Sometimes I fire up the old Delphi development environment to do a bit of Windows development, I looking at some neat stuff around XMPP and IM. This time it meant I had to go and buy a copy of Windows and VMWare Fusion as my main machine is a MacBook now.
Apart from that wrinkle a few things fell out of the linker…
- Delphi seems to have dropped off the list of popular development tools even though the 2009 version supports .Net and there’s a great C++ version
- Windows Vista is full of UI bugs, simple things like deleting a folder leaves the folder in the GUI which of course leads to a ‘not found’ error when trying to select it, presumably because I just deleted it.
- Windows feels like that old car that you loved when you had it but going back to it somehow seems wrong and you realise you only remembered the good bits, like how it looked not how it worked… or didn’t
- Being brave and booting the MacBook straight into Windows worked for half an hour, then I had to go back to VMWare as my productivity went through the floor without my favourite Mac apps.
So the outcome is that Vista is running happily in VMWare Fusion with just 512Mb of RAM and on a monitor I have plugged into my MacBook whilst my other Mac apps are running on the MacBook screen. I get the best of both worlds, all my OSX apps and a Windows development environment that I don’t have to clutter up with other Windows apps.