New, smaller, computer requires new desk, which requires new cables setup. Different from the previous setup, I had to cut about 40cm of the board off, ditched the Western Digital MyBook external hard drive (which failed one month after the two years warranty expired). Also I took the opportunity to get rid of the second outlet set.

About 3 weeks ago I had to switch from Mac OS X (Leopard) to Windows (7 beta build 7100) at the company I work for. One of the reasons of the change was starting of a new project, that will be developed on Microsoft stack (C#, ASP.NET MVC and Microsoft SQL Server 2008). The project will have to be deployed on some Windows Servers, so no point in using C# Mono or PHP.

The first week, was spent getting used to the new platform and all the tools available on it. Installing pasteboard history (ClipX), an Orthodox File Manager (Nomad.NET), a proper editor (GVim for Windows) was something you had to do if you wanted to have a proper work environment.

The second week, I started to take a closer look at the IDE itself, as I already received the sources I was going to work from now on. For a change, it is nice to have code completion for about every namespace, class, method or function, but is annoying not to have word completion (for strange words you have to write inside string declarations like SQL keywords).

Beside the different change in layout, one of the other things that I noticed was the lack of attention to details in user interface and the general lack of polish. For example, in the above image you can see the subtle blue break point (enabled or disabled) in XCode versus the red break point from Visual Studio. I’d rather have 10 more pixels to fit one or two characters then to have 10% unused space in a window. Also see the subtle indicator for folding area, shades of gray in XCode and square with +/- sign in Visual Studio.

A much more visible differences in Visual Studio are the items from the menu item and the layout of the sub-windows that change when you go from Edit mode into Run/Debug mode and back. It is distracting to see shapes changing in background when you should concentrate on the front window. Better to keep everything fix and in place, and let you focus on the things you’re doing.

These are the touches that makes most of Mac OS X software much more enjoyable then most of the Windows software.

During my business trip to Munich I haven’t had much time to wonder around and visit bike shops (although I bumped into a big one near Theresienwiese U-Bahn station), that’s why I’ve ordered this nice bicycle teapot shaped bell from Amazon.de. I think that it’s nice form goes much better with my city bicycle then a regular one. I’m sure that the nice and shiny look will wear out pretty soon.

As many office workers, I got infected with the ‘productivity bug’.

I found myself using two types of software daily (or at least weekly) on Mac (that I didn’t use while I was using Linux).

The first type is task management, represented by OmniFocus, which helps me not to forget different task/errands.

For what I use OmniFocus?

• List of monthly rates I have to pay (car loan, assurance fees)
• List of important things (utilities) or less important (having a haircut) I have to pay from time to time
• List of things I’d like to buy in the new future (inline skates, shoes)
• List of things to do (home errands)

For what I don’t use it?

• Managing projects, although some projects are written down there, but I don’t work on them much.
• Grocery store lists. For that I use a small post it on the fridge, where I write what I should not forget to buy on the next trip to grocery store.

Also not to forget dates/meetings/events I use iCal, the build in calendaring software. I prefer this to OmniFocus because it syncs with my iPods and with my mobile phone. OmniFocus can sync some of it’s entries to iCal too. I’ve tried this feature once, but I think I put all my to-dos in one calendar and that it become littered with entries from OmniFocus. On a screencast I’ve seen that you should sync only one of your contexts (e.g. errands) with one of the calendars, not all the contexts with one calendar (as I did).