The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Today I got my formal introduction to Mac OS X 10.3 and MacOpera. I'll be doing some QA work for the Mac team until they get some projects finished. I've used Windows most of my life, though I worked with Red Hat Linux in college (and installed Mandrake on one of my systems for a couple of weeks). I've seen and briefly played with Mac OS X before, but haven't had my own system. Well, now I have a Windows XP workstation, a Mac G4 box, a Mandrake Linux box, and a Windows 98 low-end test machine (P166 w/ 32MB RAM) at my desks.

So far, I'm pretty impressed with the Mac. It's spiffy. Very sauve. Opera feels like it belongs there. I've played a bit with Safari, some with Camino, and opened IE once. I'm using SDI in Opera--as that's the Mac norm--and I don't really care for it. :) I'm too used to MDI and maximized pages.

The major problem I have when switching OSes is finding the programs similar to the ones I'm used to using on Windows. For instance, I use UltraEdit as my text editor. I want something similar for Mac (I use emacs on Linux). Same for my preferred newsreader (Agent), FTP client (FlashFXP), and IRC client (mIRC). And should I even mention games?

In any case, it looks like I'll enjoy the Mac much more than Mandrake Linux. I tried to install a shared version of an internal build last week and found myself in dependency hell. And a default install should seriously only contain one way of doing things, not several file browsers, text editors, and Internet browsers. If you want to make the transition for Windows easier, fix the dependency problems and only provide one of each type of program in the default install. If users want something else, give them an easy way of downloading it.

After lots of problems with my previous attempts at reconciling the font-size differences of various browsers, I think I've found a good solution. Using IE's conditional comments, I'm telling IE to use a smaller font-size by default, which is ignored by every other browser.

In the process, I simplified the site template and style sheet, paving the way for future styling and other enhancements. My next chore is to send the correct MIME type (application/xhtml+xml) to supporting browsers.

I've also been doing a lot of reading over the past couple of days, looking for styling ideas. A List Apart has a great variety of articles about web design, several of which I'll be grabbing ideas from. The CSS Zen Garden is a great example of the power of style sheets. I'm hoping I'll find my styling muse soon.