Techy » Phil Barker

My twitter feed today has yet again been full of designers/developers (hi Ollie) arguing about Windows and OS X – throwing the phrase “fanboy” around and arguing rather too passionately one way or the other about something they very little understand

As a developer that uses both OS X and Windows (sadly) – I feel very strongly about this subject and trying to get the sum of all my ~~rage~~ arguments across on twitter was failing badly – so I thought I’d write a post about it here

A little history…
I was a massive hardcore windows fan. I built my first pc back in 1995 while I was at college and got heavily into coding and online gaming.
Every few years I spent a simply ridiculous amount of money building another cutting edge gaming PC - right up until I moved in with Rick Nunn a few years ago.

By this point I had an Xbox 360 and my online PC gaming had pretty much ended, but I did still use a Windows PC for web development and freelancing. I had just spent £2700 on a brand new cutting edge PC setup running Windows a few weeks before moving in with Rick.

Rick is a very talented designer and me being a developer we decided to work on a few projects together. Rick was using a couple of years old iMac and I was using my PC.
The days coding/designing seemed like ground-hog day. Every day he would come in, pick up his graphics tablet pen and start drawing or start hacking some CSS together.

I would sit and wait for the PC to boot up, see a notification about updates and have to install them and reboot. Plug a usb device in, find some drivers, reboot again. Half way through coding it would blue screen for some completely un-known reason and I’d have to reboot again.

This continued for a few weeks until eventually I kicked my PC into pieces, drove to Meadowhall’s Apple Store and bought a £600 Mac Mini.
Rick helped me get it all setup, showed me the differences between windows & OS X and I discovered bliss!

Suddenly no more reboots – for months and months on end. System updates installed silently and I forgot what a driver even was.
There was no risk of virus’s so I didn’t have to run a virus checker that scanned every file on my machine until it became too slow to use.
My stress levels halved over night and my productivity went through the roof.
I’ve not touched a PC since until….

My current job…
I took a job last year working for a large insurance company. That means an office with 300+ people and a windows domain *sigh*
The IT team chose windows over OS X/Linux because of the control over the users, what they run and what they can install. Exchange is a good mail server and it’s easy to find IT staff trained in microsoft OS’s. This unfortunately meant they wouldn’t let me have a Mac

For 6 months I used a windows PC and my daily experience was hell.
It took on average 5 minutes to get the machine booted up, logged into the domain, start apache+mysql+php, load up komodo, and actually start coding.
If there were any windows updates to install this would require a reboot and my time from arriving at my desk to actually working was knocking on 20-30minutes
The machine crashed regularly (and it’s a new PC not some old 2nd hand hardware). Even with anti-virus on people in the department got virus’s which then meant 1-2 days downtime as they were re-formatted and all the software pain-stakingly re-installed (with the mandatory reboot between each application!!! Argghh)

I eventually had enough of wasting time and asked my manager if I could have a Mac. It was agreed that if I could justify it I could – so I started creating a log of all the time lost specifically because of windows updates, reboots and crashes.
I kept a spreadsheet for over 2 months and the results suprised even me!
In an average 40hr week I was losing between 6 and 9 hours a week to windows.
The cost of this to my company was insane so they agreed to a solution – a £650 mac mini arrived and I’ve been using that ever since.

My experiences now are an 8-20second time from sitting down at my desk to writing my first lines of code.
It hasn’t crashed ever. I installed all the apps within 2 hours of un-boxing and didn’t have to reboot once.
I’ve only had to reboot once in 3 months for a system update – all the rest installed seamlessly without interrupting me.
Even the next version of OS X, called Lion, installs fully without a reboot.

Costs
At this point I can hear you all screaming at your screen “Yes but a mac costs THOUSANDS”
This is of course only half true and usually spouted by people who’ve done no proper research (they usually follow it up with “macs only have one mouse button” LOL)

I have a 15″ macbook pro which I use for development which cost £1850. I’ll admit that’s a boat load of money for a laptop in this day and age
However at work I have a 2.4ghz dual core mac mini with 8gb of ram which cost £650. That’s no more than the equivalent Dell PC would cost with a windows license – and I can ensure you it is sooo much more of a machine.

Windows is cursed by the impossible task of writing an operating system for infinite combinations of hardware. OS X runs beautifully because you are restricted to a certain set of hardware for its use. It’s that simple and it’s that brilliant!

So there you go – same cost – infinitely better user experience.

The cost of my macbook has never bothered me because it is a beautifully designed piece of hardware. I wouldn’t ever complain about spending more money on a Ferrari over a Volvo because it’s a slicker, better looking car. The same applies to computer hardware for me. I would rather spend nearly £2k on a Mac than use an Acer laptop slowly falling apart in front of me.

While on the subject of costs – even if the hardware was more expensive (which it isn’t) the cost of windows is astronomical compared to the cost of OS X. The next version of OS X costs £20.99 – for 5 licenses
Windows 7 Premium costs 5x that for just 1 license – making it effectively 25x more expensive if you have multiple computers in your house.

So.. in closing to all those people on twitter arguing about this let me leave you with something

You wouldn’t call someone an idiot for buying a diesel car at a slight premium and then saving hundreds on fuel costs
You wouldn’t argue that from a design/aesthetics point of view that a ferrari isn’t worth the extra money over a volvo
You wouldn’t ever argue that you prefer spending a day rebuilding a broken windows installation rather than doing actual chargeable work

Any extra cost involved for buying a Mac is more than saved over the years of hassle-free development/design work and stupidly cheap OS updates… end of

Oh and to those of you arguing windows is better and you have never actually used a mac for a few weeks – I hate you, I hate you from the very bottom of my soul for arguing about something you will never understand!

Developers & Designers : Mostly misunderstood

February 12, 2011 Techy

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For many years now I’ve been wanting to write a blog post, one of those blog posts that every time I sit down to write I can never really get across properly.

Quite simply it’s about being misunderstood when working in a corporate environment – not just myself but every talented designer or developer I’ve ever worked with.

Around 4 months ago I quit my job. This has put me up to about 15 jobs in 10 years.
People all said the same things when I left:-

I don’t get on with other people
I don’t take orders well
I’m anti-social
All I ever do is ‘winge’

Basically the usual ‘geek stereotypes’ that I get branded with every time I start a job and have to leave 6 months later

They are however entirely wrong – when I’m around intelligent logical people I am very sociable – in fact I’m currently moving house so I can spend more time with people I love and less time commuting.
What gets mistaken as anti-social behaviour is simply my inability to spend time with people who are stupid. I find it a waste of my time to have to keep explaining solutions to people who don’t understand, or having to work with someone who is a poor coder and drags me down trying to fix everything they do wrong.

I also don’t mind taking orders from people at all – in fact I work much better to a well set-out project plan. Where I don’t like taking orders is simply when the orders are stupid!
You see I’ve only ever been good at one thing – analysis. I can’t play my guitar, I can’t paint, I’m not very good at photography and I can’t play any sports. But I CAN analyze problems and come up with very good solutions quickly.
This is a major problem though when you are hired into a company with very poor business processes that mean you spend lots of time doing pointless work and making very little progress. I become VERY stressed when I know there is a far better way of doing something but someone “above” me in a company forces me to do something illogical and pointless.

Apparently that makes me disobedient and whiny.
Usually I will complain for a few months and then the stress of doing pointless tasks for stupid people will become to much and I’ll walk out.

The other major issue I have with working in an office environment is respect.
If someone does a brilliant piece of code, or comes up with an elegant design I will praise them, and I would expect the same from them if I did something worthy of praise. I don’t really value money – in my eyes that just pays for the roof over my head and a few nice things around the house – I value respect.

All of those combined is why I quit my job – I didn’t get any respect for the solutions I came up with, they were ignored in favor of extremely bad business processes. Respect was given to stupid people who talked a lot of bullshit and did very little.

Fortunately I have found a job now that although it has the usual poor business processes – and the usual helping of stupid people trying to make a career out of bullshit – lets me work with some brilliant developers and I have the best manager I’ve ever worked for.

He completely understands IT professional – when I complain about a stupid process he listens and fights my corner to get it changed rather than telling me to stop complaining – and I’ve had more praise for the solutions I have brought into this company than I have ever had in any job before.

So, back to the post I have been trying to write about being misunderstood & how you should properly manage designers & developers. It turns out I don’t have to try to word it all correctly any more as Jeff Ello has written exactly what I have wanted to for years.
So for all my previous managers who just never ‘got it’ here you go…

The Original Article

My iTunes workflow

December 29, 2010 Techy

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I cannot ignore my OCD, if my home media collection is a mess I can’t sleep. My dvd’s are even in alphabetical order. So I’ve always been quite protective of my music library and done everything manually.

Tonight though I spent a few hours playing with iTunes and have come up with a workflow I’m really happy with to let iTunes manage all my music. I thought I’d share it.
Obviously if you buy a track from iTunes or import from a CD you don’t have to worry about this – but for the mp3′s you’ve purchased elsewhere this works quite nicely.

Firstly I have a playlist called “unsorted”, my iTunes is set to “Keep iTunes Media folder organised” but NOT “Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to library”. These settings can be found under preferences -> advanced.

When I want to add music to iTunes I drag the files into the “unsorted” playlist. Then I select them all, right click and choose “Create mp3 version”. The MP3 settings are set in preferences -> import settings.
I personally find 160kbs bit rate is fine and store all my files in MP3.
When you ask iTunes to create mp3 versions it automatically creates them in its own folder (which for me is on a USB drive) and re-encodes them to your settings.
When they’ve all been re-encoded simply select all the files in the “unsorted” playlist again and hit alt-delete. This removes the original files from your library and you’re left with nice clean versions in your iTunes managed folder

I should also mention with video files I convert them into MP4′s with iFlicks – and then drag them into iTunes. Then right click on them and “Consolidate files” which then copies the file into the iTunes managed folder. I then manually delete the original

Itunes, Snow Leopard and Play/Pause

September 16, 2009 Rants / Techy

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I’d like to love Snow Leopard, I really would. It has so many nice new features and updates. The new expose is gorgeous and running it per application when you have a load of emails open saves to find a window saves so much time. BUT, and its a big but, the current ‘bug’ with the play/pause button on the keyboard ALWAYS launching itunes is really starting to annoy me.

At home I have iTunes open all the time as it syncs with my AppleTV – so it’s not so much a problem. Though it is hugely annoying that when Im listening to spotify and I press pause – it starts playing a track from itunes grrr.
But at work I don’t use itunes for anything – I listen to my iPod or Spotify. So when I press pause or play while in spotify and suddenly itunes loads up – its rather frustrating.

I don’t know if this is a simple bug or if Apple are heading down the MS route and trying to force people to use itunes instead of any “competition” just like MS used to try to force IE as the default browser. I’m hoping its just a bug

If anyone knows a way to fix it that isn’t some horrid renaming patch please let me know