Chris Betcher

After our recent move to the Google cloud and all the services within it like Docs and Gmail, our Languages department have had to face a few new challenges. We teach several different languages here at PLC Sydney and many of them requires the use of special characters. French, for example, uses accented characters like é, è, ç, å and so on. Prior to the move to Google, our language teachers knew all the various keyboard shortcuts to enter these characters into a program like Word or Outlook, and life was good. After the move to Gmail and Docs however, these same keyboard shortcuts no longer worked, making the potential move to Google Docs seem like a bad idea for language teaching. "It's ridiculous that Google Docs can't do such basic things when it's so easy in Word and Outlook" was the general consensus. Searching for a solution online revealed that we were not the only ones who were struggling with this issue . Lots of people were complaining about the poor d...

This cracked me up. And reminded me yet again of how lucky I am to be a Mac user... If you have eyes like mine, click to enlarge.

Dear Mr Gates, Is it OK if I call you Bill? I feel like I know you so well, I've been using your company's products for so many years now. I can't say that I was there from the beginning, but I did start using Windows way back at version 3.0. (I'm told that's probably a good thing, since Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were a bit of a joke apparently.) But since Windows 3.0 I've been right there with you man! I went through Windows 3.1, then WfW (remember that one? OMG, what were you thinking?) Windows 95 came along at about the same time as my daughter was born, in fact the hospital where she was born gave away a free copy of Windows 95 to every child born that special August day when you went on stage to the sound of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up"! My daughter was born a few days too early and I missed out (I've not forgiven her for that yet Bill) but hey, what a brilliant piece of marketing! And not at all tacky, like some people said it w...

I'm sitting at the official Toronto launch of Windows Vista, the theme of which is "A Brand New Day". If ever I saw someone totally miss the point of what technology means for education, it's the guy speaking right now from the Toronto District School Board, Jey Jamarararmasomething. When asked what he thought was the best things about Window Vista, and what he thought were the most important new features of Vista, he said that it will help manage the students who bring USB keys between home and school, and it will engage them in learning better because they seem to like the "wow factor" of the new interface. Now there's a couple of great educationally sound reasons for implementing new technology... not! Where was the conversation about enabling a more connected learning environment? Where was the talk about enabling deeper, better quality learning through the use of technology? We then had a guy from Microsoft showing a demo of Vista, and we got ...

As a power user on the Windows platform and a quick learner on the Mac platform, there is something about the difference between the two that has always intriuged me. I've noticed it in many forms over the years, but I was reminded of it when I read this rather silly report on the TUAW site... I'm sure the fellow who wrote it had his tongue firmly in his cheek, but if you browse through the comments under the main article you'll find a very interesting thread of discussion has emerged relating to the Mac's little green zoom button. Seems the zoom button is not without its fair share of controversy and a rather passionate, yet civil, debate is raging there about the differences between the way windows (with a small 'w') behave on Windows (with a big 'W') versus the way they behave on the Mac. The basic gist of the discussion is about the subtle difference between the user interfaces of both platforms and the author tries to draw an assertion that the U...

As I write this, I'm downloading updates for Windows in the background. Yes, you read that right. Windows. But wait, aren't I a Mac guy? Yes. Absolutely. But I also teach computing in a mainly Windows environment, and it still makes sense to be able to use those few apps that I need in a classroom situation in their native platform environment, and that means Windows. Although I personally prefer to use Mac versions of most applications, it gets too hard to teach a class about the Windows version of Word when they look up and see my Mac version on the data projector. (Despite the fact that everything is there in both versions, the Mac version has a slightly different IU and a few added features, so it doesn't look identical.) Anyway, I figured the simplest solution would be to just use the Windows apps for those few times when I need them. There is also a proprietary Markbook app that the school uses that is Windows only, and I would like to run that occasionally to...

I've just been playing with a very cool piece of software for the Mac. Or is it a piece of software for Windows? Actually, it's kind of both. Crossover is based on the work of the WINE project - a curiously-named self-iterative anagram that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. WINE has long been used in the Linux community as a means of getting Windows programs to run under Linux. When I first looked at it several years ago it was still very raw and new and difficult to use. However, in the last few years, WINE (and in fact Linux too) has come a very long way. Linux development moves forward at an amazing pace and the last few distributions I looked at were very impressive indeed. Back to Crossover. Although it's still only in Public Beta, Crossover runs as an application on either the Mac or Linux platforms and it allows genuine Windows applications to be run natively on either of those OSes. Not emulated. Natively. That means you can take a Windows program and ...