I just bought a new mac 2 days ago!

Question

Hi all...
Bought a nice new Mac mini, and I love it. I bought an iBook from a friend in March. That was when I switched from Windows to mac, and I have not touched a Windows computer since!
Upon leaving the Apple shop, I couldn't get my girlfriend to drive home fast enough. I got home opened up the box and sniffed. The new smell from Apple. Wonderful! My girlfriend caught me smeling my Mac, and promptly fetched the Yellow Pages (looking under section : Men In White Coats). She saw the size of the Mini Mac... and said - 'what the **** is that?' I replied, simply, 'it's my computer more powerful than the laptop'. She didn't believe me......!
I set it up and switched it on with glee. Welcome screen.... yeah yeah whatever, I wanna play! From having a 1Ghz iBook with 256MB RAM to a 1.83Ghz with 1GB RAM.... this thing will **** near fly. The processor speed isn't much, but the RAM is, and everything works faster.
But I do have some questions........
Intel. A nice word.... what is the difference from PPC to Intel? What does all that mean?
iChatUSBcam... here's one for you... Upon opening up iChat to talk to my mate, it said iChatUSBcam was something.....'blah blah binary'.... not understanding what that meant I pressed the option saying 'Use Rosetta'. I told my mate about this and he said Rosetta will slow me down, slow my computer down and slow the world down and he advised me to look for an alternative.
2 hours later I could not find an alternative, so I turn to you good people... any Ideas?
Looking around my pre-installed apps, I saw something that I was kinda interested in when I had my iBook G4. iLife '08.... jumping up and down on my worn out seat, I began to play and found I was disappointed with iMovie. Where's my timeline gone? What has Apple done with it? I can't not have a timeline. On the iBook, I was using iMovie HD 5 I believe, and it has a timeline, I even created a 15 minute DVD with that of my newborn son (now 4 months old!) The timeline is a crucial tool for me. What am I to do?
Summary: I don't like iMovie '08.
Solution: Don't use it!
I hear you shouting at your screen: "Use FInal Cut Pro".... but before you wear your voices out... I bought FCP with my Mini Mac/Mac Mini.... (which way is it said?!)
Installing FCP, I saw that if I was to install it ALL... Soundtrack Pro and the like, I would have not much hard drive left. (Bought the 80GB option) So I ONLY installed FCP and nothing else. I sat down last night to try and do a 2nd DVD of my son (started on the iBook but never finished!), and my question is this....
How do I use it?
And finally.... something that my good friend has - a Dual Screen. He does have a Tower Mac (meaty thing) and so he has the option to do that. I have been on various posts before I started my essay here for a bit of homework about it, and saw 'DualHead2Go'. Simple and effective, and people claim that it will work on a Mac, but their website states Microsuck Windows only.... so who do I believe? Can you shed some light on this??
Conclusion: I LOVE MY MINI MAC!!!
I hope you have enjoyed my post, replies would be great (if you have time)
Best Wishes and Kind Regards to all
Kieran

Answer 1

I was just looking to see if my own post posted, so I'll answer a few of your questions, then someone else can come along and tell me what I got wrong.
First and foremost, was it Final Cut Pro, or Final Cut Express? If it was, indeed, FCP rather than FCE, I am a little surprised at your (apparently not-so) friendly Apple Dealer. I might use FCP on an iMac, but I would think that would be a bit much for a Mac Mini. FCP is a little more power than you need for a 15 min movie of your 4-year-old. While I haven't used FCE (I've used FCP 3.0 for 6 years), I understand it has about 90% of the capabilities of FCP without emptying the wallet or filling up the hard drive.
However, as folks have said repeatedly in this forum, adding hd space is as easy as buying an external Firewire drive. (Avoid USB drives if you are dealing with video). You might consider going ahead and filling your Mac Mini drive with the FCP installation and use the external drive for your "capture" disk. Or the other way around.
Don't know about anyone else, but what I would have been yelling at my monitor was "Use iMovie 06", which you apparently can still download for free when you find your new computer comes with iMovie 08. Read the iMovie forums, and you will see that you are not alone in your disgust with Apple's "all newly redesigned" iMovie 08. There are a LOT of things missing, and the common response in the forum is "upgrade to iMovie 06".
As for Dual Screen capability, you happened to pick the only Mac Desktop computer without that capability. Sorry.
PowerPC vs Intel is really just a matter of who manufactured the chips. The PPC manufacturer just seemed to have hit a wall on chip speed, and it was time to move on.
A year or so ago, Apple made the decision to go with Intel as their supplier. Lucky them, it was just as Intel moved to the Duo chip. Of course, I doubt is was an accidental happenstance.
Rosetta is the on-the-fly translator that allows PPC programs to run (slower) on the Intel chips. However, your friend is incorrect. It does NOT slow the world down. The days are still almost 24 hours long. It might effect global warming, tho. Btw, I suspect that as slow as the programs might run under Rosetta, I doubt they are slowed to less than they are on their native platform. They just aren't as fast as the native-Intel programs are in the Intel.
With the name of iChatUSBcam, however, I would think it would be an app readily available as a native Intel program. I don't do chat, so am only guessing.
Hope this helped, or at least kept you busy til someone else corrected any of my errors.
clyde