Christopher Sikkenga

Previously, I covered some of my journey making the switch from Mac to PC this year and now here's some of the utilities and applications that made me more at home in Windows 10.

tinySpell

Seriously, what the ever-loving f**k, Microsoft? Why am I installing a 3rd party utility to have my computer check my spelling as I type in the year 2016? This functionality works across every app and window in Apple's OS X. Not to mention, every single smartphone on the planet. I just don't get it.

Years ago, I know that typing classes focused on speed and doing all the corrections at the end. However, that's just not how I work. I'm trying to switch this mindset now. Especially since Windows 10 supplies very little help. It makes sense that you continue to finish your thought, rather than backspacing, correcting an error and losing your flow. Yet, I still think highlighting incorrect words as you type is far superior than right-clicking and running a spellcheck application. You could still type your entire document and then go back to make corrections to the underscored words within the document, versus the extra steps involved in those clunky spellcheck windows in applications. For one, you can ignore the highlights that you know are correct, like brand names & products instead of having to punch the "ignore" button a dozen times.

I researched a few solutions and so far I have settled on tinySpell. This utility isn't perfect, the idea is that it uses one of those yellow tool tip things to highlight misspelled words, rather than the trusty underscore. I imagine this is a way for it to function in every application? Either way, I am somewhat happier with this installed. Unfortunately, the tool tip only appears after you type the word briefly. So, correct it now or you'll forget about it by the time you get to the end of this sentence.

Seer

I'm sure many of you prefer icons to descriptive lists, but I've never favored that. As much as I love being able to preview images and files with a click of a key in OS X, I didn't really set out to find a way to do this in Windows 10. I easily accepted defeat and tried to get used to using the file exporer setting which displays a preview of docs or images in a pane. This function pretty much halves the size of the file explorer window, truncating the details pane, but what are you going to do?

Then, I saw that a previous podcast guest, Alan Henry posted an article about Seer. Same as on a Mac, press the space bar on a selected file and get a preview. Boom. Color me happy.

Free Commander XE

When I was a windows user in a previous lifetime, I used Windows Commander (now called Total Commander) because I really liked having a dual-pane file manager. This allows me to move things quickly with only one file explorer window open. Total Commander and so many other dual-pane file managers also do FTP and have built in zip compression/decompression. This makes them excellent solutions as a file explorer and FTP application.

On the Mac, I used Forklift which did everything I needed it too. I even used it to rename thousands of images with a click of a button for a work gig. Currently in Windows 10, I'm trying Free Commander XE. Back when I was using Total Commander, it was a free beta. Now, it's $42 and the last time it has been updated was in 2015. So, I decided to try something different. Free Commander is missing FTP, but most of my HTML is still on the Mac. There is a beta of Free Commander with FTP and I can donate to get it after I finish testing this free version.

Launchy

Did you see that menu on Windows 10? And, that's after I did some edits and tweaks. (I should probably remove Internet Explorer's cousin Edge, because I don't use it.) Honestly, I rarely use the menu at all thanks to the Task Bar and Launchy. With a keyboard shortcut, you can launch anything you want. I'm loving this free thing! I've mapped the keyboard shortcut to my middle mouse button and that's how I open everything. Forget that terrible, nasty menu. The keyboard shortcut is ALT + Space and you get a nice clean blank asking for you to type a few characters in the document, file, bookmark or application you want to start.

Mailbird

Outlook? Yeah, no. On the Mac, I was using the great Airmail for my email needs. I'm part of the 1%. We're not rich, we just don't use Gmail. For Windows 10, I found something very comparable called Mailbird. The app is free with ads, or it seems to be heavily discounted all the time. The pro version removes the ads and gives a few more functions that don't appeal to me at this time. Of course, I've only been using it for a few months and I am tempted to buy the lifetime pro option to support the app. I feel like so few developers let you upgrade infinitely, these days. "Sorry, your license was for version 1, not version 2. Please cough up the $50 again. That's what is really tempting me, aside from supporting them.

Pidgin

When it comes to chat and messaging, I have friends spread out through many services. Apple's iMessage worked, for the most part. I use Slack for our podcast (you can join it by becoming a patron). I also have a separate app for IRC which we use to chat with folks during the live podcasts. On Windows 10, I decided to play it safe with an application that's been around for ages, Pidgin. I can chat with the old connections on Instant Messenger, and with my employers and wife who trust Google Hangouts. Obviously, using a 3rd party app for Hangouts means no video, but we don't have a webcam for the desktop.

There's a new kid in the game called, Franz, but the site was down when I recently looked at it. From the screen cap at the site I've linked, it connects you to WhatsApp, Grape, Messenger, HipChat, Skype, Telegram, Hangouts and Slack. It's an interesting combination for developers, but I don't use any of those services regularly. So I might test the Windows beta eventually, but for now, Pidgin.

Writemonkey

A recent OS X app find was the amazing Byword for writing. My co-host on the podcast, Paul, got me into Markdown which is just a way to format your plain text easily. I love it. Byword supported Markdown and is what I used (and continue to use on the laptop) to write for work, my personal sites and the show notes for the podcasts.

I poked a few different apps, but I really liked the look of Writemonkey because it was similar to Byword. Both apps convert my plain text Markdown to HTML so I can drop them on blog sites, fully formated with links. Kids, never write your posts, articles, blogs or whatever in the editors on the web pages themselves. Trust me. It only has to fail once for you to lose everything.

Calendar

This is where I need some help. Recent updates to Baikal have made it more complicated for me to continue using it. They had a package you could FTP to your site and it would just work, but have since discontinued that. Therefore, I would have to get a VPS & install the new Baikal with no guarantee that my current calendar data would survive. I'm not opposed to doing this work, but I've already got OwnCloud running for my files and it has a calendar. Thus, I moved everything to it.

The problem is, Windows 10's calendar app doesn't allow you to use an OwnCloud calendar. I haven't found many calendars at all for Windows. It would seem people are stuck using Outlook or Google. There's some workarounds and hacks to get the Windows 10 calendar to work, but they haven't been all that successful for me. My current setup is using Chromium (boo Google) to make a web app that connects to my Owncloud calendar at the click of an icon. Personally, I don't want a browser window open all the time with my calendar in it, so I would love to find a calendar application.

Function Over Form

You may have cringed at that Free Explorer screencap, or if you looked at that tinySpell web site. Hey Windows developers, 1998 called and they want their look back. I guess I should have posted a screen capture of Mailbird, which looks more like the Windows 10 style of app & settings window I showed in the last post. The truth is that things are not as pretty on the PC as they are on the Mac. Then again, if Apple spent as much time with the components inside the machine as they did with the outside, I wouldn't be switching at all. Windows 10 looks decent enough and I can customize those things I don't like. The 3rd party apps, well I can't change how they look on either a Mac or a PC. I've chosen function over form.

A few months ago, I talked my wife into a "family" computer upgrade. My 2010 Macbook is easily outclassed by modern, resource hungry applications and her laptop is a single purpose machine that she only uses when it's necessary to connect to her employer's ancient network or Mixbook. Thus, the solution was a desktop we could share. (See, a "family" machine.) So can you move from Mac to Windows? Should you? Here's my story as I moved down a new path.

The Road to Windows

We experimented with a tablet for my wife, but that quickly turned out to be a no go. Partly, for the lack of full applications for professionals and partly because of my incessant tinkering with the OS. We then purchased her a Chromebook and I fear that she loves it more than me, at times. As I once eluded computing is really in the cloud these days, so the OS you use is less of an issue. Her work is heavily invested in the scary, big data giant so the Chromebook is a perfect fit. There's just a few times a year she has to log into some antiquated systems from home and needs her crumbling 8 year old laptop.

As for me, I'm not a huge fan of the Google. I've left Gmail and recently moved my files from someone else's control (Dropbox) to an installation of OwnCloud that only I can access. Furthermore, I still need some serious hardware as I continue to work in digital media. I haven't been doing motion graphics and video editing as much as I did in the past, but I'd still like a machine that could handle it. After all, those is are my money-making skills. For now, until I'm discovered as a dance prodigy.

Apple has been trying to get rid of me for a while now, so I have decided to give them what they want. In 2011, Apple released Final Cut Pro X the successor to their popular editing suite of tools. They took a beating and many people in the business left Apple for good. Reading the trade magazines, I saw the writing on the wall and had my employer order Adobe Premiere Pro. Adobe products work on Macs and PC, so this is not a disruptive change. Of course as I experimented with a new workflow, I continued to read about what other production studios were learning. Studios were building custom editing rigs for half the cost of Mac Pros, which Apple is notoriously bad at updating. They were finding that these PCs rendered video much faster.

What is to keep me with Apple then? The hardware is all about smaller and thinner with Macs. My previous machine was an iMac that I cut holes into to prolong its life because thin took priority in the engineering over functional. Macbook Airs have mobile chips in them and while efficient, they still aren't going to render video as well as a 16-core, custom built PC with a decent GPU. Like my melting iMac, their Mac Pros are created for style and virtually un-upgradable.

Yet, I love OS X. Part of the charm of Apple over Windows is that they control both the hardware and the software. There's no driver issues or incompatibility issues between the OS and hardware. This makes using OS X so much less problematic. I plug in my wife's scanner and instantly start scanning. She plugs it in to her Windows laptop and and has to download drivers, restart and then install software. This is an OS I have been using for over 10 years. I am comfortable with it despite the fact that it may not be as customizable as Windows.

So can this old dog learn new tricks?

Making the Move

I can do this. I mean, Windows has been stealing from Apple's OS X for years. Of course, Apple is no better, they've been looting ideas from linux for ages. Changing over from my comfort zone to Windows 10 has been fairly easy. I've used Windows machines at different jobs and at home prior to the early 2000s. Plus, as I said above, my wife has a Windows laptop so I've had to stay somewhat fluent.

I think that is the most troubling issue, the fact that Windows 10 is such a departure from the ancient Windows systems I know. Microsoft has dumbed down the interface considerably. However, many of the panels I'm used to, like Device Manager are still available if you dig below the easy to access options.

The Start Menu is a horrific mess. Animated live tiles fluttering around and a mass of information that you're not seeking when you push the Windows icon (formerly the start button). Thankfully, this part of windows can all but be ignored thanks to the Mac OS X-like dock at the bottom of the screen. Thus, you can add your most used applications to that Task Bar for ease of use. I've added another utility to launch programs quickly, as well. I'll put another post together with the applications I've found to replace my favorite Mac apps.

I love the Task View which mimics OS X's Mission Control feature. It shows all the open windows. The ability switch applications with this built-in utility mapped to thumb button on my mouse works just like it did on my Mac.

Windows' File Explorer is comparable to Finder. It's a bit clunky, but the tabs that allow me to manipulate files are somewhat useful. I mean, show hidden files with the check of a box, handy. I was never really sold on Finder and preferred Forklift on the Mac. It's a carry over from my early PC days using Total Commander, a dual pane file explorer.

What I'm Missing

Here's the section of my rambling opinions that will really convince Apple users not to switch, right? Well, the things I really miss are the things that OS X couldn't do for me already. I've always been a 3rd party app kind of guy. I've never used iPhoto or whatever that weird Apple word processor is. I didn't use Mail and I despise iTunes more than Godzilla hates buildings.

The thing that really hurts is not having a decent calendar. I lived with iCal for a while because it happily connected to my Baikal server which is where my calendar was stored for use across devices. Windows 10 won't let me use my own calendar. Searching for a suitable app has yet to bear fruit. It would seem that Google has really disrupted this area of development. I can find other cloud calendars, but it is nice to have an app on your desktop instead of having a browser window eating memory as it sits there everyday.

Quick Look on a Mac, just pushing the space bar when you have a file selected and seeing the image, video or hearing the audio is amazing and completely unavailable in Windows 10. Luckily, I found a 3rd party solution that I'll share in the next post.

The other real difficulty? Why the hell doesn't Windows have a universal "spell as you type" that just works no matter what window you're in? OS X does this and makes me look smart. It can be annoying as it autocorrects like a smartphone, but at least it highlights it in purple to tell you the words it has changed. Windows leaves it up to developers to add their own spellcheck in their apps? Seriously? I spent a day looking for solutions and settled on something for now.

the Task View

The Path Ahead

Just getting used to pressing CTRL + C, Z, V instead of the Apple COMMAND + C, Z, V has been trying, but that's on me. It's not the fault of Windows. I've been using Windows since February and not regretting it. As a professional, you use the tools you have to in order to complete the project to your client's specifications. Therefore, most of you wouldn't have a single problem making the switch. If you're deeply embedded in Apple's ecosystem with iCloud, iMessage and iEgo, I'm sure it will be a challenge, but not impossible. Again, their ecosystem is built for their devices so it is more likely to function better than alternatives that are created for all devices and OSes. However, Apple's system is far from perfect. Since they've gained a slightly higher market share targeting consumers, there seems to be a new story every week on social media about bugs or issues with Apple devices.

If you're frustrated in the Apple space, give switching a chance. Like me, try switching while you still have a Mac lying around. This way if you have some problems, you can still get work done while you iron them out. Next week, I'll publish that list of apps that I'm using to replace the things I missed from OS X.