A real quick post on what I’m using nowadays for blogging and working in general. If you’ve read any of my previous post it’s pretty easy to surmise the following:
- I’m gaga over my Mac
- Running VMWare with Vista
- Using Microsoft Live Writer
This is actually a pretty painful setup. In my Mac I have 8 gigs of RAM – of which 4 goes to VMWare and Vista. Mainly because I want a snappy response time and come on.. unless I’m in Photoshop (which will only recognize 3.9 gigs of RAM), LightRoom, etc. etc. I’m not not even using close to 4 gigs of RAM. So why not put a little extra memory on the VMWare side?
Currently the only reason I have VMWare w/Vista running is for Microsoft Live Writer. I don’t do much Microsoft development these days so I haven’t reloaded MSDN and Visual Studio on that image. Since I typically leave my machine running 24×7, I don’t have to wait a large amount of time for the system to come up. I also use Spaces on Leopard and I’ve assigned VMWare to pop-up in it’s own screen. Yes, I do run it full screen there.
Getting this setup to begin with wasn’t as smooth as I thought it was going to be. The primary reason is that VMWare would not share a folder correctly. So when I’m in the Vista VM and I attempt to access a file in the shared folder – I would basically crash that thread in Vista. This was a very big issue for me as my work flow consists of me doing all my research, clipping my images, etc. on the Mac side. Then I would move all that information to the shared folder. Then I would switch to the Vista side and start writing my blog entry.
In the end, I basically had to turn local file sharing on the Mac and I created a shortcut on my Vista desktop to get to a ‘shared’ folder. It’s basically a band-aid, but it works.
However, I will continue to work this particular workflow until I can find a worthy replacement for Microsoft Live Writer. People may say a lot of bad things about Microsoft, but when they get it right, they get it right. Live Writer is probably the best thing that came out of Microsoft since their remote control unit. (What? am I the only person in the world that bought one?)
-JT