Simon's Blog

First impressions of the mini mac

My Mac arrived Friday and I set it up over the weekend.

1. Setting it up onto the network required almost no work at all. Not to the level that I had to set up a windows machine.

2. Does not recognize my keyboard correctly (Logitech UltraX). The keyboard works fine except for “Insert/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn”. Need to check more into this.

3. The UI takes a little getting used to. the max/min/close buttons are to the right, which if you are using the scroll bar requires more work to get there. Also have to keep remembering to click Command instead of CTRL for cut/paste/undo/redo functionality.

4. Installing software very easy to do. With no issues at all I installed.

• Xcode (Mac+Iphone dev)
• Open Office
• WOW
• Mac version of K-Lite (forget the name offhand)
• Firefox
• Eclipse

5. Graphics are very good. No where near my gaming machine but then it is built for graphics. For the size of the machine very smooth and quiet. Only game I play really is WOW and it ran fine.

6. The “Front Row” software is brillant.Especially with the apple remote.

7. Other minor things I need to get used to, but it is more my usability then issues with the mac.

Developing on the Mini Mac. 
Of the three books I got I am currently going through Cocoa Programming book. Very nicely written and clear for someone with no experience in that area. The language is very nice and easy to follow and creating an app is very simple.

Garage Band
My wife plays a lot of instruments so she was interested in the Garage band software. Using a Belkin USB network hub we connected her piano up with ease. She was so impressed she wants a mac too now.

Ok so I joined Twitter. Now what?

Actually I joined twitter a long time ago and didn’t really see the point. Still don’t really. Colm keeps trying to sell it to me. But so far all I know is he likes porridge and bananas for brekfast.

I mean I can see some uses for it, keeping up with what is going on with Decs Xpages tutorial is handy but can’t see anything else. :/

Maybe I am just too comfy with other Web2.0 technologies.

Next week is Mac induction week for me.

So finally my Mini Mac is shipping. Based on the details should arrive next week. So I ordered some books as well.

• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
• Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (Developer’s Library)
• Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

I’ve played a little bit with Objective-C the last week or so using Cygwin + GNUStep. Overall it is easy enough language to learn. I haven’t done anything serious in C in well over 15 years, but I suspect if you are a C programmer the syntax differences might annoy a little starting off.

Mac Mini update

I gave up trying to get OSX set up on windows and just ordered a Mac Mini instead a few days ago. So imagine my annoyance when I see they have upgraded the Mac Mini yesterday. The closest spec appears to be around 100 euros more expensive as well.

So I just logged on to cancel my order and get the latest one when I noticed my order had been changed. I am now getting the new Mac Mini for the price of the old one.

I checked up on it and I was told because I placed the order during a transition phrase I was given the free upgrade.

The upgrade I got was…
CPU: 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo -> 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
HDD: 80GB -> 120GB

Adding compapps to your designer client.

If you have been playing with the new 8.5 designer for a while and have been building composite applications you will notice a lot of junk in your perspective list.

This isn’t actually junk, but a feature where by you can embed composite applications in your designer. There isn’t a direct way but here are the steps.

1. Create your composite application and put on the components you want to add to domino designer.

2. Give your page a name you will remember. This will be the name of your perspective. Make sure all the components are marked as a window that can be moved (maximize/minimize is optional). For example I created a perspective called “My Test Perspective”. .

3. Save your composite application and open up Domino Designer.

4. Select “Window->Open Perspective->Other…” menu option. From the list select the perspective name you picked in step 2

5. You now have your composite application open in Domino Designer. However all your normal designer components are gone.

6. Select “Window->Show Eclipse Views->Other…”.

7. Scroll down to the list under “Domino Designer” and expand it. Then select all the components listed there. You can do this by clicking the first one, hold shift and click the last one. Then click OK. 

8. You now have all your components back again. It is just a matter of dragging them around to get them to the way you like.

9. When you are happy with the layout select “Window->Save Perspective as…” and give it a name so you can open it again.