Apples are yummy!
So, my Mac Mini arrived this week. I am LOVIN' it! Tonight's the first opportunity I've really had to play with it much. In fact, this very blog entry is being entered from my new Mac.
The first thing that struck me when I unpacked it was that the power brick (it's power supply is external) is almost 1/3rd the size of the actual box. The thing really is small. The second thing that struck me is that I need a better way of concealing all my various cables. It doesn't look nearly as sleek when you can see all those darn cables hanging off the back of it.
OS X is gorgeous. I've seen it before on my nephew's Powerbook but that's about it. I've never really had an opportunity to sit down and play with it. In fact, this is my first Apple ever, Mac or otherwise. One thing that's great about this box for me is how seemlessly it integrates with my Linux boxes. Once I downloaded X11 from Apple (I was surprised that it wasn't already installed) I was delighted to be able to connect to my Linux boxen and run X apps on this beautiful desktop. I've always been a big fan of Linux, but OSX sure is a much nicer client desktop, IMHO. Yeah, you can make some really purty desktops with Linux, if you are willing to put a lot of effort into it. OSX looks purty right out of the box.
The machine seems to perform pretty well. I haven't run any really heavy apps on it so far, so it's probably too early to judge fairly. But the desktop seems very snappy and responsive. My first "project" that I have planned is to make a DVD of our wedding video using iMovie and iDVD. Our original video is on VHS. My father-in-law was kind enough to make us a copy on DVD using their standalone DVD recorder. It's great for just watching the whole video through. But I think it'd be neat to make one with a nice menu, chapters, etc, etc. Maybe also digitize our wedding photos and put them on the DVD too.
One thing I am a little confused by is networking with XP SP2. When I browsed for network shares it could find my Linux boxes but not my XP box. I even tried making the connection directly. I double-checked my XP firewall exception rules, and they were setup correctly, so far as I could tell. And in fact, they must be, because my other Windows boxes don't have a problem browsing/connecting to each other. And I can also connect to them over my OpenVPN link. But try as I might, my Mac couldn't find them. As an experiment, I turned off the XP firewall completely. Sure enough, the Mac was able to connect straightaway. So, obviously I'm missing something here. Man, I hate Windows.
One small disappointment. No Java 5 for OSX! What is up with that? I guess Sun leaves it to Apple to release the JVM for OSX and Apple hasn't caught up yet. From what I've seen doing some quick searching, Apple normally lags JVM release by a few months. Apple has also apparently decided to tie the release of Java 5 to the next release of OS X. Well, that kinda sucks, to put it mildly. I was quite unpleasantly surprised to find all this out. I don't mind the lagging release nearly as much as I mind not being able to get it AT ALL for the current release of OS X. Oh well, at the very least I can do my Java 5 stuff on Linux for now, and use X to do the display on my Mac desktop.
So, much as I'm lovin' my new Apple, I won't be abandoning Windows anytime soon, I suppose. For one thing, there's the games. I am EAGERLY anticipating the next round of RTS games such as Age of Empires III and Empire Earth 2. I'm not sure but I doubt they will be release for Mac OSX for a long time, if ever. Second, even though my professional and personal software development is done in mostly Java, two reasons I can't do it on Mac. (1) We have already migrated to Java 5. See above. :( (2) The product I work on uses SQL server, not to mention a bunch of JNI crap. So no way to ditch Windows altogether for development either.
Well, that concludes my preliminary review of the Mac mini. :) In closing, let me just say I hope to keep the blog posts more regular again. My schedule has been pretty tight lately but (hopefully) it will be easing up some now that I've reached a project milestone at work. Though if today is any indication that may be false hope. Here's to looking forward to the weekend!
The first thing that struck me when I unpacked it was that the power brick (it's power supply is external) is almost 1/3rd the size of the actual box. The thing really is small. The second thing that struck me is that I need a better way of concealing all my various cables. It doesn't look nearly as sleek when you can see all those darn cables hanging off the back of it.
OS X is gorgeous. I've seen it before on my nephew's Powerbook but that's about it. I've never really had an opportunity to sit down and play with it. In fact, this is my first Apple ever, Mac or otherwise. One thing that's great about this box for me is how seemlessly it integrates with my Linux boxes. Once I downloaded X11 from Apple (I was surprised that it wasn't already installed) I was delighted to be able to connect to my Linux boxen and run X apps on this beautiful desktop. I've always been a big fan of Linux, but OSX sure is a much nicer client desktop, IMHO. Yeah, you can make some really purty desktops with Linux, if you are willing to put a lot of effort into it. OSX looks purty right out of the box.
The machine seems to perform pretty well. I haven't run any really heavy apps on it so far, so it's probably too early to judge fairly. But the desktop seems very snappy and responsive. My first "project" that I have planned is to make a DVD of our wedding video using iMovie and iDVD. Our original video is on VHS. My father-in-law was kind enough to make us a copy on DVD using their standalone DVD recorder. It's great for just watching the whole video through. But I think it'd be neat to make one with a nice menu, chapters, etc, etc. Maybe also digitize our wedding photos and put them on the DVD too.
One thing I am a little confused by is networking with XP SP2. When I browsed for network shares it could find my Linux boxes but not my XP box. I even tried making the connection directly. I double-checked my XP firewall exception rules, and they were setup correctly, so far as I could tell. And in fact, they must be, because my other Windows boxes don't have a problem browsing/connecting to each other. And I can also connect to them over my OpenVPN link. But try as I might, my Mac couldn't find them. As an experiment, I turned off the XP firewall completely. Sure enough, the Mac was able to connect straightaway. So, obviously I'm missing something here. Man, I hate Windows.
One small disappointment. No Java 5 for OSX! What is up with that? I guess Sun leaves it to Apple to release the JVM for OSX and Apple hasn't caught up yet. From what I've seen doing some quick searching, Apple normally lags JVM release by a few months. Apple has also apparently decided to tie the release of Java 5 to the next release of OS X. Well, that kinda sucks, to put it mildly. I was quite unpleasantly surprised to find all this out. I don't mind the lagging release nearly as much as I mind not being able to get it AT ALL for the current release of OS X. Oh well, at the very least I can do my Java 5 stuff on Linux for now, and use X to do the display on my Mac desktop.
So, much as I'm lovin' my new Apple, I won't be abandoning Windows anytime soon, I suppose. For one thing, there's the games. I am EAGERLY anticipating the next round of RTS games such as Age of Empires III and Empire Earth 2. I'm not sure but I doubt they will be release for Mac OSX for a long time, if ever. Second, even though my professional and personal software development is done in mostly Java, two reasons I can't do it on Mac. (1) We have already migrated to Java 5. See above. :( (2) The product I work on uses SQL server, not to mention a bunch of JNI crap. So no way to ditch Windows altogether for development either.
Well, that concludes my preliminary review of the Mac mini. :) In closing, let me just say I hope to keep the blog posts more regular again. My schedule has been pretty tight lately but (hopefully) it will be easing up some now that I've reached a project milestone at work. Though if today is any indication that may be false hope. Here's to looking forward to the weekend!
posted by eric at
2/02/2005 08:17:00 PM
4 Comments:
No Java 5 is bad news. I'd like to get the mini for creating music and videos. But I think I'll wait a bit first. Instead of Java 5, you could run Ruby or Mono. :)
Mono on OSX? So wrong. So very, very wrong. ;)
So Aunt Donna finally let u get a mac? :-P
Josh
Yeah, she finally did ... but as you can see, just a little one. :)
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