Amir’s Blog

My Mini has the footprint of a DVD case and is as tall as my pre-calculus textbook. It makes near no sound. I love it!

My PC on the other hand has a huge footprint and is as tall as my trashcan. It is so loud that one can hear it down the hall (This is after I bought quiet fans)

OS X is great. My Mac has not crashed once since I obtained it in November. There were a lot of things to get used to though. For example, installing stuff is now just dragging and dropping it into your “Applications” folder after opening it. Other things include using the “Apple” button instead of CTRL (This means the windows button ona windows keyboard) and having to taskbar. Instead of a taskbar you have a small bar with icons on it at the bottom of the screen. Open applications have an arrow under them. Click this to open them.

iLife is the software suit that comes with every Mac. it includes iPhoto, Grageband, iWeb, iMovie and iDVD.

Here you can enhance, re touch and remove red eye all with literally 1 button. the coolest part though is that you can create photo books, calendars, and cards easily, then have Apple put them together like you see on the computer and ship it to you!

I don’t really use this app much, but its pretty fun to mess around with. You have a library of about 70-100 instruments and you can essentially create music. You can be your own band provided you can press buttons on the keyboard.

iWeb is great if you have a subscription to .Mac. You can create a web page with photos (from iPhoto), podcasts(from Garageband), and even movies from iMove, then upload it all to .Mac for the world to see. Its actually a really nice application. Its simple to use and has some very nice templates. the only problem I had with it is that you cannot edit it’s HTML.

In iMovie you simply create a move. It has all sorts of editing options including various (limited) special effects, some nice sound effects etc. I’ve used to import some home videos off the video camera and edit them a bit. After you have your movie mad in iMovie you export it to iDVD, create menus, special features etc, the burn it. Its rather simple.

My dual core is great! its just like it sounds, you can do things while do alot of other things! For example, encoding a movie with iDVD doesn’t stop me from using Garageband, or Firefox, or Mail.

Mac has this thing called dashboard. When you open it (F12) it shows a bunch of widgets. Widgets are these little apps that have upto date information. For example, you could have a clock widget, or a weather widget, or a stocks widget. even a translator, or calculator. These are so great that Microsoft is implementing them into their next release of Windows; Vista. However, I’ve used Vista (running it on my PC) and they are nice, but Mac’s widgets are better.

This is the only reason I keep my PC. The graphics suck. If this had a nice graphics card I would sell the PC and install Vista on to my Mac via Boot Camp. Essentailly this means no games for me on the Mac