First, you need to be able to type and grasp some basic concepts, like the way the file system is laid out, which types of other stuff in the operating system is mapped into the file system, and basic usage principles. This alone is enough reason most users won’t bother with this ever. Typing is strictly not what most users want to do, they want to surf the web, listen to music, watch movies and when typing is only needed for messenging or typing in profile information in Facebook.

Well, normal users stink anyways, you say, and as a programmer you should be comfortable with typing on a keyboard too. So let’s look at the positive aspects of the command line: it’s all just typing, you don’t need to take away your hands from the keyboard to use a mouse and thereby it’s all faster anyways and also, there are so many commands with so many fine grained parameters that you can do basically anything using the shell.

This is true, and I don’t want to argue with anyone here. Surprise! I don’t think the command line is inherently bad. Instead, I think it’s an expert system. If you have invested years and years learning commands, parameters and when to use which parameter and which parameter won’t work with another one. The leaning curve is steep. You’ll need to learn the use of every single command that you’ll need for every single of the the most trvial of actions. You’ll need to know that there is this command, and how to use it, you’ll need to learn with parameters do what and you’ll ask yourself who decided on the defaults parameters or the absense of them and you’ll read man pages over man pages for that.

So if you did that, congratulations, you have aquired a valuable skill. At least as long as there’s no good GUI based solution for that. But there’re more problems with only working in text mode:

You type, the program executes and you get output. The sequential cycle of this dance has no possibility to give you additional information while you type or while the program executes. When it dumps a lot of text on the screen, you scan it for what you need to know, and then you type and wait again. For a lot of problems this won’t matter at all. Sometimes it’s even faster, for example when you grep for a certain file you’re searching for. But in the shell, there’s no mouseover, no intuitive visual design that could give you clues what to do and how to do it, no spelling correction when you mistyped a character in the middle of a three line-wrapping command. Type and execute.

Don’t misunderstand me here: I wish I would be a master of the command line. As the myth of doing command line magic is what let’s us admire those who can. The basic thought in every person who needs to use the command line is always “damn, this is hard” and “it’s take forever till I get all this” and “I guess I have to learn all this stuff”. This makes us admire those who CAN do all the stuff and know all the commands even more.

But times are a’ changing. The first really well usable wide-spread operating system that you could accomplish pretty much everything with was Windows XP in 2003. In all other systems you always had to be mastering the command line to be able to do what you really wanted to do. It’s 8 years since, and a lot has changed. GUI programmers got better at what they’re doing and they’re giving ordinary users the power to use the computer. Windows 7 is a very nice OS, and MacOS gets better with every release.

To me, command line commands are a basic foundation that you can base an operating system on. But commands are badly designed by default, and therefore you should never have users be dependent on them. Never ever. And as it’s not 2003 anymore, you cannot expect power users to know or even aspire to know the command line anymore.

I can do work in the command line when I need to, but I’m always very slow at that and I’d always rather have a GUI based tool at hand, that shows me instantly what to do and how to do it instead of Googling and guessing – and for my part if something cannot be done conveniently without the command line in an OS, I think the OS is badly designed and needs work.

I’d rather stay clicking.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

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Now for my feeling of this machine (Pro):

• I can use this little thing as my main machine now, and thats purely superb.
• The high build quality is amazing.
• The screen is small but very high resolution – wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with bad eyes, but for me it’s perfect.
• Having an SSD easily makes this thing a very responsive device. I never wait for my machine, my machine always waits for my input.
• The touchpad is so amazing, that I cannot describe it. Let’s just say if you haven’t used a modern multitouch trackpad on a Mac so far, go to a Mac Store and just try it. I cannot stress enough that this trackpad made me dismiss the idea of even using a mouse on this machine, because the multitouch gestures just make you execute everything better than a mouse could, and you don’t even need to take a hand away from the keyboard.
• Some of the interface choices in MacOSX just blow my mind – others like the Windows 7 snap to corners stuff that I really like can be easily installed via external programs.

Contra:

• I still didn’t grow accustomed to the Mac – keyboard layout. Additionally, I really don’t like the “fn” function key in the bottom left corner of the keyboard. If there were some tool out there that would let me switch this function key with the CTRL key, I would be happy.
• High price. An older but equally powered MacBook would have done the trick for me too.
• The basic layout features 2GB RAM and 64GB disk space. I really wanted 4GB RAM as I don’t like swapping to disk when programming or using the iPhone simulator, and the only device they had with 4GB also came with the 128 GB hard disk. Didn’t think I really need the space as I was going to keep private stuff on this machine to a minimum and use Dropbox for the rest, but even after just installing all the software I wanted I already went over 64GB. That means Iwouldn’t advise anyone to go without the 128GB hard disk, and also not without the 4GB RAM if this should be your main machine or if you plan on doing more than just basic tasks with this thing (read: Photoshop and above). The 1.6GHz processor instead of the 1.4GHz is wasted money in my opinion.

UPDATE: after about three month:

• Overall, I’m happier than ever. I cannot believe that there’re people in the world who work with a computer most of their lifetime and don’t even try another alternative. The carpenter also won’t use the cheapest biggest hammer he can find, he’ll use the best tool for the job (that might also be a bit more expensive), and so should you.
• There’re apps for everything I did with Windows. This means, there’re no tasks I need to go back to windows to, as for everything there’s a solution on the Mac (and most of the time a better one).
• I totally grew accustomed to the keyboards scheme. The main thing you need to understand is that you’ll only need the CMD key most of the time in all apps you use. Therefore, both are put at prominent places that are easy to find even if you don’t look at the keyboard: next to the giant space bar. The idea to put it in the middle needs you to flip your brain when you come from Windows: don’t use the small pinky finger to hopefully find the CMD key somewhere in the corner of your keyboard, but instead use the left or right THUMB to just always correctly hit the CMD key besides the spacebar. After some weeks, you won’t want to get back to the Windows way (and yes, you’ll be able to copy-paste with no problems).
• The touchpad is so amazing (and with BetterTouchTool even configurable as hell) that I won’t ever consider using a mouse for the MBA.
• Talking about Better Touch Tool, that thing also gives you the Windows-spnapping that you love about Windows 7.
• I’m happy I took the 128 GB of harddisk. 64 are just not enough to get all your stuff on there.

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Cobian Backup: Not the most beautiful user interface, but definitely the best free backup tool that I found and use on a daily basis. Has ALL the features.

JetDrive & PC Fresh: Two of our own programs that I use on my PC. JetDrive is the best defragmentation software on the market (in terms of PC speedup) and PC Fresh lets you configure all the low level stuff, that windows tries to hide from you. Both boost performance.

YouTube Song Downloader: Another one of our tools. Want to have music for free? We have the Windows tool. Getting YouTube avi videos or MP3 is no problem with this.

Skype: Why doesn’t everyone use Skype? It’s instant messaging with group conversations and included high quality phone service. It can send files. Perfect. (If the ads were removed.) You could even do video conferencing, but who would want that?

HeidiSQL: A free MySQL database client thats VERY nice and easy to use. If you find yourself or anyone else using phpmyadmin, tell that person that HeidiSQL is much better. Even if you need to tell it yourself.

TeamViewer: Help your father fix a Windows problem? Help a friend to setup his e-mail-client? Use this and share his screen and use your mouse and keyboard on his machine over the internet. Saves a lot of travelling time.

FileZilla: The best FTP client out there.

VLC: If you want to watch a video, just download this and watch it. Superb video player.

I’ll update this list if I find something else that I’d use every day.

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• The Dev Show: About Java, Javascript, Ruby and Python mainly, webprogramming and other programming stuff in general.
• The Talk Show: Apple & Geek show with John Gruber. Better than having the feed of his blog spamming your feedreader. ;-)
• The Pipeline & The Conversation & The Big Web Show: Basically all shows with interviews with people from the web industry, programmers, designers, bookwriters, and all kinds of interesting people.

I can definitely recommend all of the above shows and also did so on iTunes (where you can also get them). All those shows feature either an audio only (which I prefer for my way to work) or a video feed if you like that better. On the 5by5 website you can also find podcasts about Ruby, Podcasting, Photopraphy, and some other themes you might like.

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Hitflip ruiniert sich selbst. Seit der Einführung eines maximalen “Flip”-Preises wandern Teilnehmer zu anderen Tauschplattformen ab, weil sie auf Hitflip nur noch viel weniger bekommen, als der Gegenstand wert ist. Ich schrieb noch eine Mail an Hitflip:

Sehr geehrtes Hitflip-Team!

Laut Ihrer AGB ist es einem Hitflip-Teilnehmer möglich, seine zum Tausch angebotenen Artikel mittels der Flips zu bewerten. Leider zwingen Sie durch das künstliche Pausieren von Artikeln mit Ihrer Meinung nach zu hohen Flipkosten, dass Mitglieder keine freie Bewertung Ihrer Tauschartikel vornehmen können.

Da ich Artikel zum Teil für 200 Flips ertauscht habe, sehe ich es nicht ein, diese gezwungenermaßen für 30 Flips zu vertauschen, nur weil Sie Ihr eigenes System nicht verstehen. Ich habe dazu einen Artikel unter http://www.ithoughts.de/hitflip-an-analysis-of-economic-uprise-and-failure veröffentlicht, in denen ich Vorschläge mache, wie Sie Ihre Probleme anders in den Griff kriegen können.

Schalten Sie bitte den Pausierungs-Automatismus für mich aus oder ändern Sie Ihre AGB.

Viele Grüße,

Tim Dellas

Tja, ein Mail-Template und den Verweis auf einen Diskussionsthread später, landete ich in eben diesem. Leider waren die Mitglieder Hitflips dort auf Kuschelkurs, und fanden für den lieben Frieden und “die guten alten Zeiten” alles toll, was Hitflip geändert hat.

Nun, solange es mir nicht verboten wird, meine Artikel wieder anzubieten, kann ich das ja auch tun. Greasemonkey anyone?

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I sadly didn’t find the solution, but probably the cause for this problem. I tried to uninstall Kaspersky’s Security Suite before, but didn’t uncheck the “protect this installation” – checkbox in the settings before … which led to Kaspersky not being uninstallable! When I finally managed to uninstall Kaspersky after trying to install Office 2010 (by unchecking the mentioned checkbox), I got some errors during uninstallation … but at least it was possible to uninstall. When I then tried to install Office 2010 again, I got the same errors – but ignoring them this time didn’t work out.

Hope you don’t run into this error.

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I recently had a quite heated discussion with a friend who argued about the iPad issues that make him not buy the thing, even if he desperately wants a tablet-computer. He said that he’d gladly pay 1000€ for it, if it just had USB.

His point was that it doesn’t have USB and the disk is too small for (many) movies – the filesystem just won’t cut it at the moment. My response was, that you could stream movies from your PC if you wanted (given they ported the appropriate apps from iPhone to iPad which I heard already happend, but I don’t have an iPad so I have no proof). He responded, that this would need additional apps (costing extra money) and that this wouldn’t be usable for his dad. I was kinda drunk when I responded and said something about that this cumbersome dock was Apples strategy or something, but I really should have said that his dad could just sync via iTunes (which is only a bit more pain than synching via filesystem), and that the iPad won’t cost 1000€ even with all streamingapps in the world. And I should have responded, that apps get new possibilities for working with files in iPhoneOS4, which will come early enough when the next iPhone will be released this summer.

In fact, I think the only way that you could not like the iPad (or the iPhone for that matter), is that you’re an Apple-hater. Don’t misunderstand me, I also think they should do some ways different (especially with their Macs that I would never prefer over Windows 7), but I clearly think they got the best phones and the only working tablet out there. Besides, I don’t feel the need for one. But I guess the iPad is the only computer I would buy my mom. She would have E-Mail and Internet at her fingertips for the first time. Awesome.

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