45 Minutes

Looking back, the entire month of February still feels like a blur, like riding shotgun: ahead and behind you the scenery seems to move slowly, but immediately around you, the world races by.

Enlighten, essentially the place to do interactive work in Ann Arbor, hired me sight-unseen to a contract (a.k.a. Big Boy Job). With only a few days of notice, I had to say my good-byes to the old place, and start a new a a larger, more established agency. I was looking forward to leaving my small pond. I almost always have operated as the guy--only one who understood the technology, and I'm ready to have some good mentors.

The only bad part of the new job is that I have to work on Windows. I didn't think it would be that bad. The Web is cross-platform, right?

Wrong.

I am shocked at how much time and efficiency I lost. This maybe a slight hyperbole, but it feels like for every hour I spend working, I only get 45 minutes worth of results. For anyone who thought Mac OS X was for people who just wanted pretty and easy, you're wrong: I miss OS X because its interface is smart and complex.

Only very rarely in OS X do I find myself repeatedly slamming tab to no avail. In many applications, holding ⌘ will tell you relevant keyboard shortcuts. In Microsoft Apps, each button might have a keyboard shortcut--don't hold your breath though--and good luck finding it. The biggest slowdown I face work is switching my hands. Moving from keyboard to mouse and back is the most frustrating part of working on Windows. Every action seems to require a click, when the bulk of my work is typing.

The biggest loss by changing platforms, however, are the applications. Before starting a search around the blogs to find out if there was anything that could hold a candle to TextMate and BBEdit. Use them both for different tasks: TextMate for writing and BBEdit for processing.

I was surprised at how sparse the field was. e text editor came closest, but the damn thing has no a redo shortcut. How is that possible? E has an interesting way of saving version history, but without a fast way to redo what's the point?

I've tried Notepad++. Tried edit plus. JEdit. Even Adobe's HomeSite builder. Ubiquitously lacking in this field is regular expression support (they make you feel like a [superhero][]!). Apparently finding \n\n within a text file on Windows is impossible.

Is so difficult. Not a single text editor on Windows supports multi-line regular expressions more importantly is the problem for

<table>\n\t<tr>\n\t\t<td><b>heading<b><td>\n\t<tr>\n<table>

Becoming

<h3>heading</h3>

Transformations like these are essential to a Web designer, and I'm shocked how difficult it is to find support for them.

But I expected to miss my text editors. Some of the things I didn't expect to miss are:

1. Quicksilver
2. Exposé
3. Drag and drop
4. Mail and iCal
5. Dictionary
6. Omni outliner

With the exception of Quicksilver I wouldn't expect any of these applications landed atop at the top of the most wanted list. In fact, I never really thought of how much I used any of them. But these blue collar applications are what make the experience on Mac OS X great. They don't do much, but the features they have are intuitive and robust.

Meanwhile, in the Windows world, I can understand why Web applications have taken off. Forget having good netiquette. Three weeks into using Outlook and the plodding, spartan-featured Webmail applications look like heaven.

[superhero]: http://xkcd.com/c208.html "“Regular Expressions” in xkcd by Randall Munroe""