Rocket Dock

I discovered Rocketdock by accident one day. Stumbling onto it I had no real idea what I had found, I downloaded it anyway and started to play. It seemed like a nice little add on for XP, however, I don't use the dock a whole lot in OSX and wasn't sure it would be very useful. As I delved deeper into Rocketdock I realized there is a whole world of user driven icons and add-on's which make it incredibly useful, to the point where it is now an integral part of the XP OS for me now.

Extensions such as stacks are fantastic, allowing you to view the contents of any folder in the dock as a grid or fan, much like in OSX, tip-o-the-hat to mantonga's for that one.

All in all I would say Rocketdock is a must for anyone wishing to have a more Mac like experience on a PC.

The Dell

So for the first 6 months with "The Dell" I whined a lot and carried my personal Mac around a lot, switching to it when I actually wanted to get anything done. I was irritated by the non-stop software updates and constantly annoyed at how long the shutdown process became because of this (I won't leave my desk until I can shut the laptop lid).

After a while I realized that the Dell wasn't that bad, it was no Mac but at least it had XP installed and not Vista, I could get up to three hours out of the battery when connected to wi-fi - others in the office who installed vista struggle to get to one hour.

I started to switch the applications I used to get cross platform utility, I downloaded Safari, iTunes, Dropbox, Evernote and FeedDemon (NetNewsWire on the Mac) and I tried to build myself a PC user experience that emulated the function of my Mac even if I couldn't get the elegance of the OS or the simplicity of the Dock and Expose.

Finally one day I found Launchy it isn't quite Quicksilver or spotlight but at least I could get rid of all those horrible shortcuts from my desktop, maybe it wouldn't be as bad as I thought...

PC - Mac - PC

So here it is, I have been a Mac user now for 5 years - before that computers were a necessary evil. It started when I was told I had to use a mac on my first day of new job in 2004. I was given a pretty substantial budget and told to get online and order something. I panicked, I hadn't used a Mac since the classic, I was in a new country, an entirely new continent, I was starting a job I had no idea how to do, and I did not have the time to learn a totally new OS.

I ended up blindly ordering a Powerbook G4 12" with an external 20" apple monitor, to this day the best computer I have ever owned (including the current 13" MBP) it's still going strong.



I hated it. Everything was different, similar, but different. That was the problem, keyboard shortcuts were all the same but used the command button not control, I couldn't find any of my files and winamp wasn't an option for the music I needed to keep me sane. In a lot of ways it was like the change from England to America, everything is almost the same but just different enough to upset your balance a little and make day-to-day life challenging again.

Six months later I vowed never to go back (to PC's not England).

Fast forward four years.

New job, new office, new Dell...