12 Month Windows

I was asked the question "Why not a windows tablet?" After publishing my last post. That ultimately boils down the the entire reason behind why the 12 Months of Windows failed for me. Windows 8 isn't what was promised. You simply cannot have a "best of both worlds" scenario with Tablets and PCs. While my initial findings were certainly interesting to me, it became more of an issue as time marched on and I began to see the chinks in the facade. Simply put, you cannot expect a PC to act like a tablet or vice versa. That's not to say that Windows 8 didn't have some great ideas, but they were hampered by Balmer's fear of moving forward too quickly. The fact that there is so much legacy support still built into Windows astounds me. Apple cut its OS install size in half when it stopped supporting the PowerPC chips.Windows could save space by losing all the extraneous crap that 99% of the world doesn't need any longer. Make the companies who need th

I've spent quite a bit of money over the course of my life playing with various technologies and trying to find something that was the "Perfect Tool." I recently came to the conclusion that in searching for the perfect tool, we forget to make use of the tools that we have. I started  this blog with the idea that we cannot make a decision about whether or not we like something or hate it without first knowing all sides of the equation. That said, I think there were too many failures and unrealized potential within the Windows 8 package. Windows 7 is a far superior product that is not attempting to be more than what it is. Because of that, I moved back to the Mac ecosystem. Over the past six months or so I've been using an android phone and an iPhone. I've made a few comments in the past about my thoughts on Android vs. iPhone. This is more about Tablets. While I feel that Android Phones (the good ones that update quickly and don't come loaded with 2.1) ar

There's all this noise about who hates who and why they hate them and why the other OS sucks. Well, I have an HTC One and an iPhone 5. The HTC One is through work and the iPhone is my personal device. I love both of them. I hate both of them. Here's why... In terms of simplicity and ease of use, the iPhone kills Android. I don't the word of other techies like me on this - in that instance, either one is pretty easy to figure out. What I've done is talk to people as well as attempt to look at both systems from the perspective of a non-techie. The reason that many tinkerer types don't like iOS is the reason that I would recommend it to many people of a non-tech inclination. It's easy. It really is "Point and touch." The settings are laid out in an easy to understand pattern and everything is easily explained. Barring that, you can go to your local Apple Store and receive free training on your device. Android, on the other hand, is a little

I understand absolute hate. I absolutely hated Windows for decades for various reasons before I ran my (failed) experiment. I don't hate it anymore, but I've also found that it's not for me. That said, I'm still trying to wrap my head around why some people hate Apple so much. So while I understand it, I still don't understand it - if that makes sense. I can understand preferring Windows over Apple because of software titles or personalization possibilities such as skins, but I don't understand the pure hatred that's directed at them. Back in my younger days, as a teen and young adult, I would vehemently declare my hatred toward everything Windows. I would talk about how Microsoft stole this that and the other from Apple. I got older, I read up on things and later came to the conclusion that while Microsoft may have stolen from Apple, Apple took a few things from Xerox back in the early days. Tech companies like to steal from each other - it's

I lasted about 2.5 months, give or take, on the experiment that was supposed to last 12. As of this moment, I am typing this entry on my MacBook Air which replaces the Lenovo I had purchased for the experiment. Now let me say here that I'm not dissing Lenovo in any way. The system was everything it was advertised to be, but it couldn't be what I needed it to be and when I upgraded to Windows 8.1, it failed. I honestly don't have the time to deal with attempting to fix issues, hunt down drivers and manually patch things up that seems to be par for the course with Windows Machines. I'm retracting anything I said regarding Windows when I started out on this experiment, but I am going to provide some further insights I've had since my last post. I went into this experiment because people hated Windows 8 with such a passion I wanted to see what all the hate was about. Jumping from Mac to Windows 8 wasn't that difficult in most regards. The interface found on

Depending on which side of the isle you land on, people tend to say that “their” OS is more conducive to productivity than the other. Here is my experience and my thoughts with both Mac and Windows platforms. Out of the box both Windows 8 and Mac OS X are about equally productive in regards to the basics. Web browsing, text editing (a basic text editor is included on both systems -  though I find that Word Pad on MS is slightly more robust than Text Edit on the Mac with one exception – Text Edit will allow you to save as a .doc or .docx while neither Word Pad or Note Pad offer that function). If you play around with photos a little bit, you’re going to be tearing your hair out on a Windows machine out of the box as Windows 8 only offers viewing capabilities and Apple offers iPhoto which is a fairly robust photo editor/enhancer. It’s not Photoshop, by any means, but you can adjust saturation, fix redeye, remove blemishes, desaturate into a B&W image and more. Windows 8.1 offers so

Today has been really been the first time I’ve been frustrated with my decision to jump from Mac to Windows, and I’m not sure where to point the blame for it. The biggest issue I have both with Windows 8 and Android is the lack of quality apps. I know the Android lovers and Windows fans will decry me being a blind Apple Fanboy, and anybody who is that close-minded is just a waste of my time. They can live in their happy little bubble the way I used to live in my happy little Apple bubble. The fact that Apple OS X and iOS have a better selection of Apps available isn’t Apple’s fault, per se. I’m not saying that the Apple Branded Apps are better than the Windows branded apps of the same vein, I’m talking strictly 3rd party developers. I would imagine that with Android having more market share than Apple at this point there would be a better selection of Apps available for the platform and more high quality apps. The issue here is 3rd party developers. I’m not a part of any developer p

And the iPhone 5c is REALLY Dumb This post is in no way meant to negate my previous post titled iOS 7 is Dumb. This is merely meant point out the parts of iOS 7 that really aren’t dumb at all, and are actually brilliant. The iPhone 5c feels like Apple is trying to jump back in time. First, iOS 7 Anybody who knows anything about computer programming or engineering understands that iOS 7 isn’t dumb in the least. The underpinnings of the OS are quite sound and incredibly stable, more-so than Android and Windows Phone. What is dumb about iOS 7 is the feel and look of the interface, but that’s not to say that there isn’t brilliance there. While Notification Center has gotten better, it’s still more annoying than it is useful. On the other hand, the swipe up from the bottom to get to some quick-action controls that are frequently used is brilliant. So is the addition of a flashlight button available from the lock screen that also stays on when you lock the device, unlike the 3rd part

When I first held the iPhone in my hand back in 2007 it never felt cheap to me. It was solid, it was aluminum and, despite people’s grouch regarding a lack of customizability, it felt like a professional, slick device. I was proud to own one and I felt like, to use a Maine saying with a wee bit of profanity, King Shit of Turd Island. I never fully understood the switch from the aluminum back to plastic with the 3G and 3GS, but they were still solid phones. I had two at the time – for work and home – and the one I used for work took a beating. I dropped it on cement, I kicked I across marble floors, I dropped it down some stairs. It never broke, though I’m certain that it should have about twenty or so times. I was impressed. Then there was the app store. Prior to that, I admit, I had done the whole jailbreak thing on my phone until the app store appeared. At that point, I didn’t really feel a need to jailbreak. I could get anything I wanted and I felt that the people who designed the

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about Windows 8 is the fact that it’s useless without having touch. I accepted the challenge and spent a week using just the mouse and physical keyboard interface on my Yoga 11s. This won’t be as long as many of my other posts have been because there’s not much to say. Touch is nice, but it is not necessary to make Windows 8 as functional, if not more so, than Windows 7. The gestures take some getting used to, but after just a couple of days they’re second nature and highly useful. There are also a huge number of keyboard shortcuts that create a fast, easy experience to work within Windows 8. Over all, I will say that touch is absolutely not necessary to work with Win 8 and that the computing experience can be just as productive and fun as Win 7, if not more so. The more I use Windows 8, the more convinced I am that people hate change, not the OS. Again, Windows 8 is perfectly usable without a touch interface. But maybe that’s just me.

I would be remiss if I didn’t address the Apple Keynote for the new iPhones that was held last week. While I should have posted sooner, I needed time to digest it all and form an opinion I was more or less certain of. When Steve Jobs passed away there was a camp of people who were worried that Apple would lose its direction in the absence of the man behind Apple. I had hope that things wouldn’t change much in his absence. I had hoped that he had created a company that was self sustaining with creativity and innovation and would just keep going. As it turns out, I fear that that group of people may have been correct. I’m not seeing anything exciting from Apple. There have been no game changers since Steve Jobs passed away, merely incremental updates to existing hardware. Perhaps the ONLY exception to that is the Mac Pro, but it holds the moniker of its predecessor, even if it doesn’t hold the same form factor. The hardware in the new Mac Pro is very innovative, but it’s being used to

So I called Lenovo tech support last night because the volume rocker on the left side of the device stopped working. It would only send the volume down, not up. This was only a mild annoyance because there are three ways to control the volume on the Yoga 11s and that was only one of them. On the keyboard you have function keys that can be used to control the volume and in tablet mode you have the setting area when you bring up the charms bar on the left. Having an additional volume control seemed a little overkill to me, but I didn’t design it. The first thing that happened upon this discovery was that I wasn’t overly upset by it. I had two other, perfectly functional methods for changing the volume – I didn’t need a third. If it had been an Apple device, I would have marched my ass down to the Apple Store and raised a stink. Which I did with my 15” MacBook Pro with Retina on multiple occasions – in fact, they replaced it five times over the course of a year. Maybe now you understand

Windows Live was an answer to Apple’s iLife suite in just about every possible way. It offered a number of tools that were quite similar to the offerings that Apple had. A quick breakdown would look something like this: iPhoto – Photo Gallery iMovie – Microsoft Movie Maker iMessage – Messenger iCloud – SkyDrive Garage Band – Nothing Now iLife is one of the tool sets where Apple wins hands down with the features that each of their tools holds and the integration between all of them. Within iPhoto you have the ability to share out to Facebook and other social media outlets with little effort on the part of the user. The Windows 8 Gallery has the option to share, however that option is removed in Windows 8.1 (when last I used it). I think this was a mistake. Regardless of the ability to tweak your photos, people want easy ways to share their photos without having to jump from app to app. Speaking of jumping from App to App, iLife is so strongly integrated with everything that it’s

I think this is the longest I've gone since I started the blog without posting something. In the time since my last post I have spent a good deal of time on the phone with a friend walking them manually removing certain pieces of Malware. I didn't even have a shared screen in front of me, so that was pretty cool. I also helped my Mother-In-Law work with a photo just enough to reduce its size using MS Paint of all things. This has convinced me of two things: First, that I'm kind of a genius to even think of seeing Paint could resize a photo (who uses Paint anymore at all?) and second, Microsoft needs to do something about the malware issue. Okay, honestly the best piece of free Virus Protection Software I've found has been Microsoft's own Windows Defender. It's light weight, small and doesn't eat through your process cycles when it's running. More importantly, it's effective. And lastly, it doesn't try to sell you upgrades to some better, ne

If there's one thing that Apple nailed right on the first go round, it was iTunes. I'm an iTunes junky and will always be an iTunes Junky regardless of what OS I end up using as my primary. Most of the complaints I've heard about iTunes are invalid complaints because they revolve around either A) They have to pay for the music/TV Show or B) They don't have a particular artists/television show/movie they feel should be available and C) There's DRM on them and I can only watch them through iTunes. For all of these issues, I will point past Apple to the content providers who are stuck in a model that's now severely outdated and which they cannot seem to divorce themselves from. "Sure, you can have our show, but you can't let the customer burn it to a disk or share it out to anybody who's not them." It's been found that, in general, the people who pirate music are also the ones who spend the most money on it. Why is this? That's sim

I don't remember what cloud service I started using first. It was either DropBox or SugarSync and they are still the primary file sync services I use. To be honest, I think Apple not only missed the boat, but missed the bus that took them to the boat when it comes to cloud services.  I can only speak of what's currently available as I don't yet know what Mavericks will look like when it's released, presumably, on September 10th alongside iOS 7. In my previous entry, I noted that I had to step backwards out of Windows 8.1 due to some rather annoying issues revolving around the keyboard and mouse on my Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11s - namely that when it was flipped around into Kiosk Mode, the keyboard wouldn't turn off. I didn't blame anybody in that post, if you'd like to go read it, I just jumped back to Windows 8 and have been happy (though anxiously awaiting Windows 8.1). When I logged into the freshly imaged Yoga with my Microsoft Account, all my settings

Last night I downgraded from 8.1 to 8. Not because I didn't like 8.1, but because 8.1 is pre release software and hasn't worked out all the bugs, I found a fairly significant bug that affected my experience with this particular laptop - namely that it stopped shutting of the keyboard and mouse when I would flip it around. This was, as you might expect, the opposite of useful. Now, had I still been lost in my blind following of Apple and heard of this happening, I might have blamed Windows or said it was shoddy of the manufacturer to not release drivers. There are two reasons I don't say that and don't blame anybody in this case. The first is that I've been beta testing for Apple for a number of years and I've found in multiple instances even the great Glowing White Fruit has some impressively horrible issues during their beta phase. The second is that I've come to understand little more of how software works. It's possible that Lenovo has a driver th

So for the past week I've been making use of the new HTC One provided to me by my office. I also have an iPhone 5 I use as my personal device. I am wishing I'd purchased an HTC One as my personal device instead of the iPhone 5 after just a week. Let me start with the only two (or three) things iOS has going over Android at this point... Lumping together two different features, I must say that iMessage and Facetime are two features that need to find comparable features in Android. iMessage allows delivery confirmation and, if the user allows, read receipts. I always allow read receipts because I want people to know I've read their message. iMessages are controlled through Apple, not the carrier and therefore don't count toward texting limits, if you have any on your account. Facetime allows you to use the phone number of your contact to call them on a video call and talk, as you might imagine, face to face. While that functionality is provided in some capacity with S

First, go and read this:  http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/windows-8-1-importing-photos/ Now, I'm not saying that much of what he's saying here isn't valid, I just think he's not looking at things the same way I am, and the same way I suspect Microsoft is. The fact is that Microsoft did decide to remove some features from Windows 8 and 8.1. But that doesn't mean that they didn't think about what they were doing. The more I make use of this device, the more I realize that it is, very likely, a far more user friendly system than even Mac - which might frighten the folks in Cupertino if Microsoft's own loyalists weren't busy bashing an OS that has a ton of potential (this coming from a former Mac user - hence this blog). Apple doesn't even have to respond to Windows 8 because they see it as a non-issue because of the public response to it. Much like the iPad, this is simply a point and touch device, but with so much more ability than t

I had posted before about how I seem to be in the minority regarding Windows 8. I like the interface and I even like the ability to switch between a desktop and a tablet interface. This is, in my humble opinion, brilliant (though, as I discussed before, the implementation isn't perfect). As a note, this is Beta software and therefor anything I discuss here could be changed by the time the official release is made. Windows 8.1 fixes many of the issues it had with implementation, but creates some new ones. My over all thoughts on these changes are positive, so I'm going to start with what I feel they've missed on. My biggest issue out of the gate seems to be the touch pad. First of all, it feels as though it's using two different drivers. One driver is used in desktop mode, where I have no problems scrolling, and the other in the FKMI* where I scrolling has become a bit of a nightmare. If I go into the PC Settings/PC & Devices/Mouse & Touchpad, the touchpa

Now here is where I'm going to deviate from what most of the reviewers are saying and state that I think Windows 8 is brilliant. As I have stated in previous entries, I don't believe that it's perfect and I think it suffers from "Design by Committee" issues, but over all I've become impressed with it. At first I had believed that the marrying of the Desktop and Tablet like interface was a giant mistake. Now I feel that it's just the implementation that suffers from issues, but that the idea behind it is actually pretty sound. (Please accept my apologies for being unable to manage simple tasks this morning - I accidentally published this super short, then updated it with a huge amount of text and accidently hit "Revert" after I was done - I'm not certain that beyond this point is going to be any good). Microsoft was ahead of its time in the early 2000s with the release of the convertible form factor Tablet PCs. Gates and Co. could have h

Jumping off my experiment for a moment, I'm going to take some time to share my thoughts on Steve Balmer leaving Microsoft. This could be the best news that Microsoft has had in years. Why they allowed him to stay as long as he has is still a mystery to me. The man has taken good ideas and managed to murder them. The Courier, which was far more interesting and impressive than the iPad ever was, was killed with the reason being, if I recall correctly, they couldn't figure out the battery life on the device. Then there was a huge jump in battery life technology which made that reason completely stupid. The rest of the time Balmer was trying to play Catch Up with Apple and then Google. They have been watching as their business becomes more of a joke than anything else. Now is the time for them to take charge, hire a CEO with some new vision and a willingness to take risks in innovation and bring some new product ideas to the table. One thing Microsoft can't do is continu