Posts with keyword: windows

8 entries

Good Advice for Switchers

Wed Jan 7 07:34:00 2009

Image by windley via Flickr Todd Ogasawara has some good advice for Mac Switchers that might keep you from lamenting your move. I switched in 2002 but had never really been a Windows user (Sun mostly) and I knew Unix cold, so switching wasn't such a big deal for me. But if you've been a long time Windows user and think a Mac might be fun, read Todd's advice first. I love number two: 2. If you do go cold turkey, don't drag your wife, girlfriend, significant other, parents, child, best friend along for the ride until you begin
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Installing IE6 and IE7 Side by Side

Fri Jan 2 11:27:00 2009

If you do Web design, and who doesn't these days, then you might be interested in seeing how your site operates in multiple browsers. You could, of course, create a virtual machine for each version of Internet Explorer that you want to test against. But there's a better way. There is a repository of standalone IE versions all the way back to 3.0. Tredsoft has an installer that will install any or all of these in one convenient package. A few minutes after starting the download, I had IE6 up and running in all it's, ahem,
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Multi-Platform Add-On Lessons Learned

Thu Dec 11 15:01:00 2008

Words of advice from the multi-platform add-on session at AddOnCon: Start from the beginning to support multiple browsers by not using features that are specific to one or the other. Keep things like XPath expression standard Test IE add-ons on Vista and IE8 first--especially if you're going to use an external process. Using an external process in IE can greatly increase testability Modularity and code portability The learning curve for IE add-on development is steep. Once you're on top, it flattens out and gets easier. Crashing the browser is easy in IE and the opportunity for conflicts is high
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Reactivating Vista in Parallels 4.0

Tue Dec 2 21:04:00 2008

Windows Vista (oops, can I still call it that?) has "Windows Genuine Advantage" and so when it's moved to new hardware have having been installed somewhere else, it needs to be "reactivated." Parallels Desktop was recently updated to version 4.0. This apparently involved some changes to the virtualized hardware presented to the OS since machines created with older versions of Parallels have to be upgraded. You can see where this is going. The conversion process "fails" with a message that something has to be done manually. When you get into the machine, Vista is asking to
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Parallels Scares Me Sometimes

Fri Jul 20 21:48:00 2007

Tonight someone sent me an email with a spreadsheet in it. The extension was .xlsx, not something Office for the Mac understands. I clicked on it anyway to see what would happen. Here's what happened: Parallels fired up Excel in Windows in "coherence" mode so that my Windows version of Excel was running in it's own window--just like a regular application. Excel in Windows tried to open the file, but realized it was for Office 2007. Safari on Windows (apparently now my default browser) fired up and offered to download the compatibility pack. I did that and installed it,
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Buying Windows Vista

Tue Jan 16 11:00:00 2007

A while back, I posted links to reviews of Windows Vista. That page is getting quite a bit of play and undoubtedly, my flippant summary at the end isn't much help for people trying to make buying decisions, so here's my buying advice (with links to Amazon for easy purchasing). First off, will Vista run on your computer? If you're computer is reasonably new (last two years), then you're probably OK. You'll need gobs of memory, however--probably at least 1Gb of RAM. So, make sure you add that into the total purchase price if you decide to upgrade. Now,
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Detailed Windows Vista Review

Tue Jan 9 10:16:00 2007

Update: See my cheatsheet on Windows Vista Buying Advice for the easy answer of what you need to buy. Have you been wondering just exactly what Window's Vista is and when to upgrade? The most detailed review I've found is from Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows. Admittedly, there's a pro-windows bias here (we all have some kind of bias) and the mousemines that litter the site, waiting for you to accidentally mouse over them and launch a video are truly annoying. Still, there's plenty of good info here. Here's Paul's eight part review: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Vista
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Christopher Payne on Windows Live (ETech 2006)

Wed Mar 8 13:41:00 2006

Christopher Payne from Microsoft is giving a demo of Microsoft's new live.com services. He's standing on stage in a suit. The visual discontinuity of that is jarring. His assistant, Frederick, is adding new widgets to a page, very AJAXy. The visuals are pretty slick. Live search let's you search within the results. There's a smart scroll bar that dynamically grabs information as needed so that you don't have to click "next" and "prev" to get other results. Image search has been completely rebuilt. Nice slider bars allow you to reduce or expand the size of thumbnails in image search.
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