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Useful Apps for First-Time Windows Users?
pauljoyce asks: "I'm a Mac fan who is intrigued by the possibilities of Apple's Boot Camp software. Now that I have a chance to painlessly dip into the Windows world, what I'd like to ask you is, what Windows software amazes you? I want to build a list of unique, elegant, can't-do-without apps, so all us new Boot-Camp babies can finally experience some of the great innovation happening over on the Windows platform.
I roughed in a quick blogpage to collect the info, and to house any useful discussions. It'll probably deteriorate into a flame war at some point, but hopefully I can get a few contributions to each category before then. Would those interested please chime in with their list of favorites?"
Really - there are all these cool games, that are released *years* before they are available on Macs.
That's the only reason I have a Windows box - to play my games, b/c most of them don't run in WINE.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
Play as many PC games as you like.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Painlessly dip?
"After partitioning their hard drives and installing Windows XP--which seems to work fine--these people find they can no longer boot back into OS X" doesn't sound very painless.
Okay, this is really the stupidest thing I've ever seen grace the front page of Slashdot......not that there aren't alot of others competing for a close second, but seriously.
.....
1) You need to have a reason to run applications. There are VERY FEW COOL applications. Boot Camp was made primarly for the business world and gamers who have programs that aren't ported.
2) If you are a Mac user, why does it even worry you? Have you found your program selection limiting in what you do every day? Once again, most people don't sit and think of cool programs to run, they run a program because they need to get something done.
If you don't have Windows programs, stick with OS X. I've got dual-booting Macs running Windows and OSX, and unless you have a need (and of course, the obvious: a valid windows license), why even bother?
Once again.....
1. Stupid Question + Stupid Editors
2.
3. Profit
Slashdot motto
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
Get UltraEdit-32. Best text editor I've ever used on Windows.
Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?
Right?
Seriously though, there is nothing fun or amazing about the windows world (aside from games that aren't available on OSX). The only 'must have' applications are only 'must have' because my IT department says so.
I'll tell you straight up - If you are using a mac happily now, you probably aren't missing anything.
Let's take a realistic point of view. We have a computer user who seems to be well experienced. They even have a nicely designed blog online where you can write in your favourite Windows-only applications. Yet they claim that they have never been a windows user before (Making me wonder where they have been for the past 10+ years where windows has been the ubiquitous consumer & business software platform.)
Now let us pretend for a moment that this actually is some computer user who has already mastered implementing RSS+Atom into their blog, yet simultaneously never even noticed that Windows has existed alongside the Mac OS, nor ever even dabbled in it until the release of boot camp last week(I can hardly imagine them rushing out to a store and purchasing a copy of MS Windows for their not-even year old Intel Mac) So why would they be interested in beta software like MS Max? (Which is really only ever going to be as good as last years version of Apple's iLife?) And why is it that their top 10 Mac apps seem to resemble the top rated list from macupdate.com.
Now lets come back to the real world: If you haven't dabbled in windows ever then you're either a recent jail escapee or very good at digging one's own head deeply into sand. This story doesn't add up, and is coinciding with a new wave of windows advertising. Which is fairly interesting as it's before a major release is due. I think our friends in Redmond are just trying to peddle off some Windows sales. Now excuse me I have to drink coffee with a pretty lady from getty-images.
First-time Windows users?
Isn't that an oxymoron?
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Forgive him. He's a Mac user, so he doesn't realise that software is supposed to be obtuse to learn, frustrating to maintain and butt ugly.
Blank until
Why not just buy a 2-button mouse? It's not like it'll break the bank...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I'm not entirely sure what he wants to do, but most of these categories are just as mature under MacOS as they are under Windows. A spreadsheet application? Well, you've got Excel, you've got OO, and that's about it, for the big one and the up-and-coming, unless Lotus/Quattro is still hanging around out there somewhere. I don't know what state of the art is for spreadsheets on MacOS, but it's gotta be pretty similar to Windows. It's much the same with graphics programs and online programs, really. Utilities? What are you going to do with them? Why do you need a spam filter under Windows if you're checking your mail under MacOS? Do you actually envision booting into Windows and using it for long periods of time?
The only category that I see here where Windows definitely has a lot of options above and beyond MacOS is games. So go for that. Go down to the local video game store and look for some things on the PC shelf that aren't on the Macintosh shelf, and buy them. Over all, you probably aren't missing much.
This post sounds like the OP has a solution (Boot Camp) looking for a problem. And unless you've got a specific problem that really needs solving with Boot Camp, what's the point in using it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Boot Camp would be almost useless to a web designer or developer - you have to reboot to test it.
padding: 3px 5px 2px 2px;
Perfect in Safari, right now lets reboot into windows & check IE (time passes..)
padding: 3px 4px 2px 1px;
hmm, looks ok in Safari still, righty oh, reboot back to win (times passes..)
ARGGHHHH!
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
You know, I've now worked in a couple of environments which have seen Java in real use.
In fact, not just real use, but the real use for which people recommend Java. Database backends. Passing objects around. Network-wide management of distributed computation. Monitoring diverse datapoints and aggregating them. Web interfaces.
You know, Java's home turf.
I'm not impressed. Or maybe I am. Its startup time is impressively long, I suppose. And its memory footprint is impressively large. And its syntax is impressively verbose and messy. And its cross-platform claims are impressively misleading, the moment you stick a toe out of the hallowed sandbox.
Most damning of all, the vaunted OO strategy, far from leading to salutary code reuse turns into a game of guess-what-this-class-does. Because, see, information hiding is great. No, really. It saves us so much time in development that we can spend extra time reverse-engineering these closed classes we've been handed.
In one case, java's delightful approach to namespaces resulted in wasting days writing scripts just to manage the vast, unwieldy file structure we had. Oh, and then a version change. Chinese fire drill on the file system!
In the most recent case, where I'm still mired, the ops team is over budget and under performance. When we do a root cause analysis, the incredible bulk of the Java VM is the culprit. It's fine to have 28 bytes for an integer when you're doing toy problems in class. It sucks when you have terabytes of data you have to throw around.
If I'm ever in a position of decisionmaking authority on a project, and anyone suggests Java, I think I'm firing them (if they're a subordinate) or quitting (if they're not). It's taken a year off my life in stress because of its misbehaviour already, I'm sure.
Oh, but it's so stable! So is anything else sane written by halfway competent programmers, and probably at least twice as fast. Anybody who can't write stable modula-3 (another relatively modern, clean language) won't be helped by Java, and anyone who can handle Java can handle modula-3.
But programmer time is expensive, computers are cheap! That argument falls flat as a bad souffle the moment you remember that for toy applications this is true, but when you're beefing up your environment by millions of dollars in hardware, and tens of thousands in running expenses just to make up for the inefficiencies in your chosen language, you need to change your language as a matter of business common sense. Add to that the fact that Java's development time isn't all it's made out to be, and the programmer time argument only washes when compared to assembler or FORTH.
So no. I wouldn't use Java to attract anyone to anything. I'd use it as punishment for bad programmers.
Well, maybe not first time windows users, but for first time internet users I would give them the following:
1) Firefox
2) Wikipedia
3) Google
And tell them to go exploring.
They probably have heard of DLLs and "DLL Hell", but never bothered to learn exactly what they are. Just like I've heard of "FreeBSD Ports", but never bothered to learn how it works, since I've never used FreeBSD (after all, Netcraft says it's dying).
foobar2000 - best mp3 player anywhere.
Unfortunately, it's only available for Windows, and although it is 'free as in beer' it's not 'free as in RMS'.
It's one of those endlessly cutomizable pieces of software. It reminds me of the days before GNOME and KDE when any self-respecting unix geek would swear by some obscure window manager like vtwm.gamma and spend hours pimping it out. It was a pain, but it was also the only way to get a decent GUI back then.
foobar2000 is the same way. It can take a while to set up, but you end up an mp3/ogg/whatever player that is actually halfway decent, without the annoyances and incapabilities of itunes, rhythmbox, winamp, windows media player, and workalikes. And you can always cheat by copying a friend's configuration rather than making your own.
You can't be considered "tech savvy" if you are in absolute ignorance of Windows. It is the dominating OS, after all, and not knowing how to use what's industry standard in a lot of industries is a Bad Thing.
Besides, Macs have a BIOS, too.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I'm a software developer
I hope you don't mean you NEVER use Windows or a newer version than 3.1...
You owe it to yourself to fully understand what is out there, and the development division of Microsoft has done some really cool things in the past 10 years. Not always perfect, but different and worth knowing to at least get ideas or very least know your competition.
Even looking at the *nix market we see the classic 'taskbar' in everything from KDE to GNOME and other variants. It is kind of sad that MS was the first one with a taskbar like this, but it isn't such a bad idea, so I don't mind see others parrot it.
I find too many experienced IT people that I interview and they are non-Windows people which is fine, but when asked what they are working on or why they like one OS, etc.
I find that many times they have NO idea how much the industry has passed them by. I get answers like, I use XXXX because I want a real 32bit OS, or real Multi-Tasking, or I am developing this cool application idea (an idea that has been built into Window or other OSes for YEARS) and they think they are being innovative.
Basically you can't be innovative, unless you know what else is out there.
Getting off of Windows is great, but don't close your mind to the stuff from Redmond, they surprise many great developers sometimes, by statistics alone, it has to happen. For example at the PDC in September they shook up the way a lot of us developers view software, and even some of us are developing on other platforms, their ideas were something good to build from.
I assume you don't mean you haven't used Windows to at least explore the competition, but in case you haven't or others in here haven't, it is worth your time...
Nice VMWare or other tool and at least run a test version somewhere. (Hint, if you are using VMWare or another comperable tool, you can use the 180day Free version of WindowsXP and just reinstall it.)
I think the key here is that he is looking for innovative software that runs on Windows. Not necessarily Microsoft software. For example, Firefox and Thunderbird work in Windows just fine, although I don't consider either one particularly innovative. There are thousands upon thousands of programs that run in Windows. A very small portion of these are written by Microsoft. He is looking for the rest.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Besides, Macs have a BIOS, too.
Au contraire. No recent macs use BIOS. And when they did, the overwhelming majority of Mac users had little need to even be aware of it, since . . . (wait for it) . . . . Macs just work.
I switched from Windows 3.1 to Mac System 7 in the early 90s, and I've never looked back. I'm vaguegly aware of DLLs and the Registry, since I've heard so many complaints about them (at places like slashdot). The frustrating issues I had to contend with on Windows, such as IRQ conflicts, have been long since solved I assume, since I haven't heard any complaints about them in years.
I've been able to avoid Windows since making the switch to Mac, although last fall a boss asked me to burn a CD of photos as he headed out the door. After noodling around his computer for awhile, opening the photos in various programs, it occurred to me that, just like on a Mac, a right click would bring up a contextual menu. So I right clicked on the folder of photos and was able to burn a CD. (Of course, if this had been a Mac, I would have been able to burn the CD from within iPhoto. I'm sure that this is also possible in some Windows apps, but I really didn't want to spend the time learning a Windows program that I'd never use again. Even spending the 15 minutes to figure out how to burn a CD was annoying.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Even looking at the *nix market we see the classic 'taskbar' in everything from KDE to GNOME and other variants. It is kind of sad that MS was the first one with a taskbar like this, but it isn't such a bad idea, so I don't mind see others parrot it.
You'd have a great point, that is if MS actually *was* the first one with a taskbar like this...
Absolute - no. I can open Internet Explorer and make sure my sites look right. Beside that I couldn't tell you what to do.
I'm really shocked that folks like you find it staggeringly impossible that I know what I'm doing and have a good head on my shoulders and don't know much about Windows.
I build web apps. I need a development machine (OS X) and a server (OS X). I know how they work, and I could take either one apart as much as I need to. I can even get around my DreamHost account just fine without a good knowledge of Windows. I need to test on IE from time to time, but that is it.
I guess I'm what you might call a specialist. I know what I do quite well, and over the last 10+ years it has NEVER been important or necessary for me to use or learn much about Windows. It has never got in the way of my career or getting a job - it has never been a "BAD THING". Your logic is no good.
I'm sure I'm an anomoly. It's by choice. Me and my little Apple-shaped world are doin just fine.
-A
Freecell!! Only idiots play solitaire!
Mr Pauljoyce, firstly, it's probably not the best idea to ask /.ers which is their favourite windows apps - it's probably on par with asking a bunch of right-wing Christians what their favourite party drugs are.
Anyway, and now to answer your question...Favourite apps for Windows have to be MS-Office for productivity, Visual Studio 2005 for development (yes, ok, I'm a Microsoft Certified Whore(tm) but I love it), but more than these....
There's a tonne of games which will only run under Windows, and are not available on the consoles! Take WoW for instance; absolutely brilliant game, and PC only I believe. C&C Generals is another classic game. There's loads!
Obviously, if you're not into your gaming, then I too would suggest you're not going to miss much by not using Windows.
Hopefully, this is a little more constructive than the "use linux LOL!!1" posts I've seen by some. Each platform has got pro's and cons over the next; Windows, in my humble opinion is great for Games and development. Get involved, and welcome!
throw new NoSignatureException();
So don't leave us hanging, which GUI do you think had it first? Personally, I'm going with Acorn RISC OS, but would be interested if there's another contender.
Never mind the features: Picasa is touchy-feely and has what I believe Mac people call "The snappy".
I bought a Mac Mini because I thought it might be a good idea to store my growing photo collection on a machine that belonged to me, rather than my employer. I allowed myself to believe the hype about iPhoto, was curious about OSX so I chose the Mac.
With 1GB RAM, iPhoto 5 takes unacceptably long to start up, stutters while scrolling through the library, freezes for seconds at a time, and generally gets in the way of doing what you want to do. It does work in the foreground (so you have to wait) that should happen in the background ("Saving changes..."). Verbs are frequently where I least expect them to be. The import process is messed up (it expects you to name the "roll" before showing you what's on it. I can't find a way to rename the roll afterwards).
It's possible iPhoto 6 is an improvement, but I'm damned if I'm paying $79 to find out.
On my work Windows laptop, with half the RAM and half the CPU speed of the Mac, Picasa is speedy and fluid. Verbs are where I expect to find them; nothing is fiddly and everything makes sense.
On the bright side, the Mac runs Firefox acceptably, and does a nice job of running Azureus...
To wrench us back onto topic: is it worth dual booting your Mac just to run Picasa? Possibly not -- rebooting is a pain in the arse. But I would seriously recommend any Mac zealot spend an hour or so playing with Picasa, just to remind themselves that it *is* possible that someone other than Apple can do usability. If there was an music library that used the Picasa approach to UI -- "Tucasa"? -- I'd drop iTunes in a heartbeat.
You certainly do assume quite a lot. First off, no matter how good a developer someone is, they can't go around and fix every piece of code on the planet. That includes me. Sorry -- I also have other things to do with my life that don't involve sitting in front of a computer.
Besides which, I'm more interested in generating new and novel research output at this point in time, than tweaking platforms. I've most recently been doing work in the realm of security, confidentiality, data communications, and data integrity for health information on portable computing devices. Along with some AI R&D on the side. None of which has required any Windows.
The computing world is a big, big place, and doesn't just revolve around writing end-user applications or OS software, you know.
I've had to write more than my share of JNI code to not spout off like that here. There are a lot of things I like about Java, but in reality these days I use it professionally purely because it is well entrenched, and it's the target environment for many of the projects I've worked on (something that I haven't necessarily had a say in). For some of my own personal projects and research, I've been working in Objective-C as of late.
There are, however, problems where the language isn't all that important, and where the platform you do your development on (which may not be the target for execution -- ever try to write code and compile on a handheld or embedded device?) doesn't matter either. You just need to get out of the cubicle a little more often :).
Yaz.
...these specific cases, as Shake was available on Windows NT - until Apple bought it, killed the Windows version, and drove the cost of the Linux version up. Pro/Logic? Same type of story.
Embrace, extend, destroy - sound like another company we know?
Not quite equating Apple with Microsoft here, but there's certain trais the companies share.
Hey
I don't mean to start a flame war here, but none of these apps are worth dual-booting for. They're mostly apps to "fix" windows, and small utilities. There are awesome equivalents for OSX. So what's the point?
You are confusing the BIOS with the boot loader. In IBM PCs and clones thereof, the BIOS and boot-loader are indeed in ROM, but that comes from the fact that the original IBM ROMs also contained a BASIC interpreter and routines to load and store data from audio casettes (these were carried on as far as the PS/2 line, even though they were completely obsolete by then). CP/M computers on the other hand had only a boot-loader in ROM, and loaded their BIOS as software (i.e. part of the operating system), as did most mainframes and minicomputers, many of which had no ROMs at all, but required their boot sequences to be entered manually via a panel of switches.
So while BIOS == boot loader on IBM PC clones, this is not necessarily the case for computers in general.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.