This week Jason decided he wanted the MacBook Air so he went out and got one (don’t you just love impuslive VCs?). Being a fairly huge Lenovo/Thinkpad fan I semi-tried to talk him out of it and into the X61 which is also an ultra portable (we have several X series laptops already). Since I knew he was excited about the Air (hell it is an Apple product remember) and since I know that Apple makes great hardware (come on the are a hardware company) I didn’t argue with him too much at all. Man am I glad I didn’t.

I’ve been working on the Air for a few days now getting it all setup. I have it dual booting OS X and Vista, and it’s doing it quite nicely. Vista is plenty snappy (this is the lower end 1.6 with the 80 standard drive). And yes, it is so amazing because of how thin it is. But that’s not it. What’s amazing about it is that you know it’s thin, but you don’t get how thin. Like many Apple products you have to touch it, feel it, hold it. When you do you instantly appreciate that it isn’t thin – it’s anorexic! When I told a friend it was roughly the thickness of a DVD case he didn’t believe me. “Then it must be a flimsy piece of shit” he quickly said but see, that’s the truly astonishing part, it isn’t. Not even a little bit. The Air is so solid you’d swear it was built from Adamantium. It doesn’t flex or move in your hands at all, it’s ever bit as stable as the MacBook Pro. The keyboard is responsive (even if it is missing a bunch of “special” keys) and the screen is wonderfully bright. The backlight keyboard is very easy to see in low light (I do think I prefer the color of the MBP keyboard vs. this black one).

The Air is however not without faults. First: expansion. The biggest oversight of the Air is no 3G wireless data. See that I can forgive, there will always be things down the road you want to add (yes it should have 3G now). Sure it’s got WiFi but ONLY WiFi, not even Ethernet. So if you want to add 3G to it (which of course Jason does) you have to use a USB dongle. But of course the USB port (there is after all only 1) is in a little flip down door that is so small you can’t plug the dongle in. So you have to use an extension cord. So guess what, your tiny USB 3G dongle is now almost as large as the whole fucking laptop. Brilliant huh? There’s also this stupid Mac keyboard, missing all the “techie” keys like PrtScn, etc. (which yes, I do actually use). It also assumes I either need volume up or F12, not both. Since to use both I have to add a key to the mix (the function key). Likewise with page down, home, end, etc. This isn’t specific to the Air, rather a design fault on all Apple laptops. Then there’s the price. Roughly $2,000 for this thing is quite a lot given it’s relative lack of power. Since you don’t care about that given you’re using this as an email type device (you’re not editing video on it that’s for sure!) generally I’m fine with paying for the miniturazation but the asking price is quite steep.

All-in-all the Air is a staggeringly good laptop. I emailed Jason this morning and told him I had to have one. I really think I do. Which is a shame since I got a MacBook Pro about 2 months ago. It just may have to go up on eBay soon. It just might. So if you’re considering a small laptop anytime soon look hard at the Air. Then again don’t, it’s so small you might not see it if you squint.

Recently I’ve been considering migrating many of my users back to XP (and have already done that for a few and my personal laptop).  As there are a few Vista features that I miss (I do like some of the changes to Explorer) I figured I’d see if I could do any tweaking to get Vista running a little better. 

The first and main thing I’ve done is turn off all the Vista GUI add-ons.  It’s pretty amazing the difference it makes and since it basically looks like XP I don’t really care.  So to do this here’s all you have to do:

• Right click on the Computer icon either in your Start Menu or on your desktop and choose “Properties”
• Click on “Advanced system settings” over in the upper left
• On the “Advanced” tab click on “Settings” under the “Performance” section (at the top)
• Select “Adjust for best performance” and click OK

That should do it, after a few seconds Vista will revert back to a much more XP look and feel.  While I do miss some of the eye candy the boost in speed I’ve gotten is well worth it.  If you do give this a try I’d love to hear how it goes for you, can you feel a difference?

If you’ve been following my blog for a bit you’ll know that we haven’t had the greatest time with Windows Vista so far.  For a while now I’ve been holding out hope that SP1 will resolve many of the issues we’ve been facing (specifically performance).  I’ve been reading the rumor that SP1 would be released on February 15th.  This is good given the amount of issues we’ve had.

Now today I read that while it’s done and being released to manufacturing today, they aren’t going to release it to the public until sometime in March.  What?  Why on earth would they do this.  They’ve got fixes ready to go, no more testing, no more changes but they are going to purposely delay the release until March.  This is ridiculous.  If it’s ready it’s ready – POST IT.  I can understand if they only posted it for tech professionals or to MSDN and didn’t push it through Windows Update but they aren’t even doing this.

Microsoft you just keep making this hard on me and this time for no good reason (or none that I can see).  Why am I even having to think about this, it should just be out.  And it better rock.  I guess if it doesn’t I’ll just upgrade everyone back to Windows XP…

Those of you who follow my blog know that I recently got a new MacBook Pro. This isn’t the first Mac I’ve ever had but it’s the first time I’m going to force myself to switch. I’ve made a promise that I wouldn’t touch Windows on my laptop for at least the next month and since I won’t be in the office much that means lots and lots of time on my Mac. Tonight I sat down to do a little work and finally went for a solution to one of my main complaints, the way cycling between open applications works. Let me explain.

In Windows when you press Alt-Tab you cycle through all open Windows. In OS X you cycle through all open applications. The key difference is that in Windows if you have multiple windows open for a single application (like say two Firefox windows) you can cycle to every window – in OS X you can only cycle to the main window for any given application, then to cycle between it’s open windows you use Command-~. This is REALLY really stupid and annoying. So tonight I went on my first quest to find a solution to this problem and man did I find it. Oh and if that isn’t annoying enough if you cycle to an app that is minimized you MUST go mouse over to it to maximize it – again STUPID.

Enter in Witch. Witch fixes both of these things by adding a new application for cycling your windows – I mapped mine to Alt-Tab just like in Windows. THIS ROCKS. Thank you Witch, you just fixed the single most annoying thing I’ve had to deal with during this switch over. Apple listen up, buy this guy out and get this code in your next release. I don’t care what you’re doing, whatever it is stop and add this code first!!!

So my shiny new MacBook Pro arrived today and I’ve been setting it up ever since.  Since this is the first real thing I’ve done in my new “IT Quest” I figured I’d start posting some questions to all my Mac readers out there.  So far here are the things that are driving me nuts.  One thing to know about me, I’m a keyboard shortcut junkie.

• How do you command-tab between Finder windows?  I’ve got 4 open right now and there’s no way to select them without using the mouse (I can tab between different apps and Finder but not different Finder windows).
• Tabbing through boxes and buttons is inconsistent.  I’ve enabled tab for all controls in System Preferences but just now I was filling out a registration form and while I could tab between all the boxes I had to use the mouse to click the “OK” button.
• Is there any way to have Leopard auto connect network shares on boot up? Driving me nuts that I have to reconnect everything each time I boot up.
• Can you place the icons for the network drives on your desktop?  Tiger worked this way, can’t find this in Leopard.
• Can you set it so Finder windows open where you closed them last? In Windows if I open an explorer window then move/resize it and close it next time I open it it’s right back where I left it.
• When an app is minimized and you tab to it is there a way to have it actually open?  It’s just not very helpful to give focus to an app that I can’t actually use.

That’s my list after about 2 hours.  Next post will be apps, I’m keeping a list of the apps that I need that I don’t have or know about yet.  I’m welcome any and all feedback and suggestions, bring them on!

If you’ve been following my blog for the past few weeks (or the blogs of Seth Levine or Brad Feld) you’ll know that we’ve been struggling with many of the Microsoft technologies lately, namely Windows Vista.  Rather than go back through all my rants I’ll cut to the chase, I am now seriously exploring other solutions outside of the Microsoft dynasty.

First up is my new MacBook Pro.  It should arrive tomorrow and I’m swearing to myself that while I’ll put Vista on it I’m going to run only OS X for at least the first month.  And while I plan on putting Parallels on it too I’m not even going to use that unless I just must.  So if you are a Mac user or fan please please chime in with any pointers/software/suggestions/etc you may have for me – I’m going to need it!

But more than this I’m going to be looking into different backend technologies to see how realistic it would be to move away from the Microsoft machine.  So far I have Google Apps and Zimbra on my list to check out but I’m going to be 100% open to any suggestion or technology that I find so bring’em on.  I’m looking at this from the perspective of a startup company – a clean slate, blank piece of paper.  How would I build our IT infrastructure if they hired me right now.  Oh, and I’m going to be playing with SuSE Linux too, will be installing that for Brad soon to see what he thinks of it.

I’m going to be blogging about this experience along the way. You’ll see a link up in my header called “IT Quest” so feel free to follow along and cheer me on!