Excuse For Buying a Mac mini
The original driver behind getting a new Mac mini was wanting to play with Window Vista, which might sound a little odd at first. Maybe you weren't aware that the new mini is Intel-based and so you can run Windows and Linuxy OSes on it — either booting directly from a separate partition or by using a virtual machine. What this means for the industry I don't know, but it's great for us technophile developers.
Upgrading to 2GB of RAM means it's more than ready to cope with Vista as well as being able to run virtual machines with enough of their own RAM to get by. Having installed Parallels (a snip at the moment, on offer at $49) I now have Win2000 running IE5.5, WinXP running IE7 beta 2 and Office 2007 beta and Ubuntu running Firefox.
Right now I'm writing this on my main development machine, which is a laptop running XP/IE6 — the most common denominator in terms of what is actually in use out there by most users. Upgrading to IE7 on here is not an option and having multiple installs on IE on one box is unreliable at best.
If you take testing of your web applications seriously you need a system capable of running virtual machines. Although IE 6 is the predominant browser it's still an idea to test backward in IE5.5 and forwards to IE7, as well as in as many other browsers as possible.
Don't, whatever you do, pass off testing your apps in other browsers as something you do with tools like BrowserCam. Browser cams are great for getting an idea whether your CSS is playing well, but that's not testing. There's more to test than your styling. What about the JavaScript?! You need to actually use the site.
 | This site running in IE 7 beta 2 on Windows XP at 800*600 |
 | This site running in IE 5.0 on Windows 2000 at 1024*768 |
 | This site running in Firefox on Ubuntu Linux at 1024*768 |
 | This site running in IE 5.0 on Windows 2000 at 1024*768 |
I know what you're thinking - what about Vista? The reason for buying the mini. Well, foolishly I assumed I'd be able to install it. Apparently it's not that easy. Parallels doesn't support it yet and, although there are reports that it's possible with Boot Camp, I've read as many horror stories as I have of success. Looks like I'll have to be patient and wait for support, unless somebody knows otherwise.
As well as testing web application there's the obvious need to stay abreast of the ever-changing world we live in. You wouldn't want to be left out of discussions about the new Office "ribbon" interface now would you!? All in all there's a really strong argument to present to the boss (be that at home or work) to fork out £500 on a new Intel-based Mac. Naturally you also get the native ability to test in Safari et al. Not to mention that they look amazing. You need never consider buying an ugly-looking Dell space-waster again.
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Mine arrived a few days ago and I absolutely love it. I decided to go with Bootcamp as I had heard that parallels had some performance problems - no idea if that is true or not.
The machine is fast, quiet and stable (fingers crossed) and for the money, it is hard to beat.
Parallels seems fast to me Andy. But then it should be with 2gb of ram to go about.
You really do want to sell your old mac mini, don't you ? ;)
YoGi. The old one has gone already. I didn't write this entry to try and sell it though as the old one is a PowerPC processor and won't do any of this dual-boot stuff. I'm merely encouraging people to consider buying a new Intel-based mini.
Another alternative (although not as cool) is VMware workstation. I have it installed at work and have everything from Windows NT 4.0 - IE 2.0 to Windows Vista Beta 2 - IE 7.0. Also have Solaris 10, couple of flavours of Linux and Mac OSX as well. The virtual machines are not that fast but for loading up the browser to check out an app they work fine.
Bootcamp segments the computers in that you can't get to the host's Mac disk when in BootCamp and vice versa. With any virtualization software you need the right hardware. I run Parallels on a MacBook Pro having 1 GB RAM.
I will try Vista today on Parallels. I thought I read people running it without problems.
I do agree the Mac is a good desktop as I use this as much as my Linux workstation. I am eager to see how 7.0.2 Lotus Notes client performs on the Mac. Last time I had use a Mac with Lotus Notes is back in the 4.6 days.
Jake-
In your research, did you come across a way to run an old version of Safari? I have a project that needs to run on Safari 1.3. My current Mac running OS 10.4 won't run earlier versions, as far as I know.
This page
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looks promising, but I can't seem to get Safari 1.x to work.
Congrats on the new Mac mini-
Seth
Seth. Not seen a way to do this. What about running two Mac installs on different partitions?
yes, that should definitely work (partitioning the disk). But it requires a restart to boot into the old OS, which is a pain. I might try this by installing os10.3 on my iPod and booting from that. But it seems like there's got to be an easier way...