I’ve gotten my hands on a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Not like it could have been worse than Vista. The upgrade process went completely smoothly, copying all my programs, settings and files over from my Vista installation. I’m still planning to install a clean version, but first I need a hard drive and more RAM (more on that later).

• Speed — for all the reports of improvements over Vista (which slowed down on a regular basis), it doesn’t seem that much faster. Start up and shut down times are only marginally faster, and Windows Explorer seems a bit faster (especially with large folders of videos). So far, Flash seems to be the most problematic — Firefox slows up a lot when I’m watching Flash movies.
• Taskbar — the redesigned taskbar was pretty weird until I changed it to small icons, so it matches about the height of the previous taskbars. So far, the new icons aren’t too great of an improvement — the running applications are indistinguishable from the quick launch buttons. That said, the new system tray is great.

To be honest, there doesn’t seem to be many groundbreaking changes.

64-bit

One large change with Windows 7 has been that Microsoft has been promoting 64-bit a lot more. I decided not to go immediately switch to 64-bit since that would have required a clean install, and I didn’t have the resources to back up. Not to mention I only have 4 GB of RAM, which makes 64-bit a lot less worth it.

My plan is, however, to buy a new hard drive (already done at a Black Friday sale) and 4 more gigabytes of RAM (not yet done). Once this is done, I’ll install a clean version of Windows 7 64-bit and experience the magic (drivers and programs not working with 64-bit).

I looked at the process list, and apparently bzip2 was the process taking up so much CPU. What the hell? I’m not running anything that would even think about needing bzip2 to compress something — just Safari. And about 10 seconds later, the bzip2 process was gone, and the computer’s back to normal.

Googling didn’t help, so: what the hell?

Instead of the minimal (and cryptic) Printer Setup Utility that’s been there since 10.2 (at least, as far as I know), you’re now met with a much friendlier screen that shows you everything you actually need to know about the printer, and buttons to tweak it further. It even automatically added the printer when I plugged it into the USB port, whereas before if I wanted to use it I had to navigate through the printer list in print dialogs.

Even though these kind of improvements are minor, and most users most likely won’t notice them, it shows that Apple is still committed to polishing up all aspects of OS X. Every version just gets better and better.

Seemingly months after everyone else has marveled at OS X Leopard, I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Instead of upgrading, I decided to wipe the disk (backing up first, of course) and do a clean install. The first time, the install went fine, but Leopard hung with a blue screen when I booted it up the first time. So, I wiped the disk clean, again, and reinstalled, and everything is fine now.

The first thing I did (after installing Firefox) was change the dock to the “flat” version, then disabled the translucent menu bar. I have to tell you, Leopard is much better now that I’ve done those things.

Negatives aside, I do like the upgrade, but I don’t really see any great leaps similar to what it felt like upgrading to Tiger. Spaces is pretty cool, but Stacks is pretty annoying. I’ve been using Stacks to manage my built-in Downloads folder (new thing in Leopard) and it’s annoying the hell out of me, at least most of the time. Often I just click the huge arrow to navigate to the folder and Finder and just do whatever there, which defeats the purposes of Stacks.

The new UI (the “unified” look) is nice, but the window control orbs (close, minimize, maximize) look really gimmicky. They don’t look like they were drawn right, either — the bottom looks like it was horribly blended. Not to mention the “shine” is really overdone. I do like the new look for Leopard, though, and to me it’s familiar from using Uno on Tiger.

Unfortunately I don’t have an external drive that’s available for use, so I haven’t tried Time Machine out, but I don’t think it would be that great — I’ve been able to do the same thing for years with tools like SuperDuper!. Overall, while Leopard is a solid upgrade, the “wow” just isn’t now (to borrow Windows Vista’s slogan).

A screenshot of what my workspace looks like right now. The wallpaper is one from Windows Vista, and while I can’t say I like Vista itself, it has some cool wallpapers.

I even set my wallpaper to the black Windows Vista Ultimate one sometimes just for kicks. As for the icons on my desktop, the less the better, and I’ve switched it around to display the labels to the right, enlarged the icons a bit and brought the text size down one step.

Unfortunately Tiger doesn’t let you change the grid spacing, otherwise it would look a bit better.

I started thinking about switching when I read an article on Ajaxian that mentioned that more and more web developers were moving to Safari/WebKit for casual browsing, due to the speed and ease of use. I can’t believe it took me this long — everything is snappy, the way I would expect a modern piece of software to work, and the nightly is running great.

Inquisitor is great, too. It makes searching Google fun and easy, and as an added bonus it looks good. It just took me a while to figure out the shortcut for the search box, but once that was done it’s been smooth sailing since then.

Oh, and the font rendering in Safari is so much better. I’m never going back. Never! Oh, and WebKit is for Windows, too, now. So when I switch to Windows XP when I buy a new PC (gasp), I’ll still be fine.

1. Put it this way: when I quit Firefox, my RAM usage goes way down. Way down.

Fortunately, someone created Gmail+Growl for Google Notifier, a Google Notifier plugin that replaces the built-in notifications with Growl notifications.

So that’s one item off that list. The only other one is support for Google Reader, but the Gmail+Growl software apparently is a “plugin” for Google Notifier. Thus, if there are plugins, then a plugin for Google Reader can’t be that hard.

[via]

• Complicated installation — made more so by the fact that X-Chat’s user commands menu kinda sucks.
• It’s not contained — you needed an AppleScript file lying around your system.
• Limited functionality — it was impossible to output the information in an action, for example.

I finally got around to digging a bit further into X-Chat Aqua’s features, and I was advised by helpful souls in the X-Chat IRC channel to just write a Perl plugin. So this is what I did, and now it’s a “plugin” which you drop into X-Chat Aqua’s Plugins folder, and it’s completely self-contained.

To download it and for other documentation, please see the project page.