Nilesh D Kapadia

At work, we just recently received the new unibody 17" MacBook Pro. I got mine with the anti-glare option. I own a Early-2008 15" MacBook Pro (which I am very happy with) which is what I am comparing it to. I've only had it for about a day, and haven't used it that much yet, so these are just my initial impression and observations.

I like the display

I'm not necessarily a great judge of displays, but I'm pretty impressed with the display. Having 1920x1200 resolution on a notebook is just amazing. I subjectively find the display to look a little better than my 15". Do note that on a 17" display, with 1920x1200 you end up with very small text (with the default font sizes) and that could take some getting used. Adjusting font sizes will help, but would not be ideal if you are connecting an external display and trying to use both screens.

I will be comparing the display side-by-side with glossy displays on my co-workers' machines.

Less flex, more solid

Since my laptop before it was a Thinkpad T23, I found the Early-2008 15" MBP to be rather flimsy. There is a lot of flex to it. The new unibody MBP has lot less flex and is just more solid in general. The only place where it has a little flex is behind the display.

Keyboard doesn't seem too bad

I was recently listening to TWiT and they were discussing what e-mail clients they used. Steve Gibson and Steve Wozniak mentioned they still use Eudora for their e-mail. One of them said they considered using something newer, but all their old e-mail is in Eudora and there is no way to convert it to something like Thunderbird format. That is true that there is no direct conversion, but the solution to that is to use IMAP.

Yahoo! has bought del.icio.us. Just goes to show that the dotcom boom is coming back. Small companies without a revenue stream popping up in the hopes of being bought out.

The interesting thing about this acquisition is that Yahoo already has a social bookmarking product called "My Web 2.0." It has one feature that del.icio.us does not have: the ability to search the content of yours and your friends' bookmarks. I wonder if they are going to merge the two, and if they do, what it's going to look like in the end. del.icio.us certainly could use the ability to search bookmarked content. I might actually start using it with the addition of that feature.

I've always found task switching to be something that just isn't inefficient enough, and I tend to struggle with my window managers a bit to get things working the way I want them (and usually have to settle for less-than-optimal solution). I recently read a blog that pointed me to TaskSwitchXP, which is an excellent replacement for the Windows task switcher. I've always wondered why you couldn't select a task with the mouse when hitting ALT-TAB, and this allows just that. It also lists the full titlebar for each app and gives you a preview if the window isn't minimized. There's plenty of configuration options and I was able to get it to work the way I wanted.

Update: I have released my social bookmarking app under the MIT open source license on Github.

With search engines becoming less and less useful, personal and social bookmarking may become one of the new ways to find information on the net. I had some ideas about this before social bookmarking started to take off (probably the same ideas as other people), but sat on them for too long. Meanwhile Yahoo has created almost exactly what I envisioned. del.icio.us was something like what I was thinking but not quite. The basic idea I'm going to discuss here is being able to search the content of your bookmarks, and using a social network to share bookmarks to form a social search engine powered by people's bookmarks.

Update: Looks like Google has something close to searchable bookmarks - the Search History feature). But no social features and no proper integration into their personal home page. They really could do a lot to make this feature more useful, the interface for it can use some work. If there is an easy way to add/remove bookmarks from an external application (maybe they have an API for it), this could really be useful and would do part of what I'm talking about.

For those in search of good quality PC keyboards, Unicomp makes excellent "buckling spring" keyboards and also has models that have an integrated mouse. Read on for my personal experiences with keyboards...

If you haven't heard of PuTTY, it is the best SSH/telnet client for Windows available (there is also a Linux version which I haven't tried). I recently got tired of entering a username for one of the accounts I SSH into (it was a random combination of letters and numbers) and was wondering how I could specify that in a PuTTY session config. I could not find that documented anywhere, so I tried the obvious: I put username@hostname under "Host Name (or IP address)" and it worked.

Although the Linux version of GAIM (a multi-protocol IM client) has always worked well for me, the Windows port I found too buggy and unstable in the past. This may have been the fault of the Windows port of GTK+ which seems to have improved recently. Recent versions of Gaim for Windows have been running smoothly.

In Firefox, you can make any bookmark open up in the sidebar. To do this, open the properties for a bookmark and check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar." Now the page will load in the sidebar, and any link you click in the page will open up in the main browsing area. This would be good for a page where you have a lot of links such as a collection of bookmarks (e.g. del.icio.us). You can even use it to place the JavaScript Console in the sidebar.

Although the Notepad included with Windows is fast and easy to use for viewing and editing random text files, the lack of UNIX compatibility made it useless for editing many files. I was using Wordpad in the case of UNIX file format, but that was awkward for its own reasons. So I switched to Notepad++ for all my text editing/viewing needs. It has syntax highlighting for many languages, tabs, UNIX file format support, zoom, regexp replace, and many other little features that are nice. Much nicer than Notepad AND it is open source.