Today saw the arrival of my new toy – my brand new Mac Mini.  I am going to be using this to store much of my media content (videos and music) so that I can connect it to the sound system downstairs and we can have music around the downstairs of the house.

I am going to blog about the setup that I am using shortly, probably over on my techy blog (equalmark.net) when I finally get a design on the go.  But essentially what this means is that all the computers in the house are sharing one music library (the same files) and therefore when you add or change something with one computer it reflects on all the others.  Looking forward to see how this is going to work.

In one of the recent Mac Format magazines that I have received through my new subscription I came across a review of this Hard Disc Drive Enclosure that looked just like a Mac Pro.

Now I grant you that at close to £50 it is rather expensive for what it does.  It can take any SATA hard drive and it a USB 2 interface and mains powered.  However I thought it looked so nice, a miniture version of a Mac Pro that I just had to have one.  I happened to be on the look out for an external enclosure to turn my spare 500Gb drive into a USB drive that I could store all my videos on.

I have been encoding my DVD collection into iPhone movies that I am now storing on the external drive that this enclosure mounts. Works really well plugged into my Time Capsule so that it acts as a wireless drive and also looks really cool on the desk!

In the first of my Photo365 posts, where I am going to attempt to write about and publish a post about a Photo of the day, I am posting this picture of the latest edition of my MacFormat Magazine that was delivered through my door yesterday on New Years Eve.

I have been purchasing MacFormat for a while now and really like the articles that it provides.  The great thing, is that there a wide range of articles for different abilities.  I mean I am useless at Photoshop (I am more of a Fireworks kind of guy really), but in this magazine there are tutorials pitched at my level rather than going to techy.  At the same time there is more in depth coverage about your Mac computer which is great for learning new tips and tricks.  The product reviews are also quite good to.

I particularly enjoyed reading their review and comparison of the new Apple TV with some other products that are around and on the market at the moment.  In fact this has spurred me on to purchasing a Mac Mini to be used as a media centre, which I used to have.

I am an avid Mac user as I believe they are the best platform for developing and designing on.  However there has always been one main problem, that of how to test your sites in Windows environment without switching to a Windows machine.  Well I think I have the answer – meet Parallels desktop for Mac.

It is very important to test sites in a Windows environment as the majority of the visitors to a site will be using Windows.  For example looking at the statistics for this site 68% of visitors were from Windows machines and the statistics for Equal Design show that 61% of visitors are from a Windows environment.  However please don’t confuse what I am saying here about what I wrote the other day about not developing for Internet Explorer 6.  I am talking here about making sure sites look fine on more modern browsers such as IE7 and IE8 (even though I hate them just as much!).

But testing sites in a Windows environment when using a Mac to develop sites is often difficult.  I have been pointed to a number of tools on the web, however all of which never seem to quite do the required job.  It was about 6 months ago that I learned about ‘Virtualising’ machines, which is what Parallels desktop does.  It creates a Virtual Machine on your Mac with the operating system you choose.  Off course in order to install an operating system you still need to valid discs and product codes.  You can also have as many virtual machines as you like.  For this reason I have installed 2 instances of Windows XP.  One with IE7 and one with IE8 so that I can test sites in both version to make sure they display correctly.

It has lots of really cool features, perhaps one of the best being the ‘coherence’ mode.  What this does is, instead of running the virtual machine inside its own window you can run the machine alongside all your other Mac applications which means that to someone looking at your computer they would never know that it is a virtual machine.  Also you can drag and drop files between the Mac and Windows environments as well as being able to copy and paste between the two.

It really is excellent value at just under £50 and I would recommend any Mac user who also needs a Windows environment to take it for a test drive at least as you can trial it for 30 days without charge.

Well the year is almost at an end and therefore I thought that I would share my favourite software that I have used throughout the year in order to assist in my work.  I use both Mac and PC and therefore I will be talking about both.  We will start with the best – software for the Mac.

Top Software of 2008 for the Mac

1. Flickr Export for iPhoto
I have now used Flickr since the turn of the year in order to store, but most importantly to manage my photographs.  Not only those appearing on this site but general galleries that I want to publish for friends and family too.  I also use iPhoto, part of iLife ‘08 in order to organise my photos locally, and also to edit them too.  What I was missing was a methods of exporting photos directly from iPhoto up to Flickr, until I came across the FlickrExport tool for iPhoto.  It basically allows you to do everything in one place, editing your titles, sets, complications and anything else, right on your local machine and then all you need to do it upload the photos and you are done.  It sells for £12 which at £1 a month for the year I think is excellent value.

You can try and demo and purchase FlickrExport for iPhoto here.

2. MAMP
This is a piece of software that turns your local Mac into a web server complete with PHP and MySQL.  I create a lot of WordPress websites and themes, mainly for Equal Design however I do use WordPress for my teaching too.  Therefore creating themes directly ‘online’ can get a little annoying having to constantly upload files etc.  Therefore I looked into hosting WordPress locally and I came across this post on the very popular and excellent website webdesignerwall.com.  It is easy to install and turns your local machine into a fully functioning web server with the capability of hosting PHP and MySQL sites.  An excellent find!

Download MAMP and turn your Mac into a PHP & MySQL webserver.

3. Time Machine
Backing up your files can be a real bore and a hassle.  Time Machine has changed all that and about time to.  I am sure that most of you will have heard of this excellent programme that ships with Mac OS X Leopard, but it really does deserve another mention.  Time Machine constantly backs up all of your Macs files, applications, email, photos and everything else to a designated external backup drive.  If you find you have lost a file you had last week, then you can go back in time with Time Machine in order to get your files back.  You can also use it to transfer your files to a new Mac computer.  Great piece of software.

Learn more about Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard.

4. Parallels Desktop for Mac
Macs are fantastic machines and to be honest they are way better than a PC running Windows in my opinion, but there are some things that the Mac just will not do that a Windows machine will.  It is nearly always software that has not been produced for the Mac and therefore the problem that I have is how to get around this.  At the moment I am using two machines.  A Mac (Mini) and a PC (the PC is hardly switched on!).  But Parallels software means that you can run a ‘virtual’ windows machine on your Mac, which is basically Windows running on a Mac but with the added advantage that the two run side by side without having to re-boot your machine.  At the moment I am half way through a 14 day trial but I am confident that this will be a great success, and then finally I can ditch PCs all together!

Find out more about Parallels desktop for Mac.

So there you have it, my favourite programs (software) for the Mac that I have used in 2008.  Next software for the PC!  Return here soon.

Not that I didn’t expect it to however, but I have now got a fully functioning iMac that also runs windows – good or what?

The reason that I wanted to do this was that I have two pieces of software that I have that I cannot run on the Mac. The first being the Flash Photo Gallery software from CoffeeCup that I use in order to create the galleries for the photograph site, and the second being a nifty little program for converting DVDs to MPEG4 for the iPod called PQDVD. Before you all comment, I know that I can use Handbrake in order to do this but I have found a major problem with this – it darkens the resultant video file sometimes to unacceptable levels.

So the first step was to download the bootcamp software. I then installed this onto the Mac. Running the software brings you to the first stage were you need to burn a drivers CD and then you are ready to create the partition on your Mac’s hard drive that will contain Windows. I choose for the partition to be just 18GB but you can change this to suit your needs. The partition is then created and you are ready to install windows.

Insert a Windows CD and then the install runs just like on the PC. Once this install has been completed pop in the disc that you burnt with the drivers on and these should install automatically and then you are away.

I always wondered if installing both operating systems would slow the machine down at all but so far there has been no difference (or at least no difference that I can recognize). Well done to Apple to creating this handy little tool allowing you to easily run both operating systems.

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Bootcamp beta for Apple
Microsoft Windows
Detailed Bootcamp Manual (Print before proceeding!)

For a while now there have been some very good adverts made by Apple Inc. to promote their hardware. They have taken the form of Apple Vs PC. The idea being that there is a real geeky dude dressed in a dodgy suit and then a cool dude dressed casual. The geek being the PC and the cool dude being the Apple. Well it now seems that Apple have gone global with their ads as there is now an English version.

I think that the ads are very well and they do come across with some very valid messages about the Mac and the PC. What I do like is the fact that they have not just said that a PC is rubbish (it’s not!) but its strengths are very different from a Mac. The Mac guy plays up the fact that he is more of a home computer with iLife being the backbone of the things that the Mac can do.

I think that my favourite advert has to be the restarting one were PC is constantly stopping and doesn’t talk because he is supposed to have ‘crashed’ and needs restarting. Good thinking from Apple.

These ads are definately worth a quick look. View them at the Apple UK website.