Installing Tiger:
The initial install process seemed simple enough, pop in the DVD click the big X and reboot. On said reboot I was met with a graphic instructing me to remove the batteries from my Apple Bluetooth mouse, ok I suppose Tiger wanted to re-sync with it, after a few tries mission was accomplished and I was back on my way.

From there it was the typical language choices etc, nothing groundbreaking here, just everyday ol’ installing the worlds most advanced operating system type stuff.

Choices:
This has been stated elsewhere, but its worth repeating, especially with a hard drive as small as the mini’s. Unless you really feel you need 1.4 GB’s of printer drivers hogging up your hard drive, by all means select custom install and carefully read your choices. In addition to the printer drivers there are a few other items you may feel aren’t necessary.

Ok now the installation was getting underway, I went ahead and skipped past the “Check my installation DVD” I had faith all was well, after all if it wasn’t I’d know soon enough.

Fait Accompli:
My installation took about 40 minutes, give or take and went as smooth as glass. The first thing I wanted to try out was Spotlight, but not so fast Lone Ranger, the first time you run Spotlight you’ll need to wait for it to index your hard drive, no biggie in my system as I only keep the basics on hand, Delicious Monster, Matinee, Fire Fox and alike, so my entire index was handled in about 25 minutes or so, although I have to say it felt much longer.

Spotlight works pretty much like you saw in the last Steve note, although not quite as fast, I’m sure it’s even more impressive on a G5. Spotlight will undoubtedly be very beneficial for recent switchers, who aren’t the tidiest of file keepers. Overall I’d say Spotlight is an incredibly useful tool, and from what I’ve heard (and thankfully never experienced) a vast improvement over prior OSX search utilities.

Dashboard:
The second must see on my Tiger tour was Dashboard, Konfabulator comparisons aside, Dashboard is not only supremely handy, its just plain cool, if eyecandy is what your after Dash Board offers it in spades. If you frequent public Wi-Fi spots, by all means grab the JiWire Wi-Fi hotspot finder off Apple’s site, tre’ handy.

I can see down the road relying more and more on widgets, it just makes a sense to have a collection of commonly used tools all arranged together, instead of hunting them down individually.

Safari:
The reworked Safari was actually a pleasant surprise, first off it seems a little faster, and makes better use of cascading style sheets. The included RSS reader would make a great introduction into news feeds for the uninitiated. While I still slightly prefer Fire Fox as a browser, and a stand-alone newsreader to Safari, I can say Apple has made significant improvements to their browser.

Quicktime 7, H264 and the mini bummer:
Ok I’ve got a few complaints, hey nothing’s perfect right, first off Quicktime 7 lacks full screen play back with an unregistered version, no biggie, just annoying. Ok I gave in and bought a license, Apple wasn’t done with my wallet that day I guess.

Ok license in hand err in app, I went back and grabbed some of the new QT7 high definition movie trailers, this one was a major bummer, granted if I had read the QT7 HD requirements ahead of time it wouldn’t have been such a let down, but it still felt anticlimactic. In case you had any guises of your mini handling even 720p QT7 files here are the recommended hardware requirements straight from Apple.

For 1280×720 (720p) video at 24-30 frames per second:

* 1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
* At least 256 MB of RAM
* 64 MB or greater video card

For 1920×1080 (1080p) video at 24-30 frames per second:

* Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
* At least 512 MB of RAM
* 128 MB or greater video card

Now surely there are exceptions to these guidelines but they pretty much match my experiences, 1080p not surprisingly was unplayable, not even close. The 720p files were in the ballpark but I still noticed mild stuttering. I’ve played a few other 720p files with success on the mini (DivX comes to mind), so I find it a little odd that Apple’s own QT HD files wouldn’t be more optimized for the mini. But the hardware recommendations for QT7 hi-def speaks for itself, I’m still holding out hope for some sort or graphics hardware accelerator compatible with the mini.

Hardware deficiencies aside, Tiger on the mini was still impressive. Spotlight and Dashboard alone are well worth the upgrade, and as mentioned elsewhere there are 198 other improvements or updates left to explore.

B.Greenway

Starting with aesthetics I’m really impressed by the fit and finish of the entire laptop. It just feels right, the screen clasp closes as if it was made in an aviation machine shop and the grey band around the outside edge gives a nice balance between the smooth acrylic’ish white finish.

Once again I had the pleasure of OSX’s intuitive initial setup; although this time I punched through it in just a few minutes, as opposed to 10 or so with my mini. The other guys should take note from Apple’s first boot process; it doesn’t ask you a lot of complex questions that can be otherwise satisfied after the initial boot.

One of the things that impressed the hell out of me, right off the bat with my new iBook was how it handled Wi-Fi. Our office has a Linksys wireless B router, in an adjacent closet. That router and my now retired Vaio laptop never seemed to make friends and play nice, whereas the iBook immediately grabbed the signal and never let go.

Apples wireless interface in OSX is well, just about flawless in my book. XP makes you jump through hoops to get on a secure network where OSX only asks the necessary information and connects right up.

Batteries, heh oddly enough the battery was again a pleasant surprise. As someone who was used to getting 30-45 minutes out of an old worn out laptop battery, 4.5 to 5hrs from the iBook feels like an emancipation. I actually wrote this laying on the couch, while streaming iTunes to my stereo, ah life’s rough.

While I’m on the subject of batteries and power, Apple’s inclusion of a luminescent band around the power adapter is a stroke of simple genius; green for charged and orange for charging, both of which can easily be seen from across the room.

Getting down to the nitty gritty, I was also pleasantly surprised with how fast it was. Now don’t get me wrong, this thing won’t break any land speed records, but apps popped open much much faster than I had already prepared myself for.

This brings up another point worth mentioning, if I had listened to the doubters who asked me why on earth I’d want a Mac laptop, I’d still be sitting here with my outdated, slow malware ridden Sony Vaio, trying to decide what wintel based laptop to buy. Given what I’ve seen in the last 48 hours, I would guess that none of them would have pleased me as much as my iBook.

B.Greenway

iBooks-FREE RAM & Accessories!

This new found ‘liberation’ of being able to have information, not just entertainment, in the living room is what brought me to Delicious Library. Take a look at the screen shots below and tell me if you can identify the CD’s or DVD’s for that matter, in the rack. Heck I own them and until yesterday, unless I sat down and rummaged through them, I couldn’t have told you what half of them were. Enter Delicious Library from Delicious Monster (yeah now I get the name, it’s thoroughly addictive) DL is easily the most seamless, easy to use media cataloging utility I’ve ever seen.

The software (Macintosh Only) is extremely easy to use, so easy it barely lends itself to a review, but I’ll give it a shot. Simply download the app, install and your minutes away from ‘scanning’ in your collection. Yeah that’s the beauty here, you can use Apple’s iSight (a Bluetooth scanner is also available from DL) as an optical barcode scanner and quickly scan in your books, CD’s, DVD’s and Games . DL uses Amazon as their ‘database’ as it were, but for those odd few items that might not be listed you can manually enter them in.

Of my entire collection (roughly four hundred CD’s and 50 or so DVD’s) DL only failed to scan and grab the info from about 5%, most of this was attributed to scratches over the UPC code, or the UPC code having a hole in it (cut outs). The other few percent of failed media look-ups were from items err lets say ‘not commercially available’. This is where it got addictive, if you have a couple of hundred of any media, and you only have 5-8% unidentified, if your anything like me, this just won’t do. I actually stayed up till 2 or 3 am franticly trying to ‘complete’ my collection, it was a blast and didn’t feel like work at all, after all DL had done the lion share of the work, the least I could do was pitch in.

A little about the ‘user experience’ I have to say nothing could have prepared my girlfriend and I for what we were in for with DL. She was sitting on the couch listening to some iTunes and I start grabbing CD’s and setting up my iSight. At this point I’m sure she was thinking ‘oh boy the mad scientist is at work again’, but as soon I passed over Kill Bill Vol.1’s UPC and DL instantly grabbed all the pertinent info, cover art and entered it into our ‘collection’ we both broke out into laughter, this was fun!

It gets better though, a few movies down the line was the Star Wars trilogy. When this title was scanned in the voice (oh did I mention a female voice reads back all of your titles as their scanned in for conformation?) not only read out the Title and Version but said aloud in a Darth Vader voice “Luke I am your father!” Ok we were again cracking up, I can’t say for sure where they’re getting the dialog snippets but this was a very classy touch.





These extra touches are also DL’s Achilles heel, to a very small degree. Of all our 50 plus DVD’s Star Wars was the only one (I remember) giving this dialog snippet, which leads me to believe it’s a new or up-coming feature with limited support. That’s the thing about DL, it does so much, so easily your mind races with ‘what if it could do this’ scenarios. For example when scanning in CD’s I’d love to hear a snippet or two of audio from the disc. Amazon does have song ‘previews’ for some if not a lot of their CD offerings, but DL might not have access to their UI or may not have a viable way of streaming in that audio.

Regardless DL does offer a lot in a $40.00 software package, (a demo license is available) and in one evening I went from not being able to tell you at gun point what was in my CD collection, to being able to tell you how many CD’s I have, what their cover art looks like, what they retail for and the date they were released. To sum up, if you have enough CD’s, DVD’s, books, or games to warrant such a program I wholeheartedly recommend Delicious Library from Delicious Monster, now if only I could actually launch those DVD’s from my hard drive, and have DL run full screen without the Mac’s user interface….

B.Greenway

p.s I’ve got a few more ‘delicious’ screen shots in the system gallery

By all appearances I cant see anything the Keyspan offers that I can’t accomplish with the Remote Wonder (I don’t use Airport Express) to the contrary the Wonder has built in application launchers that seemed a little easier to setup, than the Keyspans software. In addition the Wonder transmits its commands via radio frequency rather than Infra-Red, which is great if, like myself, your Mac isn’t in your line of sight while viewing.

One thing I would point out to anyone looking for a remote like the Remote Wonder, is that my version the ‘Remote Wonder’ only reports back to the software for command transfers, but the Remote Wonder II can actually learn infra-red codes as well, this feature would be great for controlling a ‘hybrid’ system (one that has components both in and out of the computer).

I was actually able to setup a macro that will (without turning on the TV/Projector) launch iTunes, play the last radio station and even resume the stream if paused, with only two buttons. I also figured out a way to switch between a few different radio stations, using the arrow keys. A better remote solution surely could be had for more money, but for now the Remote Wonder is more than enough for the simple transport functions and macro executions, I was after.

First off I guess it’s no coincidence that Apple introduced one of their least expensive computers right around the time I was getting serious about an ‘entertainment solution’ for my living room. Rather (I got serious when I saw the price) that and the fact that the very sight of the mini ‘said’ home theater to me. I don’t mean this in a ‘hey it kinda looks like a DVD player’ sense but in a broader ‘I do home theater for a living and I can see one of these in my living room’ sense.

After seeing the first images of the mini on the web and later watching the keynote, my mind was made up, I would own an Apple and I’d place it in the living room, some 14 days after ordering mine it arrived Thursday morning, and oh man was it tough making it through work yesterday, knowing it was waiting on me at home. During down time and lunch I thought about all the years that have passed since the original Macintosh and would OSX still hold that ‘different’ appeal that Mac OS’s did for me so many years ago, but it’s my nature to obsess, I’ll be ok after I eat.

Un-boxing:
First things first as it were, as previous reviews have stated, un-packing the mini is a similar experience to un-boxing an iPod. The same clever inserts inside of the Styrofoam deal, and whatnot. Everything is logically laid out. The first thing I grabbed was the users guide, because for once in my life I figured I’d actually reads it first. The manual is adequate but doesn’t really go into a lot of ‘OSX’ detail, at first I was a little concerned with this, but shortly after booting into the OS I knew that a manual over 20 or 30 pages long would have been unnecessary anyway, OSX really is easy to use, at least for the cursory things I was after.

Booting up:
After the refreshingly simple feel to the preliminary configuration questions, OSX asks you in setting up everything, I was on my way. I made an administrator account and a few personal accounts (just I case I screwed anything up) and began to sort out basic DVD playback and networking. Like I said in the beginning I’m a windows user so there were a few things that made me scratch my head, nothing that really brought down the house in technical difficulty but, interesting nonetheless. For example when I selected the ‘Go’ drop down command and selected my networked drives, and mounted them, all worked fine, but after I rebooted I had to do the same process again.

I can only assume there’s a way to ‘map’ or permanently mount them, but that’s just something that time will have to lend it’s self to. After all I had videos to watch! I had initially planned to just use the stereo out to my receiver during the first phase of set up, and then add my M-Audio Sonica Theater, but things were going so smoothly I figured ‘why not’. In retrospect I should have just continued on with my first plan.

Issues: With my ‘DVD’ drives mapped and ready to go I decided to go ahead and add the Sonica, I attached it and installed the driver and initially I had ‘some’ luck with sound playback. I picked a few concert DVD’s and had a generally good audio experience, everything ran smoothly and I noticed no visual stuttering. But then I decided to check out iTunes, ok first snafu. The only way I could get a digital stream out of the Sonica to my receiver from iTunes was to select 96k ‘playback’ I have no idea why 44 or 48k wouldn’t work but needless to say once 96k was selected (and working with iTunes) I could no longer playback DVD’s (the audio portion) this isn’t a bug per say as the M-Audio manual clearly states that 96k only delivers 2 channels, but the problem comes into play with the Sonica Theater’s apparent difficulties in switching back and forth between the two modes.

It got worse, after a while of this back and forth business with the two modes that worked for Audio and Audio for Video, the whole card just seemed to lock up. It was as if it couldn’t be forced to work in an audio mode that had just minutes prior worked without a hitch. The rest of the night became a song and dance of swapping settings and giving it another try. At one point the hitches with the Sonicas audio playback became so bad it crashed OSX, at least that’s what I assume the (you must reboot your computer in several different languages, message meant) kernel panic or otherwise it looked like a crash to me. I place no blame on OSX what so ever as these problems only manifested during the ‘Sonica’s flake out period’.

Moving forward: Even with the previously mentioned issues, I have zero plans to give up on the mini as a simple HTPC. to the contrary, what I saw that did work, more than made of for these few glitches. Streaming DVD’s from my remote drives (the ones without multi-channel audio) played back flawlessly, and the video quality was even better than I’d hoped for. So where I’m left now is to either just bear down and work out this Sonica Theater issue, or two (and more realistically) is to find another USB audio adaptor that will pass through Dolby Digital and DTS, I think the later makes a lot more sense as the Sonica Theater’s analog outs are really wasted in my system, I just need a simple USB in digital audio out adaptor, that actually does just that, without all of the futzing around with different sample rates and channel selection, as I believe this switching back and forth is what’s causing the Sonica Theater to flake out.

What I need is a plain ol’ spdif out, you know kind of like the spdif output on just about any PCI sound card…. If anyone else has had better results with the Sonica or another USB to digital audio adaptor, please share.

B.Greenway

**Update**
With a little configuration setting help from Jonathan, I now have iTunes and DVD playback in DolbyIIx (only) Working consistently, not 100% there yet, but an improvement nonetheless.

**Edit Deux**
Success finally!

Well after re-installing the latest drivers, selecting digital out on the M-Audio panel and apparently most important of all, verifying that the M-Audio was selected as the playback device from Apple DVD player, all is working as expected. It looks like I had it right a few times by accident, but never went back and checked. Having to switch settings in two different places was the problem.

I had not actually considered that the drive would be sensitive to weight from above, but considering the similarities to notebooks inside, it’s not surprising that might be an issue. In my experience with PowerBooks, I’ve found you can cause some “spin cycle” noise effects if you press a bit too much while a disc is in action.

Mossberg also notes that based on his mailbag, many PC users are looking to make the switch. In the few days since we’ve gone live there are quite a few of you accessing from Windows as well… Could the Mini be the perfect switcher?

– Jonathan Greene

Purchase your Mac Mini from Amazon today!

Macworld provides some good background reading on the Mac Mini to scratch your itch until it’s finally installed in your theater. It’s just a preview, but good info for those of us not fortunate enough to have seen one in person at the MacWorld Expo.

You can always purchase your Mac Mini from Amazon today!

– Jonathan Greene