Blogging from a (Mini) Mac

By on January 20, 2009 in Tech

Well, I’m not rich or convinced enough to go all-in with something super-expensive, but I was curious enough to dip my toes in the Mac-water with a Mac Mini. I bought one a couple of weeks ago, hooked it up to one of the two monitors in my study and have been using it, along with my PC, ever since. At first, I was under-whelmed, but the more I use it, the more I like it. I already prefer it for converting my home movies for my media server. Getting it to play well with my reasonably extensive home network was a bit of a challenge, but except for a couple of still-invisible devices, I managed to get there.

The early results are that I get the Mac thing, at least to some extent.

It’s hard to tell if I will gravitate more to the right side of my setup- where the Mac resides, but at a minimum I’ll keep the Mac around for the things it clearly does better than a PC. If I win the lottery, I’ll buy a tricked out Mac Pro and run both OS’s via Parallels or some other software.

I can tell you absolutely that there is no Mac-equivalent to Windows Live Writer for writing and managing blog posts. I’m using Ecto at the moment, and, with apologies to the Mac nation, it’s not even in the ballpark. It feels like going back to Internet Explorer after years of Firefox plug-in heaven.

UPDATE: I really don’t like Ecto. This post originally posted to an old, abandoned blog I still haven’t deleted. Granted, I’m sure I could figure out how to post it to this blog, but how wasn’t immediately evident, as it is in Live Writer. I reposted it via the Blogger dashboard.

I also hoped that iTunes would be faster on a Mac. It’s not- the Windows and Mac experience seem identical. It still amazes me how inflexible, slow and generally crappy the iTunes application is, given how elegant the Apple hardware is.

But there’s still something that feels different and oddly better about using the Mac. Plus, Earl and my other Mac buddies will be proud of me for taking the first step.

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About Kent

Reader, writer, arithmeticer. Proprietor of Newsome.Org, a tech, music and life blog.
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  • http://www.meanderingpassage.com/ Earl

    I’m now convinced that “anything” can happen in this great nation of ours:- an Afro-American man will become President of the USA tomorrow;- the Arizona Cardinals are playing in the Super-Bowl this year; and- Kent Newsome has bought and “likes” a Mac.Change is good!!!!!!!!!

  • http://blogs.chron.com/techblog Dwight Silverman

    Kent,Glad to see you becoming more cross-platform. More choices, more options. It’s great.I have to agree with you about Windows Live Writer. There really is NOTHING like it on the Mac side. In fact, I would run Windows in a virtual machine on the Mac JUST to run Windows Live Writer.And WLW is FREE. So I’d buy a copy of Windows and a virtualization program (unless I used the free VirtualBox) just to have access to a freeware Microsoft title. That says a lot.

  • http://www.oak-tree.us/blog Rob Oakes

    Welcome to the Mac platform. I have been using it for the better part of a year and a half. Like you, I started off extremely underwhelmed, but I’m starting to appreciate it more. Unfortunately, most of the appreciation stems to the operating system.I often find that the it is often the available applications (or extreme lack thereof) which break the user experience for me. While some programs (like iLife) are slightly better, other programs (like the Adobe Creative Suite) are exactly the same. Unfortunately, far too many applications just don’t measure up. Microsoft Office for Mac is a joke. OpenOffice doesn’t deliver nearly the same usability and functionality.And then there are the programs that are completely absent. Windows Live Writer is just one of an incredibly long list of examples. It is by far the very best blogging client around and there isn’t anything that remotely comes close on the Mac. So, if I want to use a half decent blog editor on the Mac (and I very much do), I have to wrestle with VMWare Fusion and its many associated headaches.Unfortunately, my desire to work in a non-virtualized environment usually wins out and I end up using the Dell. The gorgeous MacBook Pro, then, just sits on the shelf with its blinking white light: mocking me.______________________________Oak-Tree.us/Blog

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