars using the first method above.  That makes the calendars visible to iSync, and while it doubles up the entries in iCal you can untick them so they don’t show up.  Changes you make to those calendars either on Google Calendar or iCal will be saved, and those changes filter through to the subscribed versions on iCal, which can be picked up and copied across to my phone via iSync.

In case you’re wondering about the phone end, yes it is possible to create events on the phone, but it’s a little cumbersome.  If I create an event on my phone, when it gets synced across it gets put in an ‘Unfiled’ calendar on iCal.  I then have to manually move each of those events into a Google Calendar WebDAV calendar so that it’s visible elsewhere.  Not ideal, but it works.

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…

Having bought my wife a new mobile phone I found myself thinking about technical things (to try to quash the feelings of jealousy at her having a nicer phone than me), and after much research I found I could actually make use of the Mac Mini for very little additional cost.  We don’t watch much TV, so it wouldn’t actually be of any benefit to us for me to install a funky internet TV system, but watching iPlayer and YouTube on the telly sounded like a cool idea – much more comfortable than several people trying to cram into the study to watch stuff on my computer.

This, then, is not a detailed tutorial on how to create a media centre, but rather an explanation of what I have done to create my particular system.  It might not be what you need, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to every question you could possibly have on media centres.  But I will be including screenshots to explain stuff, and hopefully someone will find at least some of this useful, or vaguely interesting.

The operating system and other software

I have Mac OS X Tiger installed on the little box, which actually gives me all the basics I need.  In addition to the basic install I have iLife (for sharing my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on my primary computer) and Firefox 3.  Yes, I could have used Safari, but Firefox comes with some cool plugins that will come in useful, and I’ll come onto that a bit later.

The internal hardware

The Mac Mini is running on a 1.42Ghz G4 PPC chip with only 512MB RAM, which is pretty pathetic by modern standards, and it really struggled when I was using it as my primary machine for work – browsing the web is no problem, but running a dozen large programs all at once really was asking too much from that amount of memory.  However, in this particular situation it should be plenty, and the onboard graphics chip handles video well enough.  And since I’m not going to be downloading massive media like films to play on it I don’t need much in the way of hard disk space either.  iPlayer and YouTube both stream their data so I’ve not had to clear out any space on the hard disk yet.  And if I do find myself needing more space later I can always delete some unwanted programs that I don’t use any more (Adobe Creative Suite isn’t really needed on a media centre).

Control freak

So, how do you control a computer from a sofa?  The immediate answer is an Apple Remote, but I don’t have one.  Neither do I have a spare keyboard to plug into it.  However, I did happen to have a wireless mouse knocking around.  Of course, there is only so much you can do with just a mouse – a keyboard is a necessity for typing stuff.  At least, that was until I discovered that Mac OS X actually comes with a virtual keyboard, which they cunningly call Keyboard Viewer.  Now I can bring up an on-screen keyboard and type with the mouse!

If you want to find it, you’ll need to go into System Preferences > International > Input Menu, and select the Keyboard Viewer from the list, and make sure you tick  “Show input menu in menu bar” at the bottom of the window.  You’ll get a little icon in your menu bar showing your country’s flag, and in that menu you’ll be able to bring up the Keyboard Viewer.  By default I think it comes up in the small mode; if that’s too small for you to see from the other side of the room you can click the little green expand button in the top left corner and it’ll expand to a bigger size.

DVI to S-video

A TV is not a monitor.  They speak very different languages, and display images in different ways (at least if you have a traditional CRT TV, if you have a flat screen TV it might be different).  However, a search around the net showed that all I needed was a DVI to S-video converter, provided by Apple, and I’d be in business.  I found one at a good price on eBay, and it arrived in the post yesterday.  So that plugs into the DVI connector on the back of the Mac Mini (Macs use DVI instead of VGA, don’t ask me why, but they effectively do pretty much the same thing), and the other end of the adapter provides a phono socket.  Yes, all you need is a standard phono cable like you’d use for your speakers and you can connect the adapter to a scart adapter.  Lots of adapters, yes, but it works.  OS X recognises what sort of display you’re using and adjusts its settings automatically when it boots up, so that makes it nice and straightforward.

So, that’s a lot of adapters, but it basically follows this sequence of connections:

Mac Mini DVI port > DVI to S-video adapter > phono cable > scart adapter > scart splitter > scart socket on TV

You might not need the scart splitter, but we’ve got too many devices and not enough built-in scart sockets.

Sounding good

The scart adapter I bought (from Tesco) actually has four sockets – video, s-video, left audio and right audio – but at the moment I’m only using one of them.  I’m sending the video to the TV but sending the audio straight to my sound system courtesy of a 2.5mm jack to twin phono cable, plugged into the headphones socket on the Mac Mini.  Sounds fantastic.  As long as the sound system speakers are turned on.

Getting online

My broadband router is upstairs in my study, where my old PC is connected to it via a traditional CAT5 cable, while my G5 and my wife’s laptop both connect wirelessly.  I do have another wireless dongle, a US Robotics USR805422 54Mbps USB adapter, which I used to use on the PC back when it was my primary computer.  Unfortunately no one has seen fit to make a Mac-compatible driver for it, so that presented a bit of a hurdle for my Mac Mini.  I didn’t really want to fork out for a new wireless dongle unless I really needed to.  And that was when my next brainwave hit – I could use my wife’s wireless dongle instead (she was out at the time so couldn’t argue).  Some Googling revealed that there was indeed a Mac driver for the Asus WL-167g.  I found a link on someone’s blog to the right software, downloaded it and installed it on the Mac Mini, and after a little tinkering around I got it working – hoorah!!  Unfortunately rebooting the computer meant that the software revealed its flaw – it wasn’t remembering connection profiles so you had to enter the network password every time you logged in, which wasn’t quite what I wanted.  Eventually I found a link to the official driver on the Asus web site, which appeared to be exactly the same software, but I installed it anyway and that seemed to solve the problem.  The Mac Mini now boots up, automatically logs in and connects to the internet.  Nice one.

A few little touches to make things easier

Of course, controlling a computer from the other side of a room has its difficulties – reading what’s on the screen is a bit of a nightmare.  I’ve set the resolution to 1024×768 for now to allow enough room for everything to fit on the screen, but it does tend to make the writing rather tiny.  I know my way around the OS well enough that I can get around without needing to be able to read everything, but there are a couple of things I’ve done to make it a bit easier for other people.

The dock is on the left hand side of the screen to allow for the keyboard viewer which sits at the bottom of the screen, and is set to be pretty big so you can see the icons nice and clearly.  Magnification is on too, so the icons get even bigger when you need them to be.

I’ve also set the mouse cursor to be bigger too, courtesy of the Universal Access options.  Not too big, just a little bit larger so it’s easier to find.  Unfortunately the Universal Access options don’t appear to provide a way to make all the text bigger in the OS, like you get in Windows, but you can zoom in by pressing Control and using the mouse’s scroll wheel.  And yes, that does work if you’re using the Control button on the Keyboard Viewer.

In Firefox, I’ve installed the Fast Dial plugin to give me nine big links when you open a new tab, like Opera does, which I’ve set to go to YouTube, iPlayer and RadioTimes.  Saves typing them in each time or going through a menu of bookmarks that’s too small to see.  This plugin even gives you a screenshot of the site so you can see where you’re going before you get there.  I’ve also installed the Zoom Toolbar which gives me three handy buttons in the toolbar for zooming in and out of web pages – useful if you want to actually read what’s on the web page.

In use

Now that it’s all set up, I’m really pleased with it.  It plays DVDs nicely (and with less interference than with our actual DVD player), plays all the music shared by my G5 computer upstairs, and iPlayer quality looks fantastic on the TV – I’m not using the uber-high-quality version either.  It’s only a 21″ TV and it’s not HD, so I guess any more quality than that would be wasted anyway.

Using a mouse as a remote is a little odd, but I’d get used to it.  It does give more control than a normal remote, but of course it does lack those instant control buttons that would make pausing and skipping chapters a little quicker – with the mouse I have to move it around (to wake it up) and then find the right button the on-screen controls before I can do anything.  Still, that’s a price I’m willing to pay for now.  I could invest in a wireless trackball mouse with programmeable buttons, but I doubt I’d be able to graft those buttons into the functionality of both iPlayer and YouTube.  So, a mouse it is, for now at least.

In conclusion

I only paid around £250 for the Mac Mini in the first place (second hand on eBay), and the only additional hardware I’ve needed to buy is the DVI to S-video converter and a few more cables.  My wife has graciously allowed me to use her wireless dongle with it, on the condition that I set up her laptop to use my old USR wireless dongle while she’s at work so that she doesn’t need to worry about it.  The fruit of my labour is that this morning I sat eating breakfast watching Top Gear on iPlayer from the comfort of my sofa.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

My own conclusions seem to run along the following lines: PCs are cheap and familiar and make good home computers, but tend to get easily overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of software available and it susceptibility to viruses; Macs are beautiful and easy to use once you get the hang of them, but the insistence on top-quality hardware pushes the prices up; Linux is great for getting down and dirty with networking and programming and suchlike, but lacks the intuitive user interface for most normal people.

I was slightly dubious, therefore, when I came across this video entitled “Mac vs. PC”, inwardly groaning at the thought of yet another OS-bashing video.  However, this one takes the idea a step further, drawing inspiration from a cartoon/toy/movie franchise that claims to be “more than meets the eye”.  This video is definitely worth a peek!

[youtube uLbJ8YPHwXM]

Many thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for this particular link.  Good stuff.

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.

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…

For a slightly more complete description of the above title, allow me to elucidate.  This weekend started on Friday, which was a little odd, with Phil and Esther’s wedding.  That was followed by a fairly taxing drive back home, and very little sleep that night on account of my cold.  On a lighter note, I picked up my new computer on Saturday (on which I am writing this very post), and in the evening I had a house full of people to watch the final of I’d Do Anything, Doctor Who and Pushing Daisies.  All in all, quite a busy weekend, and most of that happened without my wife – Ellie was helping out at a church weekend away, so I haven’t actually seen her since Friday afternoon.

Phil and Esther’s wedding

This one has been a long time coming.  Phil and Esther got engaged way back when they were both at uni, so it was such a delight to be able to be at their wedding on Friday.  It was in Cromer, which is north Norfolk, in the big Anglican church there.  You can’t miss it, in fact.  As you come into the town, down the hill, it’s right there looming over the rest of the small seaside town, visible from pretty much everywhere.  Unsurprisingly, we didn’t get lost, and as far as I know no one else did either.

What was most amazing though was how ‘them’ the service was.  Phil wasn’t dressed up to the nines like a traditional groom, he was just wearing a suit.  His shirt wasn’t even tucked in all day.  Very him.  I think he would have felt uncomfortable if it had been any other way.  The entrance music was an odd choice, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a very moody, tense, almost sinister piece of organ music.  Still, it seemed to work, just about, and set the tone for a totally untraditional wedding.  There wasn’t much in the way of liturgy, there were only three hymns, but it was all very relaxed and friendly, and there was even a bit of cheesy music played over the PA while they were signing the register.

The two funnies moments were both down to Phil, no surprise there.  The first was when the vicar said “Phil, will you take Esther to be your wife…” and Phil jumped in with “I will” before the vicar could finish the rest of the passage!  Hilarious.  The vicar, poor chap, couldn’t keep a straight face through that whole section.  The other funny bit was when the vicar asked Phil and Esther to hold each others’ right hands, at which point Phil held up both and looked at them to try and work out which was his right hand.  Again, typical Phil.

The reception was held at a hotel down the road, which was very pleasant.  After a photo session and the throwing of confetti we were all ushered into a conservatory where we were served cups of tea and the wedding cake.  Yes, going against all the traditions once again, we had the wedding cake before the meal.  It worked well though, giving us something to do while we waited for stuff to happen.  And the cake came in three flavours (fruit, sponge and chocolate), and was adorned with dolly mixtures.  Nice touch.

The meal was in a big tent (posher than it sounds), and was very nice.  Not overly complicated, nothing fancy or wild, just something simple to keep us happy.  Pie and chips was an interesting choice for a main course, but it seemed to go down well.  After that came the speeches, which in Phil’s case was more like stand-up comedy.  It’s been a while since I’ve heard Phil talking in public – I’d forgotten just how funny he is.

I have plenty of photos, which I shall no doubt put online in due course.  [EDIT: photos are now online, see Media page or log onto Facebook]

More miles on the clock

Unfortunately we couldn’t stay too long into the evening, as we had a long journey back to Colchester.  Having left Ellie to go off to look after someone else’s church’s creche for the weekend, I was given the task of taking PhilB (yes, another Phil) to his parents’ house in Norwich.  That added on an extra hour to our journey time, what with the detour and a short break and a cup of tea.  Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have been a problem, but unfortunately the driving was made harder by the fact that I had a cold.

Now, I’m not one for succumbing to the so-called “man flu”.  I don’t say I’m ill unless I really am, or at least until it’s causing me problems.  I wouldn’t have said anything on Friday were it not for the fact that it was making me unusually tired, which clearly isn’t good when you’re driving any sort of distance along unfamiliar roads.  Thankfully the tea provided by Phil’s mum was much appreciated, and kept me going a little longer, and Anne-Marie (who I was also transporting back to Colchester) kept talking to me to keep me awake.  Not that you can really fall asleep in a Mini, bouncing along the road, but it helped to keep me alert.  Thankfully we all got home safely, after a 200 mile round trip, and I was in bed by about 1:30am.

No time for dreams

Unfortunately, sleep didn’t come easily that night.  With a blocked up nose I found that I couldn’t actually breath, which caused significant problems.  In order to maintain a steady air flow I was forced to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose, which for some reason doesn’t come naturally to me.  As such, the effort of keeping my mouth open kept me awake.  The moment I relaxed and was about to fall asleep my mouth would close, and then I would be wide awake again to avoid suffocation.  Not good.  If I got 2 hours sleep that night I would be impressed.

I got up at 5:30am to get a drink to whet my dried out mouth, and at 6:30 I gave up on the idea of sleep entirely and just got up.  Somehow I managed to get through the rest of the day on very little rest.

Welcoming the heavyweight

A consequence of being in Norfolk yesterday was that I wasn’t at home to take delivery of my new computer, so I had to go and pick it up from the DHL depot on Saturday morning.  I wasn’t expecting it to be anywhere near as heavy as it was, so that was my first surprise.  Other than a little cosmetic damage (it’s second hand) it looks in fine condition.  I lugged it upstairs to the study and plugged it in, and it booted into Mac OS X Leopard – lots of fun!  Actually it doesn’t look hugely different to my old Mac as far as the desktop goes.  Sure, there are some differences, like the funky dock and the semi-transparent menu bar, but on the whole it’s still the same operating system.  Just a lot more polished and significantly faster.

First impressions are good though.  The dock reflections are cool, even if they are an unnecessary bit of bling, but I expect the novelty will wear off eventually.  The stacks are pretty neat too, visually, though they don’t really provide any additional functionality that is going to change the way I work; I could easily live without that feature, but I’m not complaining now it’s there.

I did spend some time trying to get online though, but that wasn’t the fault of the computer, I just forgot the password for our wireless network.  And it’s not like I could find out what the password was by looking at the other computers, because they wouldn’t tell me – security, eh!  I remembered in the end, thankfully, so all’s well.

I’ll probably do a proper review at some point.

I’d do anything with a Doctor who brings people back to life

In the evening I had loads of people round to watch my TV, in light of Anne-Marie having family round and hence her living room having had a prior booking.  The final of I’d Do Anything was in two parts; at the end of the first the votes were counted and three were taken down to two.  Then there was a gap of a few hours before the final votes were counted and the winner declared.  I’m not saying who the winner was just in case anyone recorded it and has yet to see it for themselves, but let’s just say I was pleased with the result.  I was also pleased that the winner was the only one to pronounce the final three words of “As long as he needs me” with the right vowel sound.  All the others – without exception – sang something more akin to “As long as hay nayds may”, which always got on my nerves.  Well done to *the winner* for being able to sing a loud and clear note without having to show off her tonsils to everyone!

Also on TV that night was Doctor Who, in the library, with a packed lunch.  Suitably random.  I’m not going to bother with a full synopsis or write-up, as Anne-Marie will no doubt do a far better job than me!  Oh, and Pushing Daisies was also good.  As always.  Good clean fun.  As long as you don’t mind the dead bodies.

In conclusion

Yes… erm… I think that’s everything.  Apologies for the longevity of this post.  I won’t apologise for the length, because I’ll no doubt write equally long posts in the future at some point.  Still, if you’ve got time to read all of this then you’ve clearly not got any work to do right now, so reading a massive blog post will give you something to do, so don’t feel too guilty.  Unless of course you have actually got work to do and have just spent far longer than you should have done reading my blog, in which case… err… thanks.  I think.

He recommended looking at a PowerMac G5, which isn’t brand new but would provide plenty of power and retain the ability to upgrade in the future. I was a little dubious to begin with, but a quick look at eBay showed that a typical PowerMac G5 was actually cheaper than a comparatively priced iMac. Tempting.

In fact, it wasn’t long before I realised I was looking at something I knew I was destined to purchase. A PowerMac from June 2004, with a dual 2GHz G5 (PPC) processor, 2.5GB RAM, two 160GB hard disks, Mac OS 10.5 ‘Leopard’, and a few pre-installed programs. Not only was this pretty much exactly what I was looking for, but it was cheaper than I had expected to find it. I looked at the photos. I checked some other listings. I came back and looked at the specs again. I checked my e-mails. I came back again and made sure it was still there. No amount of procrastination was going to change the fact that it was exactly what I wanted, at a price I could afford.

So I went downstairs to make myself a cup of tea.

At that point my wife told me off for procrastinating and told me to go and buy the computer before someone else did. So I did. The only snag in the process is that PayPal only allows me to pay for items up to £500 on their basic account – to purchase anything more expensive than that I need to pay them for the privilege. Grrr. So I’ve contacted the seller and I’m going to see if I can pay by cheque or bank transfer or something. Either way I’ve committed to buy it, so it’s technically mine, even if money hasn’t changed hands yet.

So, yay! I have a new computer set to arrive within the next few days! I get bucketloads of memory, stacks of hard disk space, and the joys of Leopard. My next challenge will be selling my cute Mac Mini, and preferably getting rid of the dead G3 under my desk too. Any takers? I’m guessing there will be more people interested in a working computer than a dead one…

This afternoon I took the opportunity to put work on hold briefly while I went outside and mowed the lawn.  It has needed doing for a while now, and I’ve been putting it off, but today I figured I ought to take advantage of the sunshine and get out there while I can.  Looking at the forecast, the weekend isn’t going to be too promising.  The lawn actually needs treating at some point, as one half of it looks to be more moss than grass.  We’ve got some moss-killer, it’s just a case of spraying it on and letting it do its job.  I didn’t get round to that today, but I did cut the grass and do the edges, so the garden is looking nice now.  I also noticed that the peas in our vegetable patch are beginning to grow too!  We’ve got carrots and parsnips in there too, but I only planted them last week so it’s no surprise they’re not topside yet.

This weekend is going to be pretty busy too.  Saturday I’m off to a friend’s stag do, which promises to be lots of fun, if somewhat energetic… I’m not giving any details, just in case the person in question doesn’t know about it all yet.  In fact, part 2 of the stag do is on the Sunday, so it’ll be a hefty weekend of fun and frolics, and a fair amount of driving too.

Also on Sunday I’m skipping church.  Doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I take a day off to go to a Mini event, pretty much all of which tend to be on Sundays.  This weekend it’s the Manningtree High School Vehicle Show, and Colchester Mini Club will have a stand there with several of our Minis on display, mine included.  Which means at some point I really ought to clean the car.  I’ve also got a couple of electrical items to install eventually, now that I’ve got all the required bits and pieces for it: I’ve got a rear brake light to go in the back window, some LED side repeaters, a cigarette lighter socket, and all the necessary wires and connectors for installing it.  All good fun.  But since I’m going to be out all Saturday I’m not sure I’ll have time to install them before the show.  Never mind.  It’s not a particularly big show, and apparently it’s going to rain anyway.  Ah well, there’s always next time.

On the computer front, I’m now testing out Firefox 3 beta 5.  It’s not quite finished yet, and isn’t even a Release Candidate, but it’s interesting seeing where they’re going with it and what improvements they’ve made.  For a start, it’s much quicker than FF2 was on the Mac, and significantly faster than previous betas too, which is good.  Speed and responsiveness was one of the main reasons I stopped using Firefox on the Mac in the first place and switched to Camino.  There are still some bugs to iron out before it goes live (I’ve seen some problems handling frames), but the big thing I don’t like at the moment is that it won’t work with UNO.  For those of you who don’t know, UNO is a cool little extra that straps itself (harmlessly) into Mac OS X Tiger and allows you to unify the messy interface, getting rid of the brushed metal windows and allowing me to make everything look consistent.  Unfortunately, FF3 seems to break UNO – it’s not dangerous or particularly problematic, just an annoying visual thing.  Basically, UNO is supposed to unify – join together – the top part of the window and the menu bar underneath.  As standard FF3 does this anyway, which is nice, but as soon as UNO is working, regardless of whether it’s actually supposed to be doing anything with Firefox, that unity is lost.  Curious.  Without UNO, FF3 displays unified, but nothing else does.  With UNO, everything displays unified except FF3.  Grrr.  As I say, not a huge problem, just a niggling frustration, but one I’m hoping will be sorted by the time FF3 is released properly.

Finally, on to this blog.  Astute blog readers will notice that I’ve changed the theme back to the way it was last week.  Sorry.  It just got to the stage where I was annoyed by enough of the new design to warrant just reverting back to the previous design.  I’m working on ideas for a refreshed theme, which I’ll be designing myself (rather than picking an off-the-shelf theme), and you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve found a way of testing themes without the general public seeing them, which should allow me to develop it and test it before actually letting it loose on you lot and letting you pick holes in it.  So, again, apologies for messing you around with visual styles, but hopefully the end result will be better.

Right, after all that, I need another cup of tea.  And maybe I’ll see if I can persuade the gerbils out – Ellie’s much better at it than I am, but she’s at work and the girls need the exercise.  Time to show the little furballs who’s boss…