Friday, February 9, 2018

Mac to Windows Part 2: Software


Mail

Outlook: I had no idea. Outlook only shows ONE mailbox at a time. I had become completely accustomed to reading all of my email from five different addresses in one list in Apple’s “Mail”. I assumed that other email clients would do the same, but . . . . . nooooooooooo.
Got Thunderbird, but . . . . . . same as Outlook, won’t show all mail in one list. I think I’m just going to have to put up with that one.

 

Web Browsing

Another example of something I thought sooo bleeding obvious that I had forgotten - when I click on a link in Firefox, the browser opens a new tab and goes to it. There is a setting for this too: but MS Edge won’t do that. NO. you must manually click on the new tab.
Oh yes, when I tried to make Google my home page it refuses, insisting on giving me a “news” page full of the crap I never want to see. Save the new default address and it just ignores it.
Bye bye Edge.
Back to Firefox, thankyou FF for the Sync feature that lets me get all my bookmarks and extensions back (almost) instantly.
Still haven’t got anything to tell me when my downloads are still in progress or done but I’ll find some addon to do that. It just seems so . . . . well, obvious. However great you think your net connection is, you can still wait for downloads and the bigger the longer it takes. Why is this no longer a standard fitting?

 

Macifying software – or at least, software that can make Windows 10 more usable for a Machead

maComfort (includes Quicklook !) - for 15 Euros you get a whole bundle of stuff that makes win 10 mac-ish. Having just got it, I am still trying it out, but so far I does look very good.
Among other things it has customisable hotkeys and a very flexible special character assignment system. You can also use a spaces-type thingo but then Win 10 has its own – the difference is one of controls. With maComfort, you only need CTRL- Arrow wheras Windows requires CTRL ALT -Arrow, and maComfort also lets you change that at will.
“Quicklook” is not exactly the same as a Mac since it gives you a smallish preview- but there is an extra button to zoom the image to fullscreen from there if you really want that.
There is also a plugin that seems to be preview-like too, will report back on that if I get to work.

 

File Management

One Commander v.2: This is a complete directory manager system for Windows. For something free it’s pretty impressive and one of the three optional layouts of it resembles the column view in a Mac, but there are all sorts of extra thingies too- and it has a “dark” mode as shown in my screenshot here. (click for fullsize view)

Oh yes, - you can change the font and text size in the Commander window. There is a setting in the Windows “settings” that will expand ALL text and all windows but that is not the same. 
This alone is soo much better than the default Windows manager that I recommend it to anyone. 

Multiple Desktops and pinning programs to desktops – 

In Mac OS you can “pin” a program to a specific desktop so that next time you start your computer the same layout of programs and windows appears.
This is actually three different features:
  1. Multiple desktops
  2. Pinning programs to specific desktops
  3. Saving all windows and programs from shutdown and reloading them on restart.

Feature (1) is now in Windows 10 but I have yet to find feature (2) anywhere else.
Feature (3) does not exist inWindows – you can get programs to restart at boot time but that is not the same as restoring to the same layout and state as at shutdown.
Feature (2) is so useful I am surprised that it isn’t already in Windows.

 

Security

Windows 10 comes with its own AV system and according to some sites it is good but apparently you also need protection from malwares so they suggest Malwarebytes at $40US per year.
I’m not going to say what I got but it always makes me wonder: Antivirus software is the perfect spyware platform since it gets to look at every file you upload or download, and it must regularly talk to head office for virus/malware definition updates – but what choice do you have?

 

Image editing

There was only one choice for now, GIMP. I will say more later once I have spent some time using it.

 

The Macro Question

This has been sorted partly by maComfort (see above) but I am still unsure about such relatively simple matters (on a Mac) as shutdown and restart key commands.


Other discoveries:

HFS Explorer is a Windows ware that can read HFS volumes. I haven’t tried it because I took another route, but there it is, folks.

 

Transferring files

I have about 700 GB of DAZ files to transfer from one computer to another. First, I got a large external USB drive and then formatted it as exFAT (exFAT is like FAT32 but it can handle drives bigger than 2 GB which is not very big nowadays). Then I began copying files to it. The largest folder is 247 GB and according to my calculations copying this to the external drive will take 8 hours.
Of course, after all of this I must then copy it all to the new computer – and that’s not all of the files to be transferred either, so since I must be home to check on the process I will leave it until the weekend. Oh yes. This does not mean that the transferred files will be readable by the Windows version of DAZ either – it remain to be seen. 


The Case

I ordered a new case without a window. It should arrive in about a month. Apparently cases without windows (and I don't mean the software) in them are so unpopular that I needed to import one specially from a US supplier. 





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