I am enjoying the coding though, it reminds me of when I started learning C for the first time 20 years ago.

Second is that I am trying to teach myself to type with the right fingers on the right keys, this sounds dumb coming from someone who spends so much time at a keyboard.. why don’t I use the right fingers now?? well I never too typing lessons and learnt to type fast using things like instant messaging, irc, and general document and code writing. I generally don’t use my pinky fingers when I type and have never been able to break the 80 words per minute. I need to retrain my brain to do that, and start ensuring that I use the correct fingers to type everything. I have dropped back to around 20 wpm and am slowly increasing my speed back as I use the right shift keys and include my pinky fingers. I am hoping to have broken the 100 wpm point within the next month or two by using all the right fingers, when I stop thinking I can get quite fast already but tend to drop my pinkies off at times doing it hahaha its hard.

well thats it for today, I am going to do some typing exercises now.

I now have Xcode for the programming, Gimp for image creation, and Word for documentation all installed tested and working. I have enabled and tested the time machine for constant backups, and set up mapped drives running on my file server (Raid Protected) for data storage. I think I should be safe to start…

So I broke out the Objective C manual, fired up Xcode, and created my first iPhone app. It took me less than 5 minutes to get “Hello World” working on the iPhone emulator. I am going to be just like Fonzie soon…

I have a habit of writing down all the ideas I have, whenever I have them, stupid or not and most are stupid. But I had one of those defining moments where you realise you have been looking at an idea from the wrong direction and suddenly you see it from the right angle and it makes so much sense that you wonder why you didn’t see it that way before. I guess what I am saying is that I had a fantastic idea for an iOS app.. One of those million dollar ideas, now I just need the time and motivation to get it done. Goodbye world, Ill be back in a year or so, hahaha.

Lastly for today, I am going to have to work out how to reverse the scroll wheels on my PC’s because I am getting used to the Mac scroll being backwards, and Im starting to realise its the right way. But I still get confused often. [wave].

I have so far installed:

• iAuthor – For writing books that work in iBooks. It looks sweet, although a little confusing, previewing my book on the iPad looked awesome, truly sweet. I am not convinced that an epub format wouldnt be better though. Will post on this later.
• XCode was next, to write apps with. Its a huge download, but it installed fast enough and was up and running in no time. I cannot test anything on my phone or pad yet as I dont have a developer account, but I wrote a test app and can run it in the included emulator. So far impressed, but I needed to make some icons.
• Gimp should let me make some images, so I installed that, it worked out of the box and I made some icons for the test app. It looks almost exactly like the windows version and has zero learning curve if you have used it on either platform. Well done gimp developers.

Photos.. I installed Picasa, but then realised all my photo’s were missing from my NAS drive. After throwing a child like tantrum, and listening to my missus tell me they would be there somewhere, I found them again but by this time I had seen an update to iPhoto. Supprised once again at the size of the updates, I downloaded the almost 800Mg update and got iPhoto working. The main feature here was the use of photo stream. I can now take a photo on my phone and it will upload to the stream and download to my photo library.

Lastly I installed VLC Player so I can access my movies, the kids have made some we encoded in XVid, and others in M4V. The M4V movies play a LOT cleaner, but I may have used a higher bitrate on them, they do play well though.

Well thats it, as you can see I am warming up to this tiny beast and look forward to stacking it full of memory.

First thoughts are, its beautiful, simply one of the most advanced computers I have ever seen as far as design goes. I didn’t think it would be as big as the box (Which was rather small) but as usual Apple make good use of the space. Opening the box and unpacking it was, as Steve intended, a joyful experience in itself. I have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but I had to use USB ones to get them set up (So I read). The 20cm square Mac Mini is now positioned under one side of my monitor, and its tiny and silent. Why are PC’s so damn ugly? A HDMI to DVI adapter was included along with the power cord, but that was all it came with.

Turning the Mac on I was greeted with the usual questions about country and language, and what looked to be a no escape registration for the device, much like my iPhone and iPad. You just have to do it…It booted up rather fast, and I was pushing icons in about 1 minute, unheard of on a PC.

I am writing this on the Mini right now, the device is an i5 and seems very responsive. I will bump up the memory as it only comes with 2GB and it should become even snappier.

Going from knowing a lot about something to knowing very little, some things have frustrated me:

• Mouse wheel is reversed compared to my PC, although initially It was annoying, it seems more natural when you get used to it.
• One of the first things I did was look for software updates and found a whopping 1.5GB update.. WOW
• iTunes cannot be just moved, I use a NAS for my iTunes folder and have copied it between PC’s a few times with no hassles. This time I am going to let it rebuild its databases, although I read they could be moved, I thought this would be a good time for a refresh. Its taking hours.

Some things that so far look to be awesome:

• The app store, as a coder I have always felt that selling software for windows was a “Your on your own” sort of thing, this looks to be very cool.
• xCode, this is going to be interesting, but to get a free fully featured IDE, even if it is 1.5GB, is fantastic. Thank you Apple.
• This thing is silent, and I mean Silent.
• Its size, I got my desk back!

Well iTunes is still chugging away looking for music, so I will post some more when I get deeper into this tiny metal box further.

Oh and there have been 3 downloads of My Wave… Im on my way!

This will open a save as box to select a location to export them to, and when you press ok the songs will be coppied to the folder you selected put into artist and album folders and renamed to match the id3 tags.

I do have to stress that it wont recognise acc files (apple format) and that i dont use the ipod database as this changes every software update. So convert all your music to MP3 and make sure the tags are set correctly.

I was enjoying myself so much that she went and got me one of my own (she was getting sick of sharing I think).

So having been a long term apple hater, I now have an iPad. I am struggling to work out how to do all the things that I know how to do already on windows, and some things are really well done, while others are just leaving me speechless. It took me several hours of messing around to work out how to post this, add the image, but it was actually real easy to type this out using the on screen keyboard. Yes I can touch type on it with relative ease.

PROS:
It’s fast. No boot times and always on means I can be working on something in seconds.
It’s light.
Long battery life.

CONS:
I don’t know how to do even the simplest things, and they are all different.copy and paste for example.. Where is the ctrl key?? Arrow keys? and so on.
There is an app for everything but it won’t do everything, and the browser won’t either. There doesn’t seem to be a manual on it either.

On the whole I think it’s great as long as I don’t forget that it is not supposed to be a content creation device, it is for content consumption. I get real frustrated when I forget this.

I have also added a mobile browser version of the site for all those nerds with phones that have browsers and data.

Will add more and more cool things if I get motivated.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2012, but not without due respect for the calendar of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great (not to imply that Australia is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms :
This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her / him or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. The wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Best Regards (without prejudice)

Name withheld (Privacy Act).

It will let you play the MP3 files from your iPod on your Windows 7 PC. Have a read about it and check it out. I dont get much time to code any more so I thought I would release this to the public before It becomes a relic.

Enjoy!