Last month while in United States, I ordered for a mac mini from the Internet. I ordered for the base config with 512MB RAM, 40GB plus Bluetooth module, Wireless Keyboard and Mouse – all put together came to abut US$700. First came the wireless keyboard and mouse package in 3 business days and a day later the machine itself arrived. That was pretty impressive delivery. I took it out and plugged to a monitor it simply worked. Wow!.
For long I wished to own a mac, to play with it and see how different or similar it is to Windows. In case of mac mini I simply wanted to own this lovely little box after seeing the image on Apple’s site. I was impressed with its extremely small size and the engineering marvel of apple. It is amazing how Apple Engineers can put inside this small box – couple of chips, a hard disk, a dvd rom drive and still manage with heat that is being generated inside. Even in my HP Laptop, after few minutes of usage I could use the bottom to boil water.
The first thing I did was to download Windows Media Player for mac so that I can listen to my WMA songs, following that I downloaded Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) for mac. With RDC I could connect to my Windows Laptop and still do my emails.
The things I loved after few hours were Mac 10.x (Tiger)’s beautiful aqua user interface and animations. Followed by that was the crisp interface especially the text clarity (to some extend thanks to my 8ms Samsung 19″ LCD). I simply couldn’t help myself admiring the sharpness of Tamil Texts in Unicode pages using Safari browser. The audio was brilliant. Safari’s RSS reading was equally good. The machine came with Office 2004 for mac 30 days trial pack installed. Word sports an interesting UI in this release for mac, cool. The best feature for me was the bundling of Murasu Anjal for Tamil Fonts and Tamil Keyboard. Because of Murasu bundled in, I could go to any latest Mac apps and start typing in Tamil. Unfortunately Office X for mac and Appleworks 6.0 don’t support this new Input/Display methods. PowerPoint 2004 & Textedit supported this flawlessly. The experience of connecting my digital camera and importing photos was simply painless. Good work Apple.
Things I didn’t like: I was not that impressed with the Safari browser page rendering speed. Even after trying for an hour or so, I couldn’t enter this blog from my apple. I tried first with Safari, then with Camino, then with Internet Explorer for mac. The issue was none of them had my Dasblog entry screen which uses FreeTextbox to appear correctly. So I am doing this post from my trusted Windows XP.
In Remote Desktop I figured how to do Right Click – later configured to use the Alt key with mouse click as Right-Click. I am still unable to select multiple songs or create a playlist in Windows Media Player for mac.
Apple mac mini Samsung 910MP 19″ LCD