43applications.com
At work, I've helped a few people set up new MacBooks in the last few weeks, and seeing a virgin install of Tiger is a reminder of just how many tiny apps I need to make a Mac feel heimisch . This isn't even counting "real" applications, like Camino or TextMate. This is just the little guys, the interface hacks.
OS X has replicated the great vi/emacs schism with its powerhouse duo of shortcut applications, Quicksilver and LaunchBar (and Butler , the forgotten RC Cola of the app-launching wars). I was a relatively late convert from LaunchBar to Quicksilver, which I suppose is the emacs of the pair in that there's a dazzling amount of crap you can make it do, most of which I am too scatterbrained to remember and almost all of which I am too lazy to set up. (Also, if you follow the tutorials lovingly posted at 43folders , I believe Quicksilver will check your email, massage your iCal, and give you a happy ending.) I use Texpander almost entirely for having a few signatures I can alternate between for email (the main one is triggered by the MediaWiki-inspired "~~~~", which I can remember); I use Gmail Notifier , MenuCalendarClock , and the messaging system Growl . I religiously install CalcService . Until the developer seemingly abandoned it, I use a little note-taking app called Sidenote . I myself wrote an application , Jumpcut , which provides clipboard buffering (kill-ring, to you emacs guys), and I can think of a half-dozen applications which provide similar functionality, some of them quite good.
Do PCs have any of this? I know someone wrote a LaunchBar clone, AppRocket
, for Windows, and there's the excellent Shortkeys
, but Windows users don't seem to geek out on this the same way Macheads do. (For that matter, despite the existance of Sawmill
, Linux users don't seem to, either; 98% of my Linux use is just at a command prompt, though, so my impression could be mistaken.) Is this really just a cultural thing? Are people swayed by the Cult of Jobs simply more willing to spend twenty minutes configuring something that will save them 18 seconds every time they launch Photoshop? And what great PC (or Mac!) UI hacks am I simply not aware of?
Comments
^Do you count the half an hour it takes to change all the explorer folder display settings to make the Windows file management possible?^
Windows doesn't seem to have nearly as strong a tinytool subculture as Mac. I have a few things I install to make Windows more comfortable and efficient, but it doesn't come close to what you're talking about, and it's mostly a personal rather than a cultural thing.
And with Linux, the command-line is the tinytool subculture (although I just tripped over tomboy the other day and that's a good implementation (in C#, bizarrely) of a fantastic idea). Although actually those types of toys tend to get thrown into the distributions by default, so setting them up after the fact doesn't come up.
(For that matter, despite the existance of Sawmill , Linux users don't seem to, either; 98% of my Linux use is just at a command prompt, though, so my impression could be mistaken.)
You clearly haven't spent any time reading KDE vs GNOME flamewars.
As a side note, Vox's insistance on jamming carriage returns into my markup and making every link seem to have a space after it is aggrevating.
And then there's The Antidesktop. Note the list of window managers he's tried. You could spend all your time on Linux doing nothing but tweaking the settings, which is why the reasonable defaults on Ubuntu/GNOME are refreshing. Back in college when I ran FVWM I had keybindings to do absolutely everything including moving the cursor for focus and moving and resizing windows, but I honestly don't have the time any more. ^I'd rather spend that time tweaking my vimrc and zsh completions.^
Dave, now that you're poisoning your brain with Macs, you might want to check out VoodooPad, which seems to be very similar to tomboy.
And then there's The Antidesktop.
Whatever terminal software we had when I was in college was similar to screen. You'd have text-based tabs along the bottom listing all your sessions, and if there was activity (say, in an open chat session), a little indicator would tick back and forth and you could switch over to it. I don't remember the keystrokes anymore, but it worked really well for managing multiple sessions. Way friendlier than X was back then.
Ha, I actually haven't touched my Mac in a week. The built-in terminal drives me crazy, and since most of my work is in the shell or Firefox, I end up using Putty on the laptop or more often gnome-terminal. Is there a better terminal program, or at least some way to get a better font in the default one?
I don't think I'd noticed the comments listing the three additional window managers he's tried since ratpoison. This is in addition to the 11 (plus "many other") window managers listed before ratpoison.
Dave, go to the Font menu in Terminal, and then choose Show Fonts. (Or just hit command-t while you're in Terminal.) That should help.
I use ProFont. There are a lot of other tiny little things that bug me about Terminal.app. Some people seem to prefer iTerm. You could also run X11 and use whichever terminal you like from Darwin Ports in there (xterm, rxvt, etc.).
I think there are a very large number of small tools and tweaks for Windows, but there's a number of reasons most Windows users don't install them.
When someone first gets their Windows computer, I think they try a bunch of things, and then after a few months their system is virus laden and worm infested and just bloated (even moreso than by default) and slow and horrible. They find someone who knows a bit about computers who says "oh man, all this crap you installed on your system, it's bad stuff!" and then they learn that unless you really trust the source of the file, you just don't install it, or you risk your entire computer.
It's also painfully difficult to find good solid Windows utils. There just doesn't seem to be the same sense of community with Windows users as their is with Macs. Even though there are millions of Mac users, the community still feels sort of tight.
Maybe it's just because I know folks like you who tip me about the good stuff, but I think if you start following the blogs of a couple of mac users you're going to encounter all those tools. For Windows you have resources like tucows and download.com, which are horrible places to get software, and no really good filters for good apps.
Installing a new application on a mac is stupid easy, you're know you're safe from stupid shit like worms and virii, and it's easy to find the best applications and to see examples of people using them.
There's also the aesthetic component. Windows application developers tend not to have the same sense of style, and there's a plague of horrible independant developer websites out there, whereas Mac devs seem to at least have better influences on what decent looking marketing looks like.
And what great PC (or Mac!) UI hacks am I simply not aware of?
This may not qualify as a "great PC UI hack", but I cannot live without PathCopy (scroll down). It's a pretty dull but useful program that allows you to right-click and copy the file name and path. Which leads me to wonder if having the right-click impedes the necessity to invent tiny apps for Windows. There's also much to be said for the closeness of the Mac community.
I may have more of the little Windows this-and-thats than most people, then. After suffering from some Quicksilver envy and menu fatigue, I am currently settling in on the somewhat coyly named Find and Run Robot which is a simple searcher/launcher ap that makes a start in the right direction without a lot of fiddly setup. Because I do a lot of cut/paste in some of my writing, I really can't imagine working without CLCL (hat tip to Jonah), which is a clipboard cache not too unlike jumpcut. And I use The Cleaner, a small format and character stripper that was written by Steve Chin and seems to be no longer available (or at least so the first page of google results would indicate, but perhaps deeper digging would retrieve it). It was meant to clean up emails for pasting, but it sees a lot of use for dumping formatting from webpages and reducing a snippet to plain text. Oscar's Renamer (hat tip to Og) does renaming and also list-of-file-name copying. Desk Pins is a quick and easy always-on-top ap that gets around juggling windows of different sizes and overlap when moving content. The notes thing I cover with a combination of Stickies (which also functions as a quick IM to my husband's computer on our network), Evernote, and TreePad Lite, and I fiddle with html in the 4.0 version of Arachnophilia just because I've gotten it so customized that it's as comfy as an old linen shirt. I keep AllNetic Working Time Tracker running so I can take client calls without fumbling. KeyWallet handles my daily-used passwords, but I use KeePass to archive them all (and carry them on my USB stick). CutePDF, Visual CD, 7-zip round out the filish things. You can see why I *cough* need a launcher, no?
There's a relevant article at Rogue Amoeba's site about their experience releasing software for Mac and software for Windows.
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Article/Lessons-Learned-2006-06-08-13-00
i use one url / app launcher that's fantastic for windows -- slickrun. free, just powerful enough to make it really useful, just customizable enough to make it your own without driving you down the ever-tweaking path to insanity.
"Windows doesn't seem to have nearly as strong a tinytool subculture as Mac."
Mac users install tiny tools, Windows users (for the most part) tweak the settings and options. And Rob, you say, "When someone first gets their Windows computer, I think they try a bunch of things, and then after a few months their system is virus laden and worm infested and just bloated (even moreso than by default) and slow and horrible."
I actually think this might be accurate for *average* PC users, but there's a lot of us (probably as many as there are Mac users) who are serious PC users. I don't run antivirus or antispyware on any of my machines, and I've never had a virus on any of my Windows boxes. I also don't install very many third-party applets (except a text editor FTP client, etc.) and mostly keep the defaults for things like UI settings.
There is kind of a zen to being a high-end Windows user, but it's not something that gets blogged about very much. Aside from Sippey, I can only think of one or two people I know (even amongst the geeks at 6A) who are *really* good at using Windows.
I would estimate it takes the same amount of effort/investment as it does to follow Mac blogs and deal with the few Windows-specific things that Mac users have to route around, but it's certainly not going to win you any cool points. Which I guess is why nobody talks about it.