JedFonner.com

Apple has been running their “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC” ads for years now. All the while, Microsoft has basically been holding their hands over their ears saying “I can’t hear you!” over and over. So it was big news when they announced they were actually going to fire back with a new $300 million ad campaign starring none other than Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

Unfortunately, the first new video ad is out, and oh-my-gawd is it awful. The Apple ads are short, to the point, and for the most part pretty amusing. The Microsoft ad is rambling, confusing, and not really funny.

Somewhere in here there’s a good analogy to recent Microsoft software versus Apple software. But at this point I feel too bad for Microsoft to keep ripping on them. Just watch the video and be amazed (in a bad way):

You’d think millions of dollars could buy you a laugh, or at least a chuckle. I’ll say this, they have definitely brought the “wow“, but like Vista, they just didn’t do it in a good way.

I’m finally getting around to making some upgrades to this site. But I didn’t want to do it in a haphazard fashion. I wanted to use some of the common development practices I use every day at work. The first and most important, of course, it to put everything into version control. I chose Subversion because it’s what I’m most familiar with.

Setting up Subversion on Dreamhost is a piece of cake. Importing the current code for this site was also very straightforward.

The only big problem I had was finding a good Subversion client for my iMac. At work I use TortoiseSVN by the good people at Tigris. TortoiseSVN has its pros and cons but it’s not an option for me here because it’s Windows only.

Tigris has a SVN client for Mac which called SCPlugin which looks like a clone of TortoiseSVN. It is supposed to plug into the Finder and provide much of the same functionality as TortoiseSVN. If you Google it, you’ll find as many people praising it as lambasting it. I gave it a shot but I found SCPlugin to be very flaky (it was constantly having problems with my repositories) and I wasn’t thrilled about having it integrated into my Finder.

So I went looking for other SVN clients for the Mac. Here’s what I found:

• MacSVN: interesting, but it hasn’t been updated in over a year
• Syncro SVN Client: looks great, has some powerful features, but it costs $60 and I’m used to free developer tools
• svnX: has potential, but hasn’t been updated for Leopard and requires you to install the subversion libraries

In the end, I was only able to find two usable clients.

The first was RapidSVN. Installing is a super simple process and I was up and running in under a minute. It allows you to do all the normal SVN actions. It does show the spinning beachball a little more than I like, but overall it’s a very capable client.

As nice as RapidSVN is, I’ve decided to go with a tool that I also use at work when I’m in the Windows world: Subclipse. It’s a plugin for Eclipse and isn’t OS specific. It works at home just like it does at work. Since I needed an IDE for editing code anyway, this was a perfect fit.

If you are familiar with Eclipse and are planning to use it as your IDE, I highly recommend Subclipse. Otherwise, go with RapidSVN unless you need the powerful features of Syncro SVN.

I switched from Windows to Mac OS X a little over a year ago. All in all, I’m much happier and recently even bought a second Mac. The main frustration I’ve faced comes from the fact that I kept my old Windows keyboard and mouse (pictured below), and they don’t play nice with my Mac… well, at least not without some arm-twisting.

The first problem is that my mouse has 8 buttons, but out-of-the-box Mac OS X only recognizes the normal three. So after much searching, I discovered USB Overdrive. This let’s me map my other mouse buttons to normal commands, like Back, Forward, Expose, etc. Very handy. I didn’t really know how it worked, but it worked, so I was happy, until recently.

The second problem was that my keyboard, being a Windows keyboard, acted a little screwy with OS X. Most noticeably, the Command and Option keys were switched and not where they should be on the keyboard. Very confusing, especially for someone trying to get up-to-speed on a new operating system and trying to learn the shortcuts.

After a little more research, I found DoubleCommand. This handy little app has an option to switch the Command and Option keys. Presto, I was in business.

All that changed when I upgraded to the latest version of OS X, nicknamed Leopard. DoubleCommand doesn’t work in Leopard, so I was temporarily without a solution. Then I stumbled upon a much cleaner solution that doesn’t use third-party software. In OS X, you can just change the “modifier” keys yourself. So easy, now my keys work as they should.

Except, all of a sudden USB Overdrive stopped working. After even more research, I discovered that USB Overdrive really just does same fancy key mapping on the backend. So previously, it was mapping my forward and back buttons to Command-Left and Command-Right. When I switched the Command and Option buttons, it was no longer mapped to the right thing. USB Overdrive isn’t smart enough to detect the switching of my modifier keys.

Long story short, I worked around the USB Overdrive issue by assigning each button in USB Overdrive to a new keystroke that takes into account the modifier-key-switch, as opposed to using the built in USB Overdrive mappings.

Damn, that was a pain. In retrospect, I probably should have just saved myself some time and ponied up for a new keyboard and mouse that are actually compatible with OS X (almost all new keyboards and mice are; mine are at least 5 years old, but I love ‘em). On the bright side, at least I’ve satisfied my geekier side with some in-depth research into how USB Overdrive works.

So I’d been patiently waiting until Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) was released on the 26th of October to get a new iMac. So the weekend after it was released I went ahead like a dutiful Mac fanboy and purchased a new iMac, happy that my computer would come preinstalled with Mac OSX 10.5. After all, the iMac website said:

Sadly, when I booted up my new pretty iMac, i noticed that it was missing the new dock, the new menubar, etc… I frantically checked the “About this Mac”. Damnit! My new iMac is still running 10.4. I searched through the rest of the packaging to find a “Drop-in DVD”, which is fancy-speak for an upgrade disk. This means that if I ever have to reinstall, I can’t install 10.5 clean. I’ll always have to install 10.4 first, then install 10.5. WTF. Plus, I dont want to have to waste my time installing now - it was supposed to come with 10.5, out of the box, done, no messing.

This kind of sucks. If they’d just warned us about this, I would have waited a little while and gotten a machine with the operating system actually installed. But now I feel tricked and a little pissed off. Needless to say I’ll be on the phone with support tomorrow and I’ve already made an appointment at the “Genius Bar” at my local Apple store.