01.19.09
Well, I haven’t touched my macbook for 6-8 weeks. Having a comfortable, familiar, and stable platform with my PC is just too much to give up. And before you say it, yes, Windows XP is fast and rock solid for me. I tried the Windows 7 beta, and I really like it. I like it so much, in fact, I wish I had a full copy instead of having to go back to XP. My next laptop will definitely have Windows 7 on it. So I guess macs aren’t for me. Maybe one day I will flirt with the idea again and try a higher end macbook to see if it tickles my fancy. But for now, the macbook is going back on craigslist and I am going to work on a project which does not require a mac.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 11:29 pm by Osman Ullah
Permalink
11.11.08
I have been using my black Macbook quite a bit since I got it (about 70% of the time I guess). Some things I have noticed so far:
- I still don’t like taking my fingers off the home row keys to use the touchpad. Two finger scroll is nice but really it’s not that much better than the scroll area on a normal touchpad. The large touchpad is definitely much more usable than the tiny one on my PC, but I still prefer the pointing stick (except for scrolling)
- The alt-tab vs alt-` thing is driving me nuts. I still haven’t figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between tabs in FF or Webkit.
- The menu bar system is totally messed up. Why does mail.app have to have the same menu bar for the main window as well as e-mail windows? I was using iPhoto and I had to click around until I could figure out why a menu item was disabled. Really frustrating and really bad UI.
- The whole concept of closing all the windows, but having the app still run is a mixed bag. Being able to alt-tab to apps which don’t have any windows open works sometimes, but sometimes it feels broken. At the very least, when you close the last window the app should move to the end of the alt-tab list.
- There isn’t a really good browser. Webkit is faster than firefox, but then firefox has the better featureset. Why is firefox so slow anyway? It’s plenty fast on my PC which is really slow compared to the mac.
- I miss my windows apps, namely GOM Player (kicks VLC’s butt), Picasa, Faststone image viewer, and Notepad++. It seems that lots of things which are now free on PCs still cost money on macs. Namely good image viewers and text editors.
- The 13″ widescreen is OK. It is almost the same width as the 15″ normal screen on my PC, but just not as tall. I always feel like it is not tall enough.
- Still getting used to keyboard navigation when editing text. Not as aggravating as it used to be, but still annoying.
- The anti aliasing is still bothering me.
- When Ayaan reaches up and grabs the lid of my PC, I just grab it and pull it back. When he grabs the lid of my mac I feel like it is going to snap in half.
Overall, if my PC is nearby I will use that. If my mac is around, I will use that. Not really feeling the “OMG Macs are so awesome” love yet.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Ramblings at 10:35 pm by Osman Ullah
Permalink
07.03.08
It’s been a while! Time flies when you have a baby. Ayaan was born on January 19 and has been keeping us busy ever since.
Started a new job a few weeks ago with Aptela. They are a small company which provides business VOIP services. I am in charge of building and designing the UI for their web-based control panel as well as any upcoming consumer-facing applications. It’s been pretty interesting going from a huge corporation like AOL to a small 50 person company like Aptela. As with any job change, there is some adjustement, but overall I am pretty happy with the new position. There are a couple people there who I have worked with before so it helps with the transition.
All the work I am doing so far is in Flex, but I am already dabbling in SQL to analyze user metrics, and will also be learning Erlang, since it’s the language of choice for the back-end systems. Erlang is a functional language, and my only functional programming experience is a brief introduction to LISP about 9 years ago in college. It’s going to be fun learning some new stuff!
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:09 pm by Osman Ullah
Permalink
06.12.07
So, Apple has released Safari for Windows into public beta. It’s an interesting endeavour by Apple. I am really wondering about their business reasons behind it. Do they want more market share for Safari? Are they planning on releasing some Safari-specific functionality on their websites? Do they think Safari is cool and slick enough to convince Windows users to try a Mac?
After using safari for a little while I really didn’t see anything that impressed me and would make me switch from IE7 or Firefox. Even though I know it’s a public beta, there are few things missing which really made me raise my eyebrows. There are almost no window borders. On an XP machine this can make the window get lost amongst the other applications. You can only resize the window from the bottom right, but even then the cursor doesn’t change to a resize indicator until you actually press down the mouse button. They say it’s faster than IE7 or Firefox but honestly the way IE and Firefox render pages seems to be “smoother” and less “choppy” than Safari…and Safari didn’t seem any faster. You can only download data so fast, correct? Also on my HP laptop I press both mouse buttons down at the same time to auto-scroll; this doesn’t work in Safari. And there are no tooltips! Bad bad bad! Releasing a brand new product (to windows users, at least), and you can’t even hover over buttons to find out what they do. I am sure Apple knows how important tooltips are for discoverability and exploration, and I am really intrigued that such an important feature was missed. I guess they figured since they only have 2 or 3 “ambiguous” buttons, it wasn’t worth the effort?
Anyway, otherwise it feels quick and smooth. I wouldn’t switch though. It will be interesting to see what happens with Safari for Windows, to say the least.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 9:54 am by Osman Ullah
Permalink
04.02.07
Well, it looks like Greg found out how to turn on the black skin I was working on before we shipped AIM 6.1. It wasn’t quite done yet but everyone seems to love it so I thought I would give it a mention. Follow the link to his blog for instructions.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:28 am by Osman Ullah
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
