New to Mac!

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UnknownZA

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Hey Everyone,

Been reading these forums for years but never really have needed to post until now.

After months of contemplating I finally went out and got a unibody mac mini yesterday, coming from windows it has been a big change but a welcome one. So far ive dowloaded firefox, adium, office for mac 2011, vlc player, parallels, skype and open office, is there any other good apps I am missing out on? Also, I have an iPhone 4, was wondering if I can sync it with both the mac mini and my laptop or do I need to pick which one I want to sync with? I know with the iPods you could only sync with one computer so I am a bit nervous to use the iPhone on the mac at the moment!

Thanks for the help!

Alex
 
There was a thread around here about recommend mac apps if you search a bit.

You could probably also go OS X (Hackintosh) on your laptop if you want the same across the board.
 
Suppose so hey, my laptop is running a similar intel platform as the i7 mac book pro, i think it is almost hardware identical to one of the mac book pro's. So I don't think that would be a problem. However I develop in c# for a living so I would need some sort of dual boot then, we have to use visual studio at work. I installed mono on the mac though it seems to work pretty well with c# development.
 
Last edited:
Welcome to MAc, your machine is gonna rock... I have some bad news though...

New mac mini out next month, or maybe even next week if rumors are true.
 
yes, go to "OSX apps" thread. but for starters, INSTALL PERIAN
 
Turn on home sharing to keep computers in sync with each other, an icloud account may also help when it is out.

I also wanted to point out the upcoming refresh within this month, bad luck, unless you needed the dGPU as i predict the refresh will use intel graphics.
 
Shot for the replies everyone, I installed Perian its pretty awesome now I can watch all my movies etc.. in quicktime

I knew about the refresh, but I bought this mac from friends, its less than a year old and I paid alot less than what it retails for, has got 4gb of ram as well score! It's not really meant to do anything hectic though. My laptop is (or was when I got it) a beast compared to the mac thing and I still use it for any cpu or graphics intensive stuff. I'm mostly using the mac for media and stuff, wouldn't mind learning abit of xcode as we are going to have to start developing iOS and Mac apps at work at some point. I downloaded virtualbox earlier, and installed windows 7 and visual studio in it. Its pretty awesome with the whole integrated desktop mode, not a bad product cosidering its free! Thanks for all the help though much appreciated! One thing though, is there any utility that is free which will allow you to access NTFS drives as well as write to them? I have a 2tb external with all my media on it which is formatted as NTFS, and so currently im using a trial of an app that will let me write to that but it won't last forever! I've searched on the net but can't really find any results!
 
UnknownZA said:
is there any utility that is free which will allow you to access NTFS drives as well as write to them?
Click to expand...

just a word of caution. Be careful with write access to NTFS drives on OSX.
I've had some troubles with it where moving files around made them just vanish into thin air and deleting files didn't work properly sometimes and the files just got stuck in trash. Had to delete those files from a windows machine.
the operating systems don't play play too nice with other's filesystems.

So yes you can use it but just be a little more careful.
 
UnknownZA said:
Hey Everyone,

Been reading these forums for years but never really have needed to post until now.

After months of contemplating I finally went out and got a unibody mac mini yesterday, coming from windows it has been a big change but a welcome one. So far ive dowloaded firefox, adium, office for mac 2011, vlc player, parallels, skype and open office, is there any other good apps I am missing out on?
Click to expand...
Check out iWork. And update to 10.6.8 so you can use the Mac App Store.
Also, I have an iPhone 4, was wondering if I can sync it with both the mac mini and my laptop or do I need to pick which one I want to sync with? I know with the iPods you could only sync with one computer so I am a bit nervous to use the iPhone on the mac at the moment!

Thanks for the help!

Alex
Click to expand...
Yeah you kind of do, although you can sync music from another PC/Mac without affecting your apps, it usually works best to sync your iphone from one PC, and to have that PC authorizes with your iTunes account.
 
Congrats. Your Mac Mini uses 1/5th the electricity of a normal PC but you obviously must know this.
 
b1scu1t said:
just a word of caution. Be careful with write access to NTFS drives on OSX.
I've had some troubles with it where moving files around made them just vanish into thin air and deleting files didn't work properly sometimes and the files just got stuck in trash. Had to delete those files from a windows machine.
the operating systems don't play play too nice with other's filesystems.

So yes you can use it but just be a little more careful.
Click to expand...

To add on, OS X has native read capability for NTFS so your fine in that department. I suggest you use ntfs-3g with its macfuse combination. If your careful with ejecting media before physically removing, not multi-tasking a lot while copying, etc, you should be fine.
 
I just unpacked my iMac a few hours ago... Thanks for the pointers in this post. I'll be up an hour earlier to try out most of the suggestions. I've got a 1TB NTFS and I couldn't read a single file from earlier.

Do you recommend that I get a new drive specific for Time Machine?
 
Time Machine does need its own drive (or at least its own partition on a drive), but if you have a USB external drive lying around at least the same size as the internal drive in your Mac, by all means use it. I use a 1TB Verbatim. It's pretty much a set-it-and-forget-it sort of thing.
 
I'm currently using a 2TB Time Capsule for all my Time machine backup purposes, also added a external 2TB hard drive for extra storage,

Doing the backup over the 5GHz WifI that the time capsule offers and it seems just as fast as a wired connection, seen it spike at about 22MB/s
 
Apologies to OP...
I gotta ask: I learnt that I will need to get a FireWire cable to import videos from my Panasonic cam and I went to IC today. I was informed that the 6-pin to 4-pin in store would not work on the iMac? Does Apple make a different type of FireWire? And I can only get this from iStore? :(
 
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