So, I finally joined the “dark side”, and had my new shiny Mac Mini arrive via DHL this afternoon. It’s a funky lil machine, and much quieter than my Desktop PC with it’s many cooling fans and über-powerful nVidia GeForce 8800GTS graphical card.
The mini was very simple to set up and I was up-and-running within 15 minutes. The longest time was waiting for the Mac to configure itself and update the software after the first boot.
When I was logged in, my first task was to find a suitable IRC client. I believe Shaun in #computers on IrCQNet (irc.icq.com:6667) uses Colloquy, so I downloaded that and gave it a shot. After about 20 minutes using it, however, I decided that it was too dissimilar to my beloved XChat. So a quick Google later, and I found the home-page for XChat Aqua, which is a version of XChat designed specifically for the Mac.
My mini now sits underneath my 17-inch 4:3 LCD display, though the display is not physically sitting on the mini, as the manuals say that is a bad idea (may interfere with the operation of the superdrive).
I’ve also upgraded safari to the latest beta release, and am quite impressed with it’s speed and accuracy in rendering. Maybe people are taking note of the khtml renderer now that apple have adopted it. Though, I don’t think that some sites that render well in safari will also render the same in konqueror, as there may be slight bugs in apple’s version of the khtml engine where they’ve tweaked it, or there may be javascript fixes that apple have applied that haven’t made their way into konqueror yet. For e.g. G-Mail works fine in safari, but I’ve noted that it doesn’t work so well in konqueror, and is marked as being unsupported in that browser by Google.