Installing Windows 7 in Macbook pro

I submit this part of the blog to those who are plucking apples trying installing MS Windows 7 on their Mac boxes :0).

Well keep in mind that your key to this process is "BootCamp" the utility from Apple which will enable you to achive this task.

So let me assume that you have a mac machine installed with Leopard 10.5 or later.

All you need to do is make sure that you have just one partition in your box. If not we need to delete the existing partitions and make it a single Machintosh HD partition. For this operation you can use the Disk Utility.

Make sure that you have the complete Hard Drive space in one single partition. Use the "-" button to delete the existing partitions ( Remember to do the proper Backups).

Once you are done with this you are good to go with the Boot camp. Select bootcamp from Applications -> Utilities and double-click Boot Camp Assistant. Click continue. Now you need to decide the space on your hard drive were you want to install win7. Remember the installation will take almost 10 GB. I recomment 50+ GB space. You can do this by dragging the space dividing the two drives in the screen. Click Partition and wait untill it prepares the partition for you.

Once it is done.. put the Win& Disk into your DVD drive and click start installation .

Now all you need is to sitback and relax.. Watch the drama.. the Mac restarts and boots in windows and will continue with its installation.

Once it is done you will be asked to configure the internet connection. And once it is done. DO UPDATE YOUR DRIVERS from the windows update feature.
This will update all your hardware resources with the latest available drivers on the internet.

Your box will restart.. in WIndows 7 now have a feel of its new graphically rich interface.. Well now you can remove the WIn7 DVD and insert the Leopard DVD into your drive. The auto run pops up and just do what it says.. it will install the BootCamp utility for windows in your box. THIS IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT. This will install all the Mac Hardware Drivers. Now you are done. ENjoy Windows on Your MAC.. :) Adios.

Here comes OUR SURFACE Table.

Finally on July 7th 2009, I had a chance to touch the Next Generation Device. Microsoft Surface Reached our Kochi office. We were so eager to see the Ultimate machine.. the box came through courier and we had to lift the heavy thing from the ground floor to our office at the 3rd floor. We realized that its no kids game as the table weighed 160 Kg and its fragile.

The well packed tablel din't fit into our lift with its huge box.. so we had to take it out of the box and move it into the lift and bring it up to the 3rd floor.

The funny part began when it reached our office and we all started to fix it and connect it to see the machine working. Our System administrator Mr. Renjith had some documents ready to refer. Thanks to him atleast that reduced our effort a lot. Well first we had to find the switch to turn the machine on.. The switch was discovered by one of my colleague after 20 minutes of search. It is right at the bottom on the table on the left corner facing the floor. We switched it on and few colorful lights came up but nothing else happened. Then we figured that we need to run the Surface shell . We commected an external monitor a mouse and a keyboard. Untill u run the shell its just another vista machine... Finally we could get the thing running and we could feel the image viewer application running in it. Now a days we do test our own applications on Microsoft Surface before delivering to our US Office.. it is really exiting to see and feel our applications working on a surface table which respond to multi touches and gestures.

As a designer i could understand the difference in designing interface for a surface application. There are no mouseover events or the color change effects.. elements are bigger in size natural in moments and layouts. Scattered views free flow scrollbars and list boxes.. Elements which are shy in nature which reponse with a giggle when touched.. i can give a much explanatory blog about designing for Natural User Interfaces later.