Tomas' log of stuff

At work I'm currently using Macromedia Adobe Captivate to create software demos & instructions, and it's a great tool with loads of timesaving features. But it's also a reasonably expensive tool for its narrow purpose. But I just discovered Wink, a freeware application that seems to work in a similar way. I've installed it and plan to give it some proper testing over the next few days.

Since my cool new workstation now runs a 64-bit CPU, I figure the natural thing to do is to install Windows XP x64. I'm a little apprehensive about the whole thing, thanks to mixed feedback from Baldido and other friends, reporting that this feels like "old" 32-bit Windows XP retrofitted with 64 bit support as an afterthought. Which I guess is actually what it is. Already, just a few hours after installation, I'm seeing some of these quirks surface. Also, I can't for the life of me understand the point of having separate \Program Files directories for native 64 bit apps and 32 bit apps. One of the first quirks I came across was during the installation of Adobe Creative Suite 2; XP x64 instructs it to default to \Program Files (WOW64), but according to the Adobe installer, ( is not a valid character in the installation path :) Furthermore neither PDF Printer driver in Acrobat 7 Pro nor the Flashpaper printer driver that comes with Studio 8 work under XP x64. Other quirks include some poorly coded apps that check the OS version before installing, and come up with Windows 2003 SP1 instead of XP, and thus refuse to install. Some also demand that you have SP2, which is a bit hard with XP x64. I got to say, I'm not impressed. I'll give it a chance tho...