Archive for the 'os x to vista' Category

My move from OS X to Vista - Day 2

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/3/2007
in Email, Microformats, Vista, Windows and os x to vista
. 10 Comments

It is taking me a while to get into this Vista machine.

On the Mac, I live in browsers (I generally have 4 running) and email. The browsers on Vista are pretty much the same as they are on the Mac but the email experience is very different.

The main choices I have for email client software are Thunderbird and Outlook 2007. I am using both for different email accounts and, frankly, I don’t like either!

Thunderbird has already crashed on me so it is not that stable and Outlook hangs from time to time, seemingly contemplating the task I have just asked it to do, before finally snapping to attention and displaying my mail.

Outlook also has an incredibly cluttered interface (seven panes) in comparison to the clean crisp interface of Apple’s Mail app. This can be very off-putting if you are not familiar with the program.

Outlook 2007

I also hate the way Outlook deals with IMAP. I like it as a protocol but it is unusable in Outlook (if I delete an email, I want it to disappear, not stay in my inbox with a line through it). I originally set up my mail account in Outlook 2007 as IMAP but when I realised Outlook still deals poorly with IMAP I decided to switch to POP.

This is where I hit another UI bug.
outlook account remove stupidity

When I asked Outlook to remove the account it gave me the above error message which basicly says, “I know what you were trying to do but because you haven’t done it the exact way I mandate, I’m going to display this error message scolding you and make you do it again until you do it properly!”

Listen Microsoft, if the app is clever enough to know what I was trying to do, why not just do it, instead of forcing me to start all over again, the way Outlook wants me to do it?

Another Vista bug?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/3/2007
in Vista, Windows and os x to vista
. 6 Comments

I have discovered another issue with Vista which may well be a bug. If not, then the OS is certainly not behaving as expected.

On a pc the standard key combo for switching between apps and windows is Alt + Tab. Vista is no different. On holding down Alt and pressing Tab you are presented with a series of windows to chose between. Tabbing selects forward. Shift-tabbing selects back and where you stop, the selected window opens.

switching windows in Vista

But, you can also use your mouse to select out of sequence (if you don’t want to continue tabbing. Selecting the window with the mouse though does nothing. If you let go of the Alt key at this point, you won’t get the window you selected with the mouse opening up.

What you have to do is click on the window you want to have open up. Why? Surely if I select it with the mouse, that should be enough to tell the OS that this is the window I want to have open.

It is the little things like this guys which annoy users.

UPDATE - post updated to correct the incorrect insertion of the image above. Completely my fault - nothing to do with Vista. Thanks to Tis me for letting me know about the error in the comments.

My move from OS X to Vista - Day 1

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/3/2007
in Mac, Microsoft, Windows and os x to vista
. 8 Comments

This is my first blog post from within Vista - I’ll try to put up a post a day on the move across.

Of course I am also moving from a Mac to a Sony Vaio so I will also be referencing that move in these posts.

The first thing I had to do when moving from my Mac to this Vista machine was to decide on a Windows compatible RSS reader. I use NetNewsWire on the Mac.

I quickly settled on Google Reader because I could quickly export my opml file from NetNewsWire, import it into Google Reader on the Mac, log into Google Reader on the Vaio and all my feeds were there. I realise NewsGator have an online reader which is sunched with my NetNewsWire which I could have used but Google Reader is the better product.

Then, I decided to try Outlook 2007 as my email client. The setup was painless enough (I went with IMAP so the mails will be left on the server and I will be able to retrieve them from the Mac if I revert!).

However I did run into one very annoying issue with Outlook 2007. When I exported my OPML file from NetNewsWire, I asked it to keep the folder structure I had set up. Google recognised this structure no problem at all however Outlook ignored the structure and just brought in the feeds. Worse than that, if you want to delete the feeds from Outlook, you have to select the feeds individually. With several hundred feeds, this took some time. Grrrr.

In fairness to Outlook though, I had exactly the same issues when I imported me feeds into Thunderbird. Annoying.

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