crazylazy.info

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Usability war

I began to read Windows Internals in the 5th edition by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon. There're experiemnets in there on how to do Kernel mode debugging, or how to include Debug symbols with Sysinternals ProcessExplorer... and lots of fascinating stuff to try in order to explore the architecture of modern NT6 systems. Before I was able to start my explorations, I had to install Windows 7 (NT 6.1) on a MacBook. But there's Bootcamp and Apple officially supports it. So... that shouldn't be a big deal?!

It turns out that if software from Microsoft and from Apple comes together... as a user you get lost in between incompatibility details. - Because of these ridiculous details: if you're in front of a Windows machine, let's say on Powershell, and you have got no pipe key to pass objects around... what do you do?

Man vs. Keyboard

For certain development tasks a Windows 7 OS is very useful. However on a MacBook Windows 7 is not very useable by default. Nevertheless there're all device drivers available since Bootcamp >3.0 (that only ships with Snow Leopard on DVD): many essential details are missing. The German standard keyboard-layout Apple designed for the MacBook, not speaking of the Pro series, doesn't contain a pipe symbol ("|").

That being ridiculous enough for developers, you'd have to break your fingers to reach Crtl+Alt+ 6, 7, or 8 just to insert a curly or squared bracket. Furthermore the right Apple key does... nothing? There's no delete-key, just something like "Return". A key with an imaginary function again. I don't know who was employed to design that. I don't want to know to be honest.

It's not a simple task to remap that. You can apply some registry hacks but I avoided that. There's a better way: the Input Remapper. That's a free tool, that stays at the tray-bar and remaps this so called "Return" key (next to the right Apple key) to delete. A function many Mac users don't seem to be aware of: Yes, you can delete the character right-sides the cursor. Furthermore it brings back the FN key to dim brightness and to change volume. A very nice tool! If you use an Apple keyboard that has got keys like F13 to F19 you may want to look at SharpKeys. That's a GUI for many of the registry hacks that have been applied in the past to automatically start certain applications with hot-keys.

I wanted more. I needed to define macros, which get activated with keystrokes to insert text.

Like that:

Alt + F1 -> \
F2 -> [
F3 -> ]
F4 -> {
F5 -> }

You don't want to type LaTeX or Java code and always press this right Apple key + $number without actually seeing these keys on your keyboard for real. Because... another problem: they don't exist on a MacBook. Again there's a nice tool, that doesn't seem to be free. However the light version does that. Maybe that's a strange setup. But it works.

HFS vs. TrueCrypt

If you've got a TrueCrypt volume on your HD and you've defined that device partition within MacOS's version of TrueCrypt it might not work with Bootcamp 3.0's HFS(J) support. The only possible solution again is some commercial stuff known as MacDrive in version >8. That enables Windows' TC to mount HFS volumes with complete read and write support and reads TC partitions - depending on your partition table of course.

Consoles vs. Aero

For a long time I completely deactivated every Windows GUI function that was optional, because they looked ugly and just slowed down the OS. I just need Windows to be responsive and reactive to do reversing with tools like IDA, Immunity Debugger, olly, ... sometimes (Iron)Python development Java stuff. Many great reversing tools are for Windows only, and stdout text based.

Even though Aero is useful and looks okay, there's no tabed terminal application included. Console does that as you can see on the screenshot. The configuration requires to set Cygwin.bat as shell for the Bash, powershell.exe from the System32 directory for PoSh or cmd.exe for the DOS prompt. You can have them all at once. The configuration dialogs are cumbersome, but do it once and it will work.

To get the transparency effect there's PowerMenu. It adds useful extra entries to the window-controls at the context-menu.

OpenVPN's TAP driver vs. Windows 7

 Normally I redirect all my traffic through OpenVPN tunnels. First of all that encrypts everything including http (Twitter e. g.). Furthermore SSH connections stay alive with Putty. Installing OpenVPN on Windows 7 is possible. In some cases there're reports that ARP flushing the interfaces doesn't work. If you add the following options you may get lucky too:

route-method exe
route-delay 2

Not VisualStudio/Office 2010 Beta! No Betas jet.

Nevertheless I'm very interested to see how F# will develop: for C# and Visual C++ I need VisualStudio 2008. VisualStudio 2008 installs without a problem. For the Windows 7 RC there were issues with the runtime assemblies. Eclipse (good with PyDev) and NetBeans (good Java and Ruby support) work. The Microsoft SDL (MiniFuzz, BinScope) tools integrate. The Visio dependant SDL modelling tool works, too. VMware workstation - no problems. Office 2007... works too. In fact I stumbled upon a nice configuration option with Ribbon:

I think that's good for a 13" screen. Furthermore some people may notice MathType - the enemy of LaTeX as it was supposed to be. There're translations since version 6 that allow you to define AMS LaTeX-style equations within Word. Just in case you write a paper or something.

No Outlook

Outlook's IMAP4 support is bad. It just doesn't scale with anything else than Exchange. If you've got your own Mailserver somewhere on a Linux box or something try Sylpheed (for Windows). A very functional and minimal client, that optionally uses your favorite external editor (Cream or Notepad++ e. g.). I like the menus. It's clear what each option does. Gmail with Gears works fine of course if you're a cloud-user.

Some nice tools

I just list them, because if you're going to migrate some tasks to Windows 7, you might search for minimal, free and useful tools.

Twitter: Seesmic

RSS: FeedDemon

Clipboard History: ClipX

Application Policy Control tool and sort of firewall: Comodo

Window Management enhancements WinSplit Revolution (tiling window management)

Just to ease searching. I think most crazy usability issues are solved so far. But that's IT sometimes. Details can matter.

- However I searched a lot: cannot recommend any blog-editor I found on Windows. They all suck, being incapable to produce simply html. ;)

That was fun ;),

wishi