Quantum Forest

Last weekend I started using our new Mac mini. Some first impressions:

• It was very easy to connect (not that PCs are that difficult either).
• Installing the printer was just plugin in to the computer and it was autodetected. I liked that.
• I love the good quality (almost photographic) icons. I don’t like that much the brushed metal windows. They look a bit tacky compared with the rest of the system.
• I installed Mighty mouse’s driver, which installed an evaluation copy of Office 2004. Because I did not remember deleting it, I had trouble when installing my own legal full version of Office 2004. So I needed to uninstall both versions and then reinstalled my copy of Office. Everything is working fine.
• Email and web browsing are working fine. I have to find how to import messages from Windows’ ‘Outlook express’ to Mail.
• I really like putting the system to sleep and how responsive is when coming back to life.
• iPhoto is sort of nice, but I am used to Picasa and the thought of importing the pictures and redoing all the work touching up thousands of pictures is more than a bit annoying. Picasa is faster and does not keep duplicates of the pictures. I may have to look for an alternative to iPhoto, without the price tag (US$500) of something like Aperture.

In general it has been a good experience. Starting work from scratch in the mac is quite easy. Thus, most of the pending issues are related to ‘legacy files’, where I want to move things from Windows and do as little as possible to get exactly what I used to have in my old machine.

P.S. 2005-12-08: I forgot to mention; only two USB ports in the Mac Mini is not enough (considering its size, no wonder there are no more ports on the little thing). The two ports allowed me to connect the printer and keyboard, with the mouse connected to one of the two keyboard ports. The other keyboard port can be used to plug the digital camera, while the video camera can be pluged to the single firewire port on the back of the mini. However, if one wants to plug an iPod, the keyboard port can not charge it. It was a good thing that I had a USB hub in my old PC. I am using it with quite good results in the Mac and can then plug everything in one go, including my Palm T3.