I've been trying to free myself from Microsoft for years. About ten years ago, I was rabidly pro-Microsoft. Windows XP, then brand new, was amazing, and I used Microsoft for everything, as everyone did. For work, Word, my hotmail email, over Outlook, with MSN Messenger on the side. I used Google for search, and Yahoo! for its calendar, which Microsoft didn't have. I hated Macs.
The real radical moment of change in all this I remember being buying an iBook. I did this because it was just much better than any PC laptop, in every respect. There was probably some peer pressure too. No more Outlook, since that didn't exist on Macs till much later. Firefox came out around the same time, which got me off Explorer. Then GMail – all of this within 2004, really. Suddenly, I was only using Microsoft for Word. I tried to get off Word, but I've never been able to. Every alternative was clunky, especially on the Mac. When the Intel Macs came out, there was something of a backslide, in that I found myself using XP for various things, mostly games, albeit on Apple hardware. That's stopped now, though, mainly because the growth of Apple's popularity means that games are ported more frequently and quickly to Mac. I very briefly bought a Windows phone, before taking it back and getting an iPhone.
I became pretty loyal to Google – Calendar, then, years later, Chrome. Things have changed a bit in the last year or so. Google+ came out. It was by far the worst thing Google have ever done, not in the absolute sense (they've been doing shit things for years), but because everyone placed hope in it and noticed. I'm an inveterate Facebook user. Before Google+, I didn't really feel this conflicted with my Mac and Google commitments, but now it does, and I've chosen Facebook (actually, it had already kind of got me of Google Chat). I even removed my Google+ account recently. I also started using GMail and Google Calendar through the Apple apps rather than the web interfaces.
A big shift back happened last year, however, when the iPhone 4S came out and I realised that Android phones were now better than Apple.I bought my first Android phone recently, though I'm still waiting to take delivery of it. Still, this represents a decisive shift towards Google.
Today, I did two things. Firstly, I finally worked out how to use Zotero in such a way that I can keep using Chrome rather than Firefox, and that I can cut MS Word out of my productivity in favour of Apple's textedit. Scores for Apple and Google over MS. Looking for cloud storage, however, I had a direct choice between all three: Apple's iCloud, Google's Drive and MS's SkyDrive. And, weirdly, Skydrive won, basically because it's the cheapest and they give you the most space for free. In particular, I have a 6GB collection of pirated PDFs that will fit in the free 7GB SkyDrive storage, but not in the free storage offered by other cloud operators. SkyDrive, is, like all the others, basically a ripoff of Dropbox, so works fine. The logo is a ripoff of Apple's, and the name sounds vaguely like Terminator's Skynet, which is only mildly terrifying. Incredibly, then, I am still attached to MS by a string.
Update: The day after posting this, that is, after spending a day doing all this shit reorganising my cloud storage, I get my new Android phone through the mail, and discover that it comes with 50GB of free Dropbox storage. So all the other stuff ends up being redundant. I move all the stuff from SkyDrive to Dropbox and my link with MS is effectively severed. Well, I still have Word open for something I'm working on, but when that's done, and barring spreadsheets.
The new Android phone is at first mildly disappointing. The interface is pretty ugly compared to iOS. But I persevere and become obsessed in a way I never was with iOS, because of the depth of customisability of the new interface. Effectively, Android is automatically what iOS is jailbroken. Ultimately, and with rooting, there is no limit to what this thing can do. I end up limiting myself though, by not rooting it. Rooting is scary, and the process to do it even more worrisome than that of jailbreaking an iPhone, which was never quite straightforward.
Update 2: After many hours playing with the phone, I learn several things. Firstly, that you can do quite a lot with the phone shy of rooting it, mostly stuff you can't do under iOS, by installing a new 'loader'. However, ultimately, I wanted to root the thing (mainly to remove a load of apps it comes with but which I do not wish to use, and which, in some cases, but discovered I can't, because there are no instructions extant for doing so on my phone from an Apple computer.
The real radical moment of change in all this I remember being buying an iBook. I did this because it was just much better than any PC laptop, in every respect. There was probably some peer pressure too. No more Outlook, since that didn't exist on Macs till much later. Firefox came out around the same time, which got me off Explorer. Then GMail – all of this within 2004, really. Suddenly, I was only using Microsoft for Word. I tried to get off Word, but I've never been able to. Every alternative was clunky, especially on the Mac. When the Intel Macs came out, there was something of a backslide, in that I found myself using XP for various things, mostly games, albeit on Apple hardware. That's stopped now, though, mainly because the growth of Apple's popularity means that games are ported more frequently and quickly to Mac. I very briefly bought a Windows phone, before taking it back and getting an iPhone.
I became pretty loyal to Google – Calendar, then, years later, Chrome. Things have changed a bit in the last year or so. Google+ came out. It was by far the worst thing Google have ever done, not in the absolute sense (they've been doing shit things for years), but because everyone placed hope in it and noticed. I'm an inveterate Facebook user. Before Google+, I didn't really feel this conflicted with my Mac and Google commitments, but now it does, and I've chosen Facebook (actually, it had already kind of got me of Google Chat). I even removed my Google+ account recently. I also started using GMail and Google Calendar through the Apple apps rather than the web interfaces.
A big shift back happened last year, however, when the iPhone 4S came out and I realised that Android phones were now better than Apple.I bought my first Android phone recently, though I'm still waiting to take delivery of it. Still, this represents a decisive shift towards Google.
Today, I did two things. Firstly, I finally worked out how to use Zotero in such a way that I can keep using Chrome rather than Firefox, and that I can cut MS Word out of my productivity in favour of Apple's textedit. Scores for Apple and Google over MS. Looking for cloud storage, however, I had a direct choice between all three: Apple's iCloud, Google's Drive and MS's SkyDrive. And, weirdly, Skydrive won, basically because it's the cheapest and they give you the most space for free. In particular, I have a 6GB collection of pirated PDFs that will fit in the free 7GB SkyDrive storage, but not in the free storage offered by other cloud operators. SkyDrive, is, like all the others, basically a ripoff of Dropbox, so works fine. The logo is a ripoff of Apple's, and the name sounds vaguely like Terminator's Skynet, which is only mildly terrifying. Incredibly, then, I am still attached to MS by a string.
Update: The day after posting this, that is, after spending a day doing all this shit reorganising my cloud storage, I get my new Android phone through the mail, and discover that it comes with 50GB of free Dropbox storage. So all the other stuff ends up being redundant. I move all the stuff from SkyDrive to Dropbox and my link with MS is effectively severed. Well, I still have Word open for something I'm working on, but when that's done, and barring spreadsheets.
The new Android phone is at first mildly disappointing. The interface is pretty ugly compared to iOS. But I persevere and become obsessed in a way I never was with iOS, because of the depth of customisability of the new interface. Effectively, Android is automatically what iOS is jailbroken. Ultimately, and with rooting, there is no limit to what this thing can do. I end up limiting myself though, by not rooting it. Rooting is scary, and the process to do it even more worrisome than that of jailbreaking an iPhone, which was never quite straightforward.
Update 2: After many hours playing with the phone, I learn several things. Firstly, that you can do quite a lot with the phone shy of rooting it, mostly stuff you can't do under iOS, by installing a new 'loader'. However, ultimately, I wanted to root the thing (mainly to remove a load of apps it comes with but which I do not wish to use, and which, in some cases, but discovered I can't, because there are no instructions extant for doing so on my phone from an Apple computer.
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