hyalineskies

When I woke up Tuesday morning, my iBook failed to come out of sleep. Instead, it seemed to have promptly shut off when I brought up the screen. I assumed it was just a low battery; I plugged the notebook back into a power outlet and restarted the computer, only to have it half-start, showing me nothing on the screen and giving me no notice of it being on other than the green Caps Lock button staring at me. Things were not looking good.

Four restarts later, the computer booted; I connected to a wireless access point, opened Firefox and navigated to Gmail. Out of nowhere, the screen started flashing numerous coloured stripes on a white background; when I forced a power off with the Power button, the notebook finally died. Nothing responded. It wouldn’t boot past illuminating the Caps Lock key. My reliable satellite machine, which has been absolutely everywhere with me for the past two years, was dead.

Thankfully, I have AppleCare. I took the computer to the nearest Apple Service Centre and they quickly diagnosed the problem as being the machine’s logic board, a part that would cost me $500 out of warranty, roughly the value of the laptop itself. To make things worse, the service centre didn’t have a replacement, and neither did Cupertino. The technician told me that the wait would be “a while,” and, probably, up until a month from when he placed the order for the new logic board. It was terribly inconvenient — I have at least 1000 lines of source code on that hard disk for a personal project that I wasn’t able to get off of the machine — and the idea of living without a notebook, which handles most of my work, was almost scary.

You don’t seem to recognise how important your notebook is until it’s gone, and Wednesday was certainly no exception. I had no way to respond to hyalineskies comments, e-mails, or work on any development projects outside of my apartment, where my mac mini resides and where construction workers have been replacing my windows. I had to have a laptop ASAP, and, with no money with which to purchase a replacement, I fished up a Sony VAIO abandoned by my sister. When she went off to college, she purchased a MacBook at my recommendation; her “old” (purchased in December 2005) PC was thusly orphaned. The machine, she complained, was slow and useless; it wouldn’t run Microsoft Office without crashing, and the system seemed to fail all the time. I took it and decided to see what the problem was.

The problems were exactly as expected: it was riddled with malware to the point of where Windows was nearly incapacitated; I backed her files up onto a DVD and then reformatted the hard disk, installing a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional. After restoring all of Sony’s drivers, I was left with a backup notebook — nay, laptop, considering it’s the size of a 17″ PowerBook — a Sony VAIO VGN-FS660W. A look at the System’s specifications was astounding: with a fast Pentium M processor, 1GB of RAM, and a dual-layer DVD burner, this thing put my old iBook to shame in terms of performance. The 15.4″ glossy screen is absolutely gorgeous and colour reproduction is wonderful. The machine itself isn’t too bad looking, as well, although it is relatively bulky compared to my 12″ iBook.

When I finally managed to get the machine to run smoothly, I realised that I had absolutely no idea what to install. My workflow has catered to the Mac OS platform exclusively since January of this year, and all of my applications are for that operating system; I don’t know what I’d do without Adium, TextMate, iWork and Cyberduck. I had to find open-source or otherwise free replacements for everything I could aside from Adobe Creative Suite, which I still had an old PC copy of. After quite a few hours, I was able to hack the PC into something manageable with a few choice applications.

• Gaim (Win32) — The Windows port of gaim is nowhere near as elegant as Adium, and it reeks of old-school (read: terrible) Linux UI. The only alternative I really have that I know of, though, is AIM’s official client, which was fine back in v4.7 but was absolutely bloated past that.
• Songbird — the Firefox-based audio player sure looked beautiful, and now I had a valid reason to try it out instead of using iTunes. Compared to iTunes, Songbird is seriously lacking: there is no equaliser, and the interface still contains too much of Firefox. It feels like a hack, a really beautiful hack, at that, but still a hack.
• Zune Desktop Theme (Available Here) — Microsoft released a dark, Vista-like skin for Windows XP with the Zune release, and it really cleans up the absolutely terrible, bubblegum look of Windows XP. While it’s received mixed reviews, I personally like it. Windows should look like Windows, and at the least you can make Windows look OK instead of terrible.
• Awasu — Awasu is a free RSS reader for Windows, and I personally think it’s mediocre. The interface is nowhere near as clean or navigable as NetNewsWire, my reader of choice, but I’m not about to pay for FeedDemon.
• Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall — I used to use this on my PC before it was acquired by Sunbelt, and it still rocks. It’s simple, lightweight, and to the point.
• uTorrent — I can’t live without my RSS-based torrents, so uTorrent takes care of them for me. It’s every bit as nice as BitRocket on the Mac and is absolutely minimalist.
• Second Life — Second Life is absolutely wonderful on the PC compared to the Mac. This is the only application that I have that I actually prefer to use on Windows instead of my Mac; the framerate is tons better and it just feels more responsive overall.
• SmartFTP — yet another mediocre FTP client with no SFTP support for the PC. I wish there was something free that was as elegant as Transmit. (I’m too cheap to pay for Transmit on my Mac, so I use Cyberduck, a GNU GPL FTP/SFTP client.)

The big problem: replacing TextMate

While the replacements I had found for most of my common applications were at the least acceptable for regular use, the one thing I haven’t been able to find a replacement for is the absolutely killer TextMate. Aside from Adium and Firefox, TextMate is my most used application, and there is nothing on the Windows platform that can come close to its simplicity and power. I tried Aptana, an Eclipse-based IDE that felt too much like Visual Studio; I also tried jEdit, a Java-based application that a lot of the guys at Organic used, only to find it both ugly and too, well, geeky in the way that it was configured.

For now, I’ve settled on a pared-down, hacked-up Crimson Editor, a basic editing application that I’ve been able to get to resemble TextMate in some way. I even went so far as attempting to recreate TextMate’s Vibrant Ink theme under Crimson Editor to make it resemble TextMate as much as possible. Crimson Editor seems to be doing its job fine as of now.

Still…

Sadly, even now, I’m still not content with the PC. Something still makes my workflow absolutely frustrating (except inside of Second Life, where everything runs tens of times faster.) Maybe it’s my lack of Exposé; maybe it’s just the unfamiliarity of an operating system I used religiously up until a year ago. Something just isn’t as efficient or as comfortable.

Ironically, I think the issue is simply one of user experience. Everything I do on the PC takes an extra click or keystroke somewhere that’s not required on my Mac; even the simplest tasks seem to require a ton of extra steps to get to happen properly. While in some cases I blame the programmers of individual applications (Windows seems full of applications designed by developers,) Windows itself is to blame in many cases. The Windows registry, installation procedures, Start Menu, and other such interface nuances really do make a huge difference in productivity, although such things are rarely noticed when you’re used to using Windows daily.

Meanwhile, Windows, regardless of what I do, just isn’t beautiful. Sure, the Zune theme makes it a little cleaner, and I’ve got everything imaginable skinned, but the interface isn’t exactly inspiring. I miss my window drop shadows, real type support and UNIX-based shell. ClearType, Windows’s built-in anti-aliasing system, can sometimes render the anti-aliasing in very spotty ways, leading to greenish artifacts on the side of some verticals at smaller type sizes. I also really hate that I’ve lost Pages, one of the few word processors I actually enjoy using, thanks to its advanced OpenType support (instead, I’m stuck with Word, which has horrible support for type.)

I’m not trying to bash the PC users; I’m sure that some people prefer the Windows platform over the Mac. As for me, however, I’ll be happy when I can just have my two-year-old, half-broken-anyway iBook back.