Last week I bought a MacBook Pro because I can now use Windows XP on it as well. I had to wait so long, since I need Windows only for 4 applications, that do not exist in Mac and probably will never be.

Many people do now write on how to install Windows on the Mac. I would like to focus on one thing that is also important. What software do you need on your Windows installation besides the ones you really have to install (the ones that don’t exist on Mac).

Besides that I think it is hard to tell which software you will NEED – but you can make a list of software you DO NO NEED (on your Windows installation).
- DVD Player
- PDF Reader
- different browsers
- CD/DVD burning software
- Printer driver
- …

The reason behind that is, the more software you have available on Windows the less likely you need to switch to Mac – but isn’t that what you wanted to do?

A decision from German judges may have a high impact on forums in Germany. They said that the forum owner has to check each entry that has been made to the forum right after submitting it.

So far, if someone wrote an entry with “bad” content, the forum owner had to delete this entry apon notice. That means you would see the entry, tell it to the admin and then he will delete it. The current decision will require admin to check the entries before they go public which is almost not possible for most forums. The forum owner for this case Heise will appeal at a higher court to reject this decision. Hope this will work.

Over the last weeks a lot of hackers have tried to run Windows on a Mac. Finally, one managed to overcome the issues and let it run. A big relief for a lot of Windows user’s how want to switch but still are stuck with some Windows applications.

Now, Apple has released Bootcamp, an application that guides your through the steps to create a Windows XP boot disk and then install it on an Intel-Mac. Whoever thought about that and decided to do that is a genious.

I expect the hardware sales for Apple to be phenomenal, and hope to see a MacBook (without Pro) soon (I predict around beginning of July, latest for the APD in August). Meanwhile I have to wait or buy a Mac Mini.

If you look at the site there are some nice comments. Michael Heilemann already mentioned some quotes. My favourite is

But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

and also

option key [...] (That’s the “alt” key for you longtime Windows users

The next comparison in my “versus” category is about editing text online. There are a lot of CMS out there, most of them have some kind of way to edit html online.

One way is the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) – Editor. It looks like word in a small window and has features like bold, italic, fonts selection, tables, borders, list, …

Another way is textism. Special tags that will be parsed when you see the page (being used in Backpack, Writeboard).
*text* will be parsed to text

As a tech savvy user I like textism a lot, since I get results very fast in the way I want them. Also nothing really spectacular can happen with it. Every time I use a wysiwyg-editor I don’t exactly know what will happen. Also, I never use more than headings, bold, italics but I still have to wait until the editor will load completely.

I think wysiwyg-editors will dominate for a long time, since few people have to worry about the markup. But as soon textism is used more and people see it’s easy useage they will like it. It’s just simple.

The recent trend to create rich internet applications with AJAX has put preasure on Macromedia and it’s Flash technology. Products like Backpack, Writely, etc. make heavy use of Javascript and and XML. They interaction allows for dynamically adding items, drag-drop, even searches like “Windows Live Search” are done using AJAX.

Adam Pasztory has a comparison chart and discusses the different functionalities of AJAX vs Flash. Jonathan Boutelle also highlight some interessting points. One of his arguments “Integration with multimedia” is the one I think will have the biggest impact for still some more time.

If you want to create multimedia websites, using video and audio, you are better off using Flash. It gives you all the tools you need, especially if you use Macromedia Studio, it has image editing, animation, etc. to create the content of the Flash and then you plug it together. That’s very nice.
On the other hand if you create information or task orientent applications AJAX is currently the technology to use. It makes development easy, has nice interaction features and doesn’t need a lot of data to be downloaded in advance.

My point here is that I think you have to decide on the domain you develp for. Is it entertainment use Flash, is it appliaction use AJAX. This is indeed a black/white separation and developers of both sides will say they can do the other stuff also. But I think you should do what the technology is made for.