Moving To Windows

Let's talk about your jump from Mac to Windows. Yeah. All matches. I don't know if you've seen it, but I posted a couple of blog posts about my switch to Windows.

Basically, the first time I've been fully on Windows in about almost a decade. It's about eight and a half years or so. Wow. This is the last time I actually worked for my main primary development sheet.

We've got Windows left up at home and we don't use this, but that's mainly just IT support from me. I don't really do any work on anything like that. Yeah. So now I'm out where I'm fully on Windows.

I'm using the Windows app now right now as we record and it's been right, actually. I was a bit apprehensive about it first. So, you know, it's going to be a big change thing because I haven't used it in the last part of 10 years. But to be honest, not a lot has actually changed, which obviously what laptop I've been moved on to.

Okay. Cool. Let's talk about it. So I've given up a MacBook Pro 2020 model.

I think it was. Yeah. It was the latest 16-inch model. And that was just whatever the top spec was at the time, which was like a, a 2.6 kilohertz, I7, which had 16 gig ram in it.

So good machine, good old ram machine. I've now moved on to a Dell XPS 15, which is got the same processor. So 2.6 gigahertz processor as well. So I'll still, the 6 core I7, but it's got 32 giga RAM.

So similar, but you know, obviously double the amount of RAM, which was needed for the sort of stuff that I'm going to be doing on it. It's a nice machine actually. It's, I think it looks a lot better than the MacBook for sure. It's got a very nice sort of sleek wedge shape.

It looks a bit more like the MacBook Air than the Pro. Yeah, I just got it up right now. I'm just googled it. It's checking out.

Yeah, it does look really nice. Yeah. It is nice. Yeah.

It's USB-C. It's got three ports on it. It's got an SD card slot on it as well. I don't really need really to manage stuff, but it's not too hard for us.

It would be nice to have a USB-A as well, but it's quite thin laptop. So I understand why it's not there. Yeah, the form factor is, I mean, they're matching the MacBooks. I want they, they're trying to get it as sleek as those.

Yeah. I'm more than happy to switch everything to USB-C. It's just that there's so much history with USB-A that, you know, there's so many devices that haven't moved over yet. And, yeah, sometimes it's not as simple as just buying a new cable.

Um, probably it's actually to be honest with the marketing, but it's expensive as it is. I don't know if it's going to replace all your cables. So I think the other came with a quite nice little dongle as well. It's quite compact.

Aren't you? I'm going to show you on camera. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's got a USB-A and HDMI and then the cable just like tucked into it. All right. Yeah.

That's handy. That is, yeah. It's a game with that. And that just, you know, it's more enough to fit into any bag or anything.

So that's pretty good. Now, I think the legacy ports are really handy. You know, if you've still got some kind of access to that using an adapter or something, bring in. Well, the thing is, oh my guys, I've got a USB-C Thunderbolt dock, which I had my MacBook connected to.

Yeah. And then that's got a bunch of ports on my screen, my webcam, you know, my, all that stuff goes into the dock and then I've just got a single USB-C cable that was going into the MacBook. And that was also giving me the power is off for the Mac. Now, the problem, everything works fine with this as well, with the Dell, but the Dell's power rating is a lot higher.

So the MacBook was like a 96 watt power supply or something. And this one's 130 watts. Okay. I don't know why it's drawing so much more power, maybe because of the increased RAM, but- RAM probably, yeah.

Possibly, possibly, but I think it's more than that. I think it's just efficiency wise. I think the Mac has just, you know, they've got it, it's just had to run a powerful machine on less power. So with this one now, the power delivery that comes from my dock is not enough.

So it doesn't charge the laptop. So I have to plug in the charger separately. So I've got two cables coming out of it instead of one, which is right. Okay.

At the end of the world, but, you know, my dock's got plenty of USB-A ports. It's got the head from port, mic port, it's got some USB-C's on there as well. So it's easy when I need to get off my desk and I can just unplug that one cable and off you go. And everything on the desk just stays plugged in.

That's a good setup here. Yeah. So it's good. So overall, it's a good laptop.

The keyboard's nice. I much prefer it over the Macbook. It's got, you know, some proper key travel, a little bit of bounce to the keys. And the trackpad is pretty much the same as the Macbook's eyes, almost identical in size.

And it's got all like the same gestures and stuff, so I can have the right pinching, zooming and all that stuff. So overall, yeah, really happy with it. You know, above and behind me to get used to a Windows keyboard layout again. Yeah.

It's been quite a smooth transition onto the hardware at least. That's good. It's often wise, you know, that's a bit of a different story, but hardware is hard and good. And like with my backbook, I had an external Apple keyboard.

So with this one, I invested in a Logitech. It's called the MX keys keyboard and mouse combination set. Yeah, that's, yeah, I've used that one. It's a solid keyboard.

Yeah. Really, but it's actually really heavy for the built-in battery. It's a rechargeable one. And yeah, surprisingly heavy, but it doesn't move any way.

It stays on the desk. And that's a good choice on the keyboard, definitely. Yeah. Also got the MX Master 3 mouse as well, which is nice.

I think I saw your Instagram, I think. I might be giving you Instagram with your stories, I don't know. Yeah, I posted something on Instagram back. Yeah.

Yeah, really nice. Nice. Good size, good weight, you know, fits in your hand really nicely. Yeah.

So, I mean, you know, like, Apple's design philosophy and everything is really nice. I don't think we're wrong, but yeah, it's just stale, I think. I think it changes in ages, especially with the MacBooks. It's just been like making everything a little bit thinner and lighter, but no real innovation on the shape or the design or, and especially the mouse as well, you know.

It's just, you know, I got it. I got a magic mouse too, recently in black or, you know, space gray, we want to call it. And even that just feels really difficult to get used to because it's got the swipe, it's got the gestures built into it as well. So even if you just casually just move your finger across it and certain things are turned on, it will start, you know, messing about, like, for example, if I'm using, you know, Photoshop style software, it will start rotating my canvas for no reason if I'm holding down a command like things like that.

You know, it's really annoying, but I've kind of got used to it and I do really, I like it. I do like it, but it's not something, you know, I wouldn't go to recommend it to anyone like if you had to get a different mouse and get that one. Just trying to stick to traditional style mouse because this is a bit much, it is quite a bit thought it's not for the gestures, but it's such a thin mouse. It doesn't sit comfortably in your hand for a long period of time.

I can't get used to it. Like, it's just really awkward. Yeah. Well, I recommend the same mix, master.

It's really good. It looks cool, but it looks nice. That's the thing about it. Well, it's all last, when they had their event, the last event, the spring loaded event, they announced the new iMacs.

They released a bunch of new keyboard and mice as well, and the colours that match the iMacs. But as far as I know, you can only get them with the iMac. You can buy that keyboard and mouse on its own yet. Yeah.

So, anyway, enough of the hardware. Moving on to the software. I was going to give you some of my experiences the last time I used Windows 10. And from what I remember, the OS, because I actually did the upgrade from the previous version of Windows 2 to 10.

I can't remember what it was now. It was a 7. 8.1. 8.1.

OK. So I did that upgrade and instantly I found it was a really clean looking OS. And it was super fast as well. And part of that might be down to the PC that I was using it on.

I had a laptop as I was using a HP. I can't remember the modern number, but it was a super laptop. So it was super fast to use. The iconic start menu was just still there.

It had never disappeared. It was slightly adjusted in its look, but it operated the same way. Well, I was going to remember from it. Yeah, the customisation on it, I found there's a lot more you could do with your customisation.

You could really go into it and really customise the way it looked, the way it ran and all that as well. I found that was a pretty cool feature of it. One of the biggest differences I found on that was the virus protection for Windows 10 was far superior than when it was previously. The OS was a lot more secure and it had some built-in features which helped with it to keep it secure.

Those are the main things I sort of noticed on there. Yeah, definitely. Even now, I don't know when it was the last time you used it. Oh man, it's been a while.

It's been years. It's probably been about six or seven years. Yeah. I mean, I'd still say that it's a good, solid operating system still.

The first thing I noticed when I switched over was because Windows is designed for touching interfaces or because so many Windows app do have touch. Yeah, everything felt a little bit big for me first. Mac OS, you've got nice, tidy, neat little icons for things and sometimes you need a bit of precision to click on things where as with Windows everything is sort of square, blocky, got lots of empty space around things, lots of like the touch areas are quite big, the click areas. But it's kind of blends into the background quite quickly.

It was quite an easy transition in terms of apps. Most of the apps that rely on on a day-to-day basis were available on Windows as well. All the sort of web development stuff, the design apps I mentioned last time that I switched over to Figma so that was fortunate because Figma is on Windows as well. So obviously for the sketches I'd be a bit stuck at the moment.

But that'll work out fine. All the web browsers are fine. I was actually doing what? I suppose I should touch on why it switched to Windows.

But maybe we can come back to that in a second. Yeah, yeah. I just thought of the web browser, which is a hint as to why. But yeah, in all the web development stuff is all there.

It works quite well with the iPhone as well. You can do iCloud syncing. Okay. So I've got a library syncing contacts.

That's as far as I've gone, just for the library and contacts. You can't sync your notes and reminders unless you sync them to Outlook, which is... Right, okay. Yeah.

It's just clunky because Outlook doesn't handle them very well. So notes and reminders and things like that. I'm still using just on my phone, which on the micro-code I used on the desktop a lot. But then all the other like, their party software that I use like Notion and WhatsApp, yeah, like Zoom and all that sort of stuff.

It's all available to Spotify as things on Windows anyway. So transition in over was quite easy. Yeah. I've used Windows in the past.

I've had plenty of muscle memory there. I'll find it my way around. The only biggest challenge was just remembering like shortcuts and things like that and remembering that the positioning of things. Now the closed icons on the right, the desktop icons on the left rather than the right, the menu bars on over the left not centered, not the menu, the doc, sorry.

There's no top menu bar, which is that was something that I get used to because with macOS, every single app has that top menu bar and you always kind of know where to go when you need to find certain functions or parts of the app, whereas Windows have that. So I was spending a lot of time just sort of looking for things like settings or, you know, keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that. Where to find these in certain apps because, you know, they're all different. There's no, there's no like consistent way to do things.

So I think Windows could do some like, it could do with a bit of like design language guidelines or some other or user interface guidelines. They probably are some but clearly not everyone is a data system because. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

You don't need to, you're not behind that sort of wall guard in the app or has where all the apps are controlled by them where Windows developers can kind of just release whatever they want on their own website and off you go. Yeah, I was going to ask that, you know, how do you feel about that? Yeah, obviously it's an issue. Yeah, if you switch in between the two and then all of a sudden you can't find simple things and yeah, it's going to take a little bit of time to kind of adjust and get used to things.

So on the Mac, you can normally press a command and comma. So I've kind of forgotten what key is. I just, we get used to pressing it. So command and comma brings up the preferences for most apps on the Mac and a lot of the newer apps and a lot of the cross-platform ones are adopted as same shortcut on Windows as all.

So if you're just going, for example, you press control and comma and that will bring up your VS code settings. So just swap out command and control. So you're not lost in everything, but it's the ones that are a bit more native to Windows that feel a bit different to the way that they are on the Mac. Yeah, but so far so good.

I managed to customize the OS and just generally the layout and everything quite nice the way I want it as well. And is it still the same case? Like you've got, there's a lot of options there to customize. That's why I remember the customization on there was quite extensive.

The amount of stuff you could do with it. Yeah, with Windows, it depends how deep you want to delve into it because what I found is that you've got Windows 10, right? And you've got, you go to the settings and they give you a bunch of options. And it very high level settings, which most people are going to want to change, you know, things like display resolution, maybe installing printers and stuff like that.

But then there's certain, like, there's certain settings where you maybe click on the advanced settings and then it'll bring up a window, which looks like a Windows 7 sort of style or Windows XP style. Yeah, I remember those. Yeah. And the deeper you delve into Windows, the more low level setting changes you want to do.

Like if you wanted to go and change the registry items, for example, then you're looking at a very old UI. They haven't updated any of that. Probably for good reason, because they don't want it to be user friendly. They want it to be difficult to do.

But what it just shows is that Windows 10 is not a brand new OS. I don't think it's ever been built from the ground up, right? It's always been built upon the previous one. Whereas with Mac OS, it seems like whenever they release a big new version, it seems like they started to scratch for a lot of things, especially with the most recent big, you've got big cell, you're all telling me, yeah, because you've got a new Mac, so it kind of came with it.

Yeah, it came with it. Yeah. So, the previous version, what was the one before Big Sur? Was it Mojave?

I can't remember that. Yeah, what do you have names? Stitch numbers. I don't know.

Marv, whatever it was. Quite different. Looking for you. But from what I've heard and what I've read, it wasn't just a skin change.

For this new version, there was a lot of the actual OS, low level OS, which I think Windows could do with clearing out a lot of the old legacy crap, which is still in there. Yeah, there's been a number of times just from a bit now, actually. I've got some clients who I help. I shouldn't be helping with this stuff, but I do because, you know, this relationship's there.

And, you know, they ask me to just use TeamViewer to kind of log on to their machines and help set up their email. And, you know, I'm providing that service, email management, hosting, et cetera. So I'll actively go in there and I'll just set it up for them. And it's a really quick task.

But then I notice that legacy UI, you know, when you go into your settings and you've got to create a new account within Windows, it does break down to the older version of Windows and you're like, hey, yeah, this is like Windows 3.1, this is crazy. Yeah, I remember those. Yeah, that's true. That's exactly what it opens.

Yeah. Strange that the goal, that stuff lying around. And, you know, all this stuff is just adding bloat system, right? Surely these, you know, these parts of the OS would have been written 15, 20 years ago.

And I can't imagine they would have changed much. And then probably having to jump through it was just to make them still work. So hopefully, you know, one day Windows will release a brand new version of Windows, which is just get rid of all the crap that's not needed or maybe just like several versions. So they have, you know, you've got the concept of Windows home and pro and whatever else that is, enterprise, whatever.

Maybe the home version, right? They just strip out all of this rubbish that the average user doesn't even have any to look at. Yeah, true. Yeah.

Like who needs to run a disk defragment? Why is that still there? Exactly. Yeah.

It's not needed. Yeah. It probably was never needed in the past. Anyway, so it's just a killer, especially if you've got SSD.

It's just not needed. Yeah. They should just keep it a bit of bones and it could probably run even faster. You probably even need a super powered hardware to get it right now.

Yeah. But yeah. That's Windows. Cool.

So moving on to the next bit, what bits of it really do kind of stand out that you like, what features of Windows, you know, win over the Mac OS. I like that it's not so locked down. There's a whole load of utility apps available to customize themes and, you know, shortcuts and little utility apps in there, which aren't part of the OS by default. So there's a lot of that.

Not to say that I've done a lot of it. I have enough kept mine fairly simple. They're burnt. It's quick.

It's very fast. It's definitely on par with the Mac. I wouldn't say it's not. It's not.

It's not. It's not. It's not. It's definitely on par with the Mac.

I wouldn't say it's definitely faster or slower. But then obviously this is quite fast machine as well. It's quite powerful. Powerful laptop.

I haven't really got any dislikes. I suppose it might be easier to say that because generally I'm just quite happy with it. It does what I needed to do. It's pretty solid development machine.

As a front end developer, it was quite easy to switch over. A few things needed to be installed here and there. A few global settings needed to be changed for Git and for like node and things like that. But it's all really well supported.

Everything is now. And I think overall the development community is probably more supported in Windows than it is with Mac anyway. It's just got a lot more history, isn't it? Yeah, it has definitely.

With the support side of it, it's going to be huge. There's so much more you can do. If you've got questions, the answer is to them. We can do it this way.

This was a solution whereas for Mac, there probably isn't. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

And that's what I found. Yeah. It's just because the Mac says a bit more lockdown and you need to be a bit more of a power user to really get to where you want to go. Whereas Windows is a bit more forgiving, I think.

Yeah. But also Windows does reveal a lot more to you. A lot more files to you. A lot easier.

So it may even be easier to make a mistake on Windows than it is on Mac. That's true. Yeah. That was one of the things.

Yeah. It's definitely two-sided coin, isn't it? Yeah. It's one of the things I remember Windows was, yeah, you could get lost and you could easily send up ruining something.

Yeah. And then to your file, you know, in your Windows directory or in your system, 32, directory, if you accidentally leave something in there, it could have an RC effect. Yeah. Even formatting, like, I was at FAT32 and NTFS.

NTFS. I can't even remember it now. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's these things to consider as I, if you're moving like hard drives between two different systems, make sure that you're using different partitioning.

That's the thing, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing on Mac as well, but it's not something that I've done in a long time. It's just handles that sort of stuff quite nicely as well.

Yeah. I guess when the OS improves, you know, yeah, this probably does not need for it. No, not for the average user, I don't think. Yeah.

So, yeah, there's not really any standout things that I think, wow, but then there's also not really anything that I dislike. I think it's just, it's just been a pretty simple lifting shift really for most things. Yeah. I mean, the one thing I don't like is the Windows Command Prompt compared to the Mac terminal.

But that's just me, you know, there's not a lot of people who use the terminal all the time. I use it a fair bit. I use it every day, at least. I'm not like a terminal power user, but I do rely on it.

But I found an alternative for using that called commander, which is like an emulator. And it emulates the Mac style terminal on Windows, basically. So all the, all the Linux commands I used to use on the Mac, I can now use them on command as well, run them in Windows. So that's all good.

That's right. Yeah. And I think for newcomers to development, design, et cetera, like to get into a get an entry level machine is always probably going to be better going for Windows powered laptop or something, rather than spending big marks on a Mac book pro or, you know, Mac book here or something like that. I mean, yeah, your one is pretty expensive anyway, but I think it's easier, isn't it, just to find a cheap laptop?

Well, yeah, my mind's an opportunity and obviously is provided by work. It's a powerful development machine. You can start pretty cheap on Windows. You can pick up a laptop for probably around 250 to 300 pounds for a basic one.

And there's loads of second-hand ones available as well. The second-hand market for Mac is they tend to hold the price a bit more. The Windows ones don't as much. What's the entry price for a Mac book these days?

About 1000? Yeah, it's about a grand deal. Yeah. So it's not bad.

I mean, if you want to go for one of the nicer Windows laptops, look at Surface Book or something, or like a Dell XPS or even one of the nicer slim slim and light HP ones, then you're probably looking closer to 1000 as well. But there are cheap options for becoming, if you are just getting started, if it's your first laptop. I think if it's like, if you're thinking of buying a laptop for your child or something as their first laptop, then I probably would go for Windows, just because of the schools. I think most schools, especially in the UK, just still on Windows.

It's very rarely, would you have a whole school running on Mac? Yeah, I don't think they are. Yeah, I know somebody who's actually running a laptop donation, sort of drive like a campaign and they've managed to pick up a few hundred laptops and donate them to schools just to get into the school. And just to get, and kids are kids can actually start, you know, when they're working from home or studying from home, they can easily just access everything just by using the laptop that they've just bought.

And I think it applies to anyone who wants to get into development, who doesn't want to have a huge budget, it just shows that, you know, you just find yourself second-hand laptop. It's really easy to get involved with. You don't need to spend big bucks on any kind of on a Mac, on a Mac, on a Mac, on a machine that you've got. Yeah, especially with front end of the saw, because with front end development, all the software is for you.

You need to be anything. All you need is a text editor, pick the S code, pick notepad, wherever you want, and a web browser. What else you need? So, yeah, you can get.

Exactly, yeah. Best practice as well. Yeah, you can get started for free. No problem.

We did an episode about this, didn't we, about? We did. That's what I'm flushing back to. Yeah.

Yeah, about what it costs to get started in my development. What number was that? So quick look. November 2019, I had to get into development for free.

There you go. Yeah. So if you want to become a web developer, go check out episode, website number is it? Yeah.

So, it's good. I mean, happy with the sort of user experience of it. Just a few things that we're missing, but I managed to replace like, you know, how on the Mac, you can launch the spotlight by doing, come on as base. Come on as base.

Yeah. And then just typing, right? And then you do the spotlight search. Yeah.

So windows, you can press the windows key and start typing. And it does pretty much the same thing, but it's more geared towards launching apps that is, right? Like where I used to use on the spotlight on the Mac was to do quick calculations or to, you know, you could do more than just more japs from there, right? And so windows doesn't have that.

But via Twitter, found this like a utility suite of apps called Power Toys. And you just know that install Power Toys and it's got about seven or eight small utility apps, which are, which are open source developed by the community. And they bring some of these like little extra functionality to windows. So one of them is called Power Toys Run.

So that gives you the alt and space shortcut and it gives you the same thing. It gives you the same thing. It gives you the text box in the middle of the screen where you can search for documents and launch documents from there. You can do like math calculations.

You can do web searches and more. It's basically a clone of spotlight. So that's been really handy. Having that is also Power Toys Run.

It's also got this thing called spaces. I think I'm just not cheap. Does it use stacks as well? Because that's like a, I don't know if that was a Mac feature first or that was a Windows feature on the desktop.

You mean like in the dock? Not on the dock, like on your desktop. You can actually stack like files similar type of files that got documents and speech sheets, etc. Images.

No, I don't think it has got that. I don't know. It's really interesting. I haven't haven't looked around for a feature like that.

I don't really store a lot on my desktop to be honest, but I might get that a test. Yeah, like when my desktop gets pretty busy pretty quick. And what I do is just to clean things up. I just use a stack feature and it just stacks like files together and it clears a lot of space on desktop.

And then afterwards I can go in at the end of the day when I'm done and just remove anything. I don't need any more. Usually it's a lot of graphics that I've just been working on. Maybe even like, you know, CSS files which I just pulled and just need to quickly have a look at.

Yeah, it's still a handy feature. Yeah, I found that, you know, all these features that you missed from the Mac, just a quick Google search and someone's already built them. So like, you know, when you press the space behind a file and preview of it, yeah, there's a window's all tended for that as well, which I found. I think it's called quick views or quick look is called works again.

It's the same. It doesn't prove you every single file, but you can get extensions for as well. So you know, other people again, it's an open source project on GitHub and then people have extended it and added support for the markdown files or SVG files or video files, whatever. So use that a lot because I've just got a muscle memory to preview videos files like that.

You know how you can on the Mac, I had an app called Better Snap tool, which allows you to snap your windows into corners and things like that. So on Windows as part of the Power Toys, there's a one called Fancy Zones where you can set up different screen layouts, different grids, and you can snap certain apps into it. And it remembers where you've got them, so you can quickly put them back into there, whatever you want to as well. It's good.

There's a lot of little utility apps like that. And part of my like blogging series about my experience of changing the windows, I'm going to start, you know, blogging about these things as well. And so I've already become built a resource about what it takes to switch from Mac to Windows. So I've already published a post about my experience, you know, also Chink.

And then I've published another one about the web development specific experience. So I'll probably do another one in the series about these utility apps behind me. Yeah, no, I think, yeah, just to put the link in the notes and the other ones I think is probably worth while showing that and just to giving people some, you know, probably a more detailed outlook on what you've experienced and how they changed me for you. Yeah, yeah.

I think one of the things as well is I remember there was a sort of the older version of Windows. There was a suite you could purchase called Windows Blinds. I don't know if you remember it at all, but what he did was it basically allowed you to customize the whole graphical user interface, rounded corners, all that kind of translucent, you know, transparent backgrounds, opacity, all this kind of stuff. It allowed you to really kind of change it pretty much everything and anything on there and get it more looking like the Mac OS at the time.

So it was one of those, I don't know who created that. I can't remember which team was responsible or even if you sit around. It is still around. It was by a company called Stardock.

That's it, Stardock, yeah. Yeah, I remember Stardock because I used to use the app called Fences. Do you have these Fences? No.

It's a bit similar to what you're just saying about stacks, right? But on your desktop, you can basically draw a little rectangle and it creates like a little pot and you put your files in there and those little boxes that you try files into to get their own independence for bars and you can expand them full screen and see just the apps that are in the files that are in that box. So you basically, like the name says, is your ring venting certain files. So instead of all of your desktop icons all being stacked to the left of the screen, you can have them all over.

You see in any shape you want and you just draw these boxes around them and this day in those boxes, that was called app actually. I just loaded the starter website. They've actually got loads and loads of these little utilities. See this one?

I mean, a lot of this stuff is not in Windows out of the box. There's so many developers out there who have created really good utility apps. I might install Fences again because I used it a lot when this is going back, like I said, over 10 years now. I remember using this so this apps been around forever.

What's on you just said? You said blinds. No, it's called curtains now. No, it's called curtains.

Yeah, I'll just to see it now. So it blinds us now, it volks to curtains. Okay, so it'll be the other ramp. Yeah, it should, shouldn't it?

They've got tiles as well and diskscapes and all sorts of stuff now. Yeah, looks nicer. The customization is a little nice. Usually like the translucent windows with the blurred backgrounds.

Basically, macOS style, isn't it? Blinds is still there. Oh, just a sound bit. You can actually turn your windows 10 back into a legacy version so you can go back to XP.

I was thinking to support us recently and do you know when iOS 14 came out? There was like a workaround using the shortcuts app where people started customizing their iOS screens. I don't know if you saw that trend happening on Twitter. There's a window where they released widgets on iOS.

Yeah, when iOS 14 came out. There were a few apps in the app store. One of them was called WidgetSmith, which is probably the most popular one, which allowed you to create custom widgets and one of those widgets could be like an app launcher. So what people started doing is they started creating custom icons in a widget, which then launches an app.

So you could have Facebook launching via this widget, but the icon of the widget was your own custom Facebook icon. Right? So then there was this little trend. It didn't last for a couple of months on Twitter and on Reddit and everything.

There was crazy customizations for iOS. And obviously, this made it onto all the tech podcasts listening to ATP podcasts and they were talking about how they used customizing windows as well back in the day. It is quite a desirable thing to do. And if Mac OS did allow you to do that, I reckon some people would get really creative from this and really cool stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just lockdown isn't it? I think I like to keep mine fairly simple. And I don't know.

I've got no interest in customizing it, haven't you? Yeah, I've seen from my member of it, Windows 10 is very clean anyway. The look and feel is modern. It's just slick isn't it?

It's just minimal. I think crazy about it, to be honest. And I think work customisation was more so back in the day when people wanted to do their old school looking windows looking more like Mac OS. Yeah.

It was something to do as well, wasn't it? It was just a way to show off your skills and bragging rights. But no, look at that. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Really? I think, you know, I didn't really catch on why I've changed. So the reason I've changed is because work has required me to change because, you know, the app that we build at work, it's an angular front end and it's got a dot net C sharp back end. And yeah, just part of my job is evolving to start working a bit on the back end as well.

So as part of that, I've basically switched to Windows and I'm using Visual Studio, not Visual Studio code for the front end, but then I'm using the full Visual Studio ID for some of the backend as well that I'm going to be getting into slowly. So over the next, whatever, however long it takes really cool. So that's the main reason for it. And like I said, it was a bit apprehensive first.

I thought, you know, this is going to be a bit annoying. I'm so used to using Mac, but when it's been fun that I haven't really, haven't really missed the Mac much. I've still got my own personal Mac book, which I use in my personal stuff. But you know, pretty happy now.

I'm going forward if I was ever to get a new laptop, I work, or even personal. I'm quite happy to get Windows on. I think it's fine. There's nothing really that I've experienced in Mac OS recently that's making me think, well, I have to stay here.

Other than the fact that I've got an iPhone as well, and it's just a little bit easier with an iPhone. Yeah, I was going to say, if you've got the family of Apple products, then it just makes sense to have everything. That's all we've got. I've got Apple Watch, but I don't need to do anything with the Mac.

But we haven't got an iPad in our house. We've just got me and my wife, we've both got an iPhone. And that's it. And the kids have got like Android tablets.

So yeah, I'm pretty fluid in terms of switching between Mac and Windows. Yeah, I did think about making a switch myself. But then, you know, the brand new MacBook Pro came out with the M1 process and I thought I just has to be done. I've got to get myself that.

So, you know, I think for the, you know, foreseeable future, I'll be a Mac user. But, you know, I have, you know, built PCs in the past. Mainly for gaming purposes and video editing and graphics and all that kind of stuff. So, and I still have a PC, but it's never been fired up since I started using a Mac.

So, I'm on a hurry to Windows, unless, you know, I get back into a hardcore PC gaming. But, you know, probably won't go back to it to be honest with you. I've never done any PC gaming. It's one of those things.

Like, I was never kind of impressed by it until, you know, I went to, I think it was my mates' place and he had this, you know, really powerful machine setup and he had a see-through case and lights and all this kind of liquid cooling. Back then, that was a thing. And I could see him running games when they're like, you know, like it was nothing. And my PC was like struggling, you know, to run a game.

And that's what got me into it. I was like, you know, I need to, you know, get my level up on building PCs. And it's nothing to do, something to learn. And before I knew it, you know, I built like eight to ten PCs.

I started building PCs for clients as well. You know, they wanted to build a network of five or six computers and their offices. And it's like, can you help with that? And, you know, I did that a couple of times.

And it was a fun thing to do. But, yeah, looking back at it, the only reason for me doing it was purely the gaming side of it, which was really fun. Once you've done something really powerful, the games you could run on it were just in on another level. Yeah, maybe one day.

I mean, I can't do it on this machine. This is a company laptop, but I'm not going to start playing games on it. That's the bonus, right? You've got that full customization.

You can literally go into the hardware and do what you want to do with it. Apple don't let you do that anymore. With this new model Macbooks, everything's on the motherboard. So you can't actually go in there and upgrade any part of it.

No, of course not. Yeah, well, they haven't let you upgrade anything for a while. Especially at least not by yourself, you know, if you go to the top of the paper. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, no, you've got to pay like, you know, what is it grand for a logic board or something if you want to, you know, more RAM or hard drive, whatever. Yeah. So I wonder if it'll become a trend when people start switching over.

Don't know. Let's see. But, yeah, what's the space? You know, I'll be talking about Windows a bit more now on the podcast than just generally on Twitter as well.

Because that's where I am. So this is not going to be a purely an Apple-focused podcast as it was, as has been in the past. It should be a bit more across the board now. Any Windows questions?

Ask me any Apple questions? Maybe still ask me. Yeah, why not? All right, cool.

Yeah, we'll leave it there. I'll let you know. I'll get on over the next few weeks, I guess. Yeah.

One last question before we end this one. Does it still crash unexpectedly? No, you said it, right? So far, I haven't had any problems with crashing.

Hold on. There's one thing that I just thought of as something is Windows Update. It's still the same. It still gets in the way when you don't want it.

You know, it decides to run an update, you know, at 10 to 9 in the morning when you just about to log on for the day and it still takes just as long as it always has. That's interesting. Because on the MacBook, you know, it asks you, would you like to schedule this update, you know, later on today? Sometimes you'll say that updates are being downloaded.

Would you like to install them? Install them, yeah. It gives you the option to do it whenever you want. But every now and then, you know, still like on a critical update or something needs to happen and it just does in the background and gives you a little countdown.

Windows is going to restart in 56 seconds and quickly say you work. Just as you're writing a bit of code. Yeah, you do, right? Yeah.

You want to let you do it because you can't just leave it. So that's a little minor annoyance, but still there. Yeah. Otherwise, all good.

Cool. Nice. Nice. Nice.

Cool. That's a wrap on Windows. More Windows told to come in the future. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. Any recommendations this week? Recommendations. Oh, I started watching.

I think it's on the catch up Sky, Mayor of Easttown. Okay. No detective drama with Kate Winsler in there. And I think only two episodes of it.

I think the third one's out this week, but I just watched both episodes one off each other and it is really good. And it sets the whole scene up just off the two. Again, some of these shows take a little while to start going, getting on and telling you what's going on. This is literally just off the two episodes.

You know situation, the town, all the characters, their pasts, you know, things like that. Yeah. You know how you recommend it, even though it's only two or maybe three episodes out of the moment, but yeah. Definitely.

Cool. I just recently started watching Snowpiercer. Have you seen that? What about it?

I've seen the film. Oh, didn't know the other film. There is a film. I believe there's a film.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure I watched it. Yeah. The train.

Snowpiercer. Yeah. The train that's going for like this ice age thing and it's just continuously going around the world, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, Mr. The guy who plays Captain America is in it. All right.

Okay. I suppose. Yeah. Chris Evans.

That's it. Yeah. So there is a movie. Son.

I think it's on prime. Interesting. Well, I just like the series, which is on Netflix. Okay.

I'm only two episodes in so far, but pretty good. Pretty good. So far. The concept is that, you know, the earth went through a period of like overheating and then due to global warming and so on and then scientists tried to cool the earth back down and they took it a little bit too far and they basically froze it to the core.

So now the temperature on earth is like a minus 100 and something degrees Celsius. So pretty good. Yeah. Bit of a chill out there.

And the snow is just 1,001 car train, which is just certainly in the globe with a few thousand people on it. I think it's got about 3,000 survivors on it. It's good though. It's like, you know, it's a good representation of like class and society.

Yeah. Because that's how the film had it. Look at the first class carriages and then second and third class. And they had all the people that had bought tickets to be on this train reserved a spot.

And then you've got all the people who snuck on and they're in this bit called the tail. And they're like basically the beggars and the the ruffians and stuff like that where they just get basic rations and they just get treated like prisons basically. It's good. I'm going to drop a little.

I'm going to drop a little spoiler here. Can't you miss spoiler? It's a minor one. It's not like a major plot thing or anything like that.

So, and it happens pretty soon, I think in the film where the first was an economy feels it wasn't a lot one of the last carriages. So they're trying to move up from the last carriage up to the front to get control of the train. And as they're coming out of the first carriages, they realize that the guards. Don't have any bullets in their guns.

Okay. That hasn't happened in the series yet. It probably won't. It's a film, right?

It's more condensed. So it's just one of those things like, oh shit, these guys have no ammo in these guns in that carriage basically. But then as you get further on, they were in the TV series from what I've seen so far, the guards and the train don't actually use guns. They use batons and not swords.

They're like, they're like these like ice pecks on us. Yeah. It's more hand to hand combat rather than bullets. Yeah.

I think that's sort of that issue out then because in the movie it was a major thing because everybody was scared. But for no reason that the guns had nothing in them. So yeah. I think I watched that.

Yeah. Cool man. All right. Cool.

Good stuff. We'll catch up again soon. All right. Nice one.