Jim's Journal

My first foray into MS Windows in a few years after moving to Mac OSX both at home and work, has been interesting and frustrating.  There are the old habits I have to get back such as memorizing rather than figuring things out, a subtle difference I will never be able to explain to a Windows user without sounding like an Apple fan-boy, but its there. And there are things about this Lenovo Thinkpad that are unusual and subtly different that are creating anxiety that I cannot blame on Windows.  Finally, the last Windows I used was Windows XP, skipping Windows 7 and that mashup of OS X like features blended with the old Windows way.  Windows 8.1 is very, very different and really quite interesting. Frustrating but interesting.

First I’ll give you a few frustrating things about this new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch- its a wonderfully constructed computer that is ultralight and carbon fiber, the fastest i7 processor and a beautiful touch screen.  It has a soft-key strip at the top of the keyboard that changes with the applications, the keys press comfortably and it has a track pad and the famous red eraser pointer in the keyboard – a tool I really enjoyed when I worked heads down building proposals years ago. You simply keep your fingers moving – using your pointer finger to navigate rather than leaving the keyboard for a mouse or trackpad.  Problem is – its not easy to use anymore as the left and right buttons are gone.

      They tried to squeeze too much into the keyboard and to do that they seem to have slightly shifted everything a bit to the left.  They put a delete key right next to the backspace key and the trackpad below – but since its all a little to the left my fast tracking fingers keep hitting the wrong things.  For example, I keep hitting the delete key rather than the backspace key and that just frustrates me, my pinky finger doesn’t know its a little to the left.  And the trackpad is correctly centered on the GH keys but they and it are not in the center of the computer so I keep right clicking rather than left clicking and that is just a big mess.  I am going find myself looking down a lot more and having to consciously shift my hands to the left to make this work. And I’m not giving up my MacBook Pro for personal use so its going to be an adjustment back and forth.

The Windows 8.1 environment is really cool and clever but still built for fiddlers at heart. What I mean is that Windows has always been designed by and for people who are comfortable and actually want to customize their experience.  Mac isn’t really about that – its actually a pretty perfect experience, if you let yourself go and just try things.  It doesn’t overdo the minimal controls – you still have a menu bar and still have robust contextual menus.  What I’m seeing here is closer to iOS yet still missing a awful lot.  I know its probably there but that is my impression.

        For example, I simply wanted to copy and paste the name of my new computer here from an email.  I couldn’t find the right key combination to do that.  I was able to “Alt-Tab” over to Mail and navigate to the invoice for the computer – but then I struggled to highlight the text I wanted, eventually remembering where the left part of the track pad was – and captured it.  My first thought was to use the touch screen – but in fact when I touch the text it brings up the soft keyboard and some crazy square comes up but it didn’t intuitively start highlighting text. Even my Kindle works that way, I don’t get it.  If I have a keyboard you would think that Windows would be smart enough to know I don’t need a screen softkeyboard. Edit: I did finally figure out that once I’m in the right context I can use good old ctrl-c and ctrl-v at least from Evernote and pasting here in WordPress.

When I wanted to paste it I wanted to “past as” and remove the formatting.  there is no option for that – just plain paste, there is no top menu bar to allow me to pick more advanced options, I don’t know what to do.  So I’m going to have to take a tutorial on this, look on the web, invest a lot of time here.  Ironically, Microsoft and Thinkpad was always more of a business tool and yet I’m not feeling like I can bang stuff out here.

I do need to explore more the options of customizing the start screen and tiles – that’s kind of cool. I’ve moved around the ones I want, deleted all of the advertising tiles wanting me to buy all things Microsoft and resizing things.  I want to add a few websites for easy access, haven’t figured that out yet, just the Internet Explorer Icon.  Using websites is somewhat confusing – pulling the “charms” from the right, sliding up to see tabs of other sites. Having it automatically open a second page and splitting the screen when I don’t want it to (then I have to drag it to the right). Its quite a juggling act.  In fact I’m still not sure how to easily get to favorites or how to quickly toggle between websites.  Maybe Firefox or Chrome work that way – I can try that. Wait (geez, went to edit this and immediatly hit the delete key rather than backspace and deleted the next paragraph – argh) – wait – if you work form Explorer from the desktop rather than start screen you get the old tabbed website view.  That’s great.  But still no menu bar at the top.

The fact is I probably should have loaded Windows 7 and upgraded later but I felt I needed to learn this. So I opted for Windows 8.1 Pro – will dig in and maybe at some point I’ll be able to help my friends again in the Windows World. So folks, the days of Jim the IT guy aren’t here yet.