When I write here, I end up writing long winded articles that I fuss over and take a long time to write. Due to this I’ve not written for a year(!) or had a real meaty article in longer than that. I’ve had a bunch of excuses like…I hate the design; when I redesign I’ll post again, but I’ve decided to just get on with it, and write some sorter form posts until I get back into the swing of things. Or not as the case may be!
As a long LONG term Mac user that now works for Microsoft, I thought I’d write my first one on the MS apps I use day in day out. I’m only including things here I choose to use, and not things I have to use for my day job at Microsoft. Now, Microsoft have not asked me to write this, and I’m going to be as honest as possible. This is my personal opinion and not those of my employers.
As I said, I’m a long term Mac user. At university, I was the only Mac user I saw. Most people were using some form of IBM ThinkPad laptop. As such, old habits die hard, and I consider myself a cross platform user. I’ve both a work ThinkPad X1 Carbon and a person MacBook Air, while my phone is a work supplied low end Lumia. I don’t have a tablet; I’ve never really understood the appeal for my use cases.
Due to my cross platform usage, I’ve started in the last year to look beyond the Mac specific apps I tended to use, to high quality cross platform ones. In general this hasn’t been as difficult as I first though. Much of what I use, such as Twitter, were web first and have perfectly serviceable web apps anyway.
Anyone that knows me will probably tell you how stubborn I can be to change, so anything I recommend here is high praise from me. And in general, except for Microsoft Edge, I had nothing to do with any of them. I use them as they meet my needs.
OneNote
The first Mac specific app I transitioned off of was actually for notes. I’m one of those people that flip from idea to idea in a heartbeat, and have to note them down lest I forget them. For this I has the most unorganised system of about 100 unsaved TextEdit documents with various notes. Am I the only one that does this? Instead, I discover OneNote. I love this app. It is both cross platform and web based, and notes automatically get synced to “the cloud.” It is free too, which is a big bonus. I like how it allows free form edits. Click on any area of the page and it creates a new text box. The UI generally doesn’t get in the way, although I disabled the completely over the top purple colour in the settings. I feel like if I had a machine with pen input I’d get even more from the app. The only thing I can really complain about beyond the purple is that it isn’t always great at importing data such s tables and charts from Excel. In general, a notes app should let you jot down thoughts, get out of your way, and allow you to share them, and OneNote does just that. It is a really work horse app…it is used extensively inside Microsoft.
Visual Studio Code
Perhaps the hardest thing to transition from from any Web Developer is their text editor. This is the familiar home that you have to feel productive and comfortable. If you ask anyone that really knew me, you’d need to pry TextWrangler from my cold dead hands. Much of it was probably just inertia and resistance to change, but I was really stuck on TextWrangler for over 10 years. A lot of habits form in that time. I was used to the syntax highlighting; the find and replace was really second to none. It just felt like a comfy slipper. But as projects got more and more complex, the lack of projects got more and more annoying. And with my memory less than perfect, not having auto-complete became tiresome. I briefly tried BBEdit, but I wanted to go cross platform, and thus tried Brackets and then new kid on the block Atom. It was Brackets that I decided to go with while building Status.modern.ie until Visual Studio Code was announced at \Build. I couldn’t be more excited.
Working at Opera, and gathering feedback on building Opera Dragonfly (I was the PM at the time), the desktop and core developers I talked to at the time would wax lyrically about Visual Studio. It was probably more of an inspiration than crowd favourite Firebug. Visual Studio was too much for me as a web developer that was used to a light weight text editor though, and it is Windows only. Visual Studio Code ticked all the right boxes. It is built with web technologies for the web, it’s lightweight, works cross platform so I can use on my work Windows machine and my home Mac, and it has some of that Visual Studio “DNA”. I like it a lot, and it is only getting better now it is open source. Indeed my main bug bear was that while I loved the IntelliSense auto-complete (especially how it includes a description as well as browser support for CSS),it was fairly out of date. Flexbox for example only showed the old WebKit syntax. But now it is open, I’ve been able to help improve that, and it has gained other improvements such as auto-complete for ARIA too. I don’t know about you, but I always have to look up the appropriate attributes as I always forget them. It also has a bunch of other useful features such as Git integration (which saved my bacon when GitHub Desktop stopped allowing me to commit for some reason that I’ve not been able to fathom), and to me the default dark theme is really beautiful. With F12 (IE/Edge’s developer tools) also using the Monaco editor, I‘d love if the two projects share more in the future. I’d love my F12 to match my VS Code. I’d recommend anyone on Mac, Windows or Linux to try out VS Code, and I’d love to hear what you think.
Azure Websites
This is not something I can write a whole lot about as I develop exclusively on the front end, but all of our projects use Azure Websites, or Azure Web Apps as it is called today (MS really love renaming things!) The best thing I can say about it is that it completely gets out of the way. I don’t even have to know it exists. It has continuous integration, so that I just push my changes in the normal way to GitHub and they’re staged on our development server, and then they can be swapped out to the live site. As a MS project, if you still hold on to old ideas, you might think this requires ASP.net or some other MS invented technology, but as well as using GitHub instead of TFS, we also use Node.js. It just makes sense when we’re browser vendors that we use JS on the server side as well. I’d love to try Chakra Node when and if that becomes possible.
We also use DocumentDB as the database, which does use Chakra. I can’t speak much to this as I’ve not touched it, but my colleague and friend Anton will be able talk more about both of these.
Azure RemoteApp
This one is really cool as a Mac user. Unfortunately, Microsoft Edge doesn’t exist on a Mac, but I can use it anyway through Azure RemoteApp and Remote.ie. It doesn’t get the full performance or fidelity as a native browser as it is streamed, but it is a fantastic piece of technology. It doesn’t work out of the box with localhost, but you can use Ngrok to tunndel through. When using this, the only real issue beyond animation fidelity isif you’re using a slow network. If I need to test older versions of IE, I use BrowserStack.
Microsoft Edge
I can’t really write this without writing about the product I work on. We’re still in the early days of a hugely ambitious project, but it is one I’m hugely proud of being part of. Just like Opera, it is brimming with smart people that really care about the web, and it is really exciting to see where we’re heading. There will always be trolls that try to put you down due to the history of IE, but I think we’ll prove a lot of people wrong. The amount we’re opening up with the roadmap on status.microsoftedge.com, solicitation of feedback from web devs on Twitter and UserVoice, regular previews via the Windows Insider program, and even the recent announcement of open sourcing Chakra (our JS engine) is something we could only dream about a few years ago. The Web is a healthier place when multiple strong parties are competing. Currently Chakra is the engine to beat for JavaScript. We’ve also done a huge amount of work forking Trident to make EdgeHTML, including thousands of interop fixes, deprecating old IE only features, and adding a whole host of new standards. So much so that we’re only 10 points behind Firefox on the commonly cited HTML5test. We’re knocking on the door for sure. And one of the things I’m proud off that doesn’t get much limelight is all the accessibility work. That is something we’re really committed to getting right.
What’s next?
Honestly, I use Office as many of the internal documents are in that format, but I‘ve yet to fully try out Outlook. I use it on my phone as it is the default mail app, but I’m still stuck on mail.app due to inertia on my Mac. We get DRM email at work that doesn’t open there, which is a reason alone to switch (never mind having a cross platform mail app), but in general Mail has been annoying me for a while. Calendar invites will often not show the date and time, emails will randomly not delete, app crashes, etc. I’ve heard good things about the mail and calendar apps MS bought recently, and I’m looking to try Outlook on my Mac to see how it holds up. I just have to get over about 14 years of inertia and habbits of using mail.app. That is a lot of mail!
The other thing I want to experience more is the hardware. Truth be told, after using a Mac for so long, it has been hard switching to Windows hardware. I first got an Acer when consulting, and I hated that plasticy thing. When I joined MS I got a hand me down thick ThinkPad with a VGA port! Even my first ever Mac at the turn of century didn’t have one of those! I’ve since got a close to top of the line ThinkPad X1 Carbon. But through all of them, what I’ve most struggled to get used to is the trackpad and keyboard. Macs do really have great versions of each…and I’m sure 15-ish years of each doesn’t help there either. Cause, really, while I’ve got used to the main modifier key being in a different place, I still struggle with the fact that due to the Mac having a one button trackpad, and being left handed, I automatically click just on the right side of the keyboard. This always to this day makes me regularly rick click on Windows. Now, the Carbon is night and day better. On the other machines I always highlighted text and typed over it as I used the keyboard, due to either weak or none existent palm rejection. And it drove me batty. But I still can’t get away with the fact it still isn’t quite right for me. It is a business machine foremost. People love the keyboard, but I’ve still not quite got into it. It does have quality materials but not quite my style. It would look so much better without those logos . It is definitely a serious looking machine. It says person in a suit. And that is great for that audience.
But I really want to try a Surface. It is perhaps only the second Windows machine I’ve desired as a Mac user (the first was when I had a chunky 15" Powerbook and people around the office had tiny IBM Thinkpads they could throw around). But the Surface, I think, can really compete in the Mac demographic. It has really quality materials, and fit and finish. More so than I‘ve ever seen outside of Mac. But…and this is the key thing…it isn’t just a Mac clone. It isn‘t just this hunk of aluminium that sits in an uncanny valley where it looks like a Mac at first glance but isn’t. Surface, whether it is the Pro or the Book, is its own machine. The matte finish and material (Magnesium instead of aluminium) is different of course, but perhaps more importantly, they have their own profile. That is always a trait Apple have been good at. Draw a quick line art drawing and you’ll instantly recognise an Apple product. From the click wheel iPod, to the rounded rectangle iPhone with circular home button. Surface has this. From the lowercase Greek Lambda of the Surface Pro in profile, to the binder shape of the Surface book. Even the gap between the screen any keyboard in the latter is genius to me. Due to the hinge and how it detaches, there probably needed to be some gap. But put a small gap and it just looks like poor fit and finish. But a relatively big gap and not only does it become part of the design signature, but it avoids those issues, and provides clearance to stop the keys rubbing on the display.
All that is cool, but the reason for that hinge is the ability to remove the screen. I’ve not got into tablets, but I miss the touch screen functionality of my Windows machines when using my Mac, and I love the idea that the book detaches without compromising the keyboard. I could have got the Surface Pro 3 when I got my Carbon, but I felt the keyboard would be too much of a compromise for someone so used to the Mac keyboard and trackpad, and whose tablet use would be a distant second. The book seems to have that balance right for people like me (and I’ve heard that they are fantastic). It also has to be said that the keyboard for the Pro 4 also looks a lot better. And the pen. I really want to try the pen. Especially for Edge annotation mode.
The other thing I have to commend the design team on is no logo (or buttons) on the front of the device at all. In that regard it out Apple’s even the Macs. Whoever made that happen, thank you! Hopefully future Windows Phones will drop the MS logo off the front too.
So all in all, the Surface Book is a highly desirable piece of kit, that holds its own with the best of Apple. The only thing is it is hard to justify when my personal Mac is only 1 year old, and my work laptop is also new.
Wrapping up
Ok, so that was longer than I planned. You see why I don’t blog much now! But, I‘d love to hear what MS products you use yourself. Are you a Mac user that discovered the appeal of VS Code? Are you a cross platform user, that likes that a bunch of products are available on more than one platform? Are you a Windows user that loves MS Edge? What are your thoughts of the various Surface devices as a development machine?