Session 2: The Mini starts to strut it's stuff
Posted by admin, Fri Feb 25 10:06:26 UTC 2005
Ok, I was sick for a couple of weeks, and the Mini just sat there, mostly because I was pouting about the mouse. But, I read this week that uControl was updated and working on OSX 10.3.8, so we were off to the races today.
Download and install the new uControl (1.4.6, I believe). Bam! Works just fine, without even having to reboot. I am now a happy left-handed mouser.
So, what to do now? I didn’t order iWork, because I’m not sure I want to go that way just yet. I hear OpenOffice runs on Macs. Little poking around, and I rediscover something I read about a couple of weeks ago. The native Mac OSX OpenOffice is stalled, and just the X11 version is available. That just sounds like too much trouble to me. Isn’t the Mac supposed to just work? So I poke around using Google and discover NeoOffice/J.
That’s more like it. NeoOffice/J uses combination of the Aqua interface and Java, and it’s a fork of the OpenOffice code. All sorts of problems downloading NeoOffice/J from it’s home website, until I discover that it’s mirrored on Apple.com. Download from there is quick, and install is quicker. Hmm. No desktop icon. Where is it? Open up Finder. Oh, I see. Applications folder. There it is. Double-click, and we are rolling.
NeoOffice/J looks just like OpenOffice to me. Let’s find that spreadsheet I wanted to copy and adjust for the new year. File | Open. Hmmm. Looks like the standard Java file dialog to me. I don’t think that’ll get me to my Samba shares on the server. Open up Finder, and navigate to the proper directory. The .sxc files all seem to have NeoOffice icons associated with them… what the heck. Double click on the file I want. SWEET! It opens up in NeoOffice just fine! You know, you can’t do that on Linux with OpenOffice. Just for laughs, let’s try a “File | Save As” to get a new copy to play with for the new year. SWEET! It saves to the Samba share just fine. You can’t do that on Linux with OpenOffice either.
Thus ends the second session on the new Mini. I’m a much happier camper now. Can’t wait to see how a real development tool works.