Macs. Yum. They’d match my iPods nicely and fit my shallow aesthetic needs - even though my current PC is small, white and quiet.

The main pain of my PC is the OS, and more specifically, its failure to do much in a sensible and stable way. My PC doesn’t always shutdown. It doesn’t always startup. Its window redrawing isn’t buffered, and is sooo 1993. It has a hideous look when returning from the screensaver. It handles multitasking in a seemingly clumsy, awkward way. It doesn’t look as pretty as I like.

But the main joy of my PC is .Net, and more specifically, Managed DirectX - I’m so utterly in love with it’s high levelness that I can forgive it’s failings in exception handling and documentation. And anything that hammers another nail into the ‘oh, we must write in C++ for performance’ coffin is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

So I’m not ready to Switch, yet. An iBook under my coffee table wouldn’t be too bad. (I have my eye on its VGA to S-Video for MAME goodness. But that’s another story). For now I’m making do with a couple of ‘Shell Enhancements’, or Windows Hacks. Newly discovered today is the bizzarely Germanic Entbloess 2 for its Expose mimic. It does it rather well - especially when you’ve tweaked the ugly default font, turned off the dumbass ‘help’ strings and set the mouse trigger areas to be Just Right. It appeared on LifeHacker this morning, and I’d shelled out a whopping 5 new British pounds on it this afternoon. I did have to go to IE to successfully view the Download page however. Oh the irony.

exposed

The other Windows agnostic stuff I’m currently mucking around with is the much hyped (but also quite good, especially when viewed from my 2000-era-PHP-Web1.0-experience point of view) Ruby On Rails. I stalled a few months back when I found myself searching for an editor with both good keyboard shortcut support and quick filesystem browser. And which wasn’t Emacs. Failing miserably I sobbed gently into my Rails book (which, it has to be said, is my favourite techie book in the last couple of years) and vowed to try again soon.

Well, the Rails community certainly isn’t slothful. In a matter of weeks some clever bods have built ontop of Eclipse (another sobful aborted experiment from, ooh, about 12 months ago, when I was too tight to buy C# and braved Mono and GTK# instead. Mistake). RadRails certainly feels special. It kicks off the WebBrick server for you, highlights code good, navigates and copes with the filesystem in a good way and (most importantly) supports custom keybindings. The only work I had to do outside of RadRails was to create the database (even the database.yml has a pretty GUI frontend! This impresses me, at least). (and anyway, SQLyog is a pretty straightforward and honest GUI for MySQL, and easily copes with my database needs).

Oh, and RadRails also looks good. Which, you may have gathered by now, I care about a little too much.