New Switcher

Welcome to Applefritter, and Mac ownership!
I know you'll enjoy the Mini, and I think you'll find the 'fritter a friendly and useful place. (at least I think so)

Mike

always good to hear some one has come to the light:-)
if you're interested in puting your computer to work while youre sleeping (er, um partying)
check out http://teammacosx.homeunix.com/
its a mac-centered folding at home site. also very helpful.

Welcome to the fold, and to the 'Fritter.

Here are some things to look forward to, some of them you may have already discovered:

1) Things are going to "Just Work." My favorite Mac OS X dialog:
"Disk Copy cannot work with this type of file, but StuffIt Expander can. Would you like to open the file with StuffIt Expander instead?"

2) Installing a program is as simple as dragging it to the Applications folder; and uninstalling it as simple as dragging it to the Trash. 'You Are Now Leaving DLL And Registry Hell, Population: Not You Anymore!'

3) OS X is the beauty of a Macintosh over the full power of Unix; this will surely appeal to a comp-sci like yourself.

4) You're --almost-- immune to malware, viruses, etc. because of the Unix underpinnings, and because most script kiddies are after That Other OS. Soon that Mini will be standing strong as other boxen fall prey, and someone will be asking, "Didn't you get that (insert nasty here?)" Remember to smile, be helpful and point them in the same direction when the timing is right.

5) If and when the Dremel and the soldering iron come out, heheh... make sure to take lots of pictures and show us what ya did.

-- Macinjosh

When I was a CS student (well, BS of IT) I ran NetBSD on 68k Macs, BeOS on x86, and finally managed to buy my first OS X machine, my iBook 600. Having decent machines to code on makes life a lot nicer. I did get alot of work done in the BeOS C++ IDE on a P-133 DEC box. Running command line UNIX help make CS more understandable, rather than suffering though the all the false layers of helpfullness that Windows and the Classic Mac OS had. Have no fear of the command line. You can write, compile, and test a program in the time it might take someone to go though the coding option menus of Visual C++...

I was going through some of my boyfriends stuff who says he hates macs and found a graphite 366 iBook in pieces. I just now got it together thanks to iFixit take apart manuals, my friend had OS 10.3, so ive got a clamshell iBook running trackpad cable is broke and battery is shot, but I have it running OS X on 192MB RAM and a 30GB HD outta my old pc laptop, seems nice, ive got it on my workbench so i can have net access easily over there without having to move to the mini all the time.. I do love my mini, so far i got a USB 2.0 IDE bridge and made an internal DVD-RW external there isnt a case on it but it does the trick, and like you said mac os just works. It popped right up and would let me burn a DVD from the finder, ive also got an external USB 2.0 200GB hard drive as well, a logitech wireless desktop from my pc... peecee is sitting in the corner, might make it a nix box later. shes pretty fast and responsive. I just messed around with bootcamp and got windows vista RC1 installed too and even that screams on this mini... However i think i will need to upgrade the ram to 1GB, but so far even that looks simple on the mini.

My Clamshell that I Built from parts

My Mini set up and the boyfriends PC

My workbench

Thought ud like to see my setup

I don't understand people who feel the need to stick to the command line. OS X ships with a beautiful and free IDE. I don't think I've ever compiled Obj. C or Java from the command line in OS X.

Welcome to AF.

For quick tests of short snippets of code, using vi to geta few lines down, then gcc to compile and then a run a test is pretty quick. When you are in the middle of an actual project, I agree, an IDE is much nicer to use.

And congrats on your first mac. I would also tend to agree, compiling a program from the command line is soooooo much easier! I used to use vb on a pc, and its a lot faster to compile c from bash.

Betcha can't stop with just one Mac. I've got a basement full of 'em, and I love playing with old systems to see what I can convince them to do.

Welcome to Apolefritter. Come back often!