Lion is the perfect Mac mini Media Center OS

In this next post related to converting a Mac mini into a Mac mini Media Center (MmMC), I want to share what I discovered once I upgraded to OS X Lion and why I consider Lion to be the perfect OS for my MmMC. You can read my thoughts after hitting the link below.

In my previous post I shared some images from the unboxing and setup of the new Mac mini. The Mac mini came with OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.6) installed. If you are following along, you may recall, this is a previous generation Mac mini. I did not expect OS X Lion to be installed out of the box. This was not a concern as I had already purchased Lion for several of my other machines and had created a USB drive installer. I expected to install the Lion at some point, but not initially.

Why not? Well, first of all, OS Lion is new. However, I’ve had nothing but good experiences on my other Macs. Secondly, Lion is really meant for a touchpad. I was using a mini keyboard with a trackpad that did not support multi-touch. Thirdly, Lion includes lots of nice changes that make the GUI more visually appealing and easier to use. This device was simply going to sit under the HDTV and run either Boxee or Plex a majority of the time (I’ll share my choice in a later post). Sure there would be the occasional web surfing using Safari, but my goal was to turn the Mac mini into an appliance that just happens to have all of these wonderful extra features.

Once the Mac mini was out of the box, set up and connected to my network, I immediately updated it to the latest version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8). As expected, the update was flawless. I then installed a minimal list of software. I omitted any productivity apps and focused only on installs that would allow the Mac mini to be the best media center it could be. Everything was working great and then in the corner of my eye, I saw it. The USB Lion install drive. It was really calling my name. I couldn’t help myself! I had to install the latest version of the OS on this device even though I was not sure all the software installed would work flawlessly. I live on the bleeding edge!



I grabbed the USB drive, plugged it into the back of the Mac mini, opened the drive and hit the install Lion icon. The Lion installer fired up, created the recovery partition, installed the disk image, rebooted, installed Lion over the existing OS and rebooted one more time. Automatic login was already enabled and the desktop appeared immediately. I tried out all the software and everything was available and seemed to be functioning well.

As I used Lion over the weekend, two new features really struck me as extremely useful. The first was Full-Screen mode. This new feature in Lion allows an application to take over the entire screen and will even hide the application menu until needed. You then swipe a multi-touch pad (or use the keyboard) to switch between full-screen apps or return to the desktop. Having my Media Center software (to be named later), which defaults to fullscreen mode, and Safari running in fullscreen mode make for an exceptional experience. I can watch a show and simply swipe a touchpad or hit a keystroke to immediately view my fullscreen browser. Since I have the MmMc set to 720p, the extra room for the browser really makes for an enjoyable experience. Why 720p? I tried 1080p, but the resolution was entirely too high and everything was teeny/tiny from a distance. When watching video I didn’t notice any discernible difference between the two, especially for streaming video. 720p was the pefect middle ground.

Resume is a new Lion feature that is simply perfect for the MmMC. Resume will remember application window locations as well as the application state. Let me give you a real world example. Over the weekend, we had a brief power outage during a storm. Everything shut down including the MmMC. I had set the MmMC to restart automatically after a power failure in System Preferences | Energy preferences pane. Once power to the home returned, the MmMC fired back up and within 45 secs, the Media Center software had loaded to the exact location it had been before the power outage. Both my TiVo and my DISH DVRs would always reboot after a power outage, usually taking 5-10 minutes, but they NEVER returned to where I had left off.

Those two features alone make OS X Lion a prefect MmMC OS. But there is so much more to explore. For instance, I am interested in how I might use AirDrop to transfer files from another Mac to the MmMC. I’m already using Screen Sharing to control the MmMC using my 11” MacBook Air, but I want to explore the new Per-user Screen Sharing options and see how I might use it to control the MmMC without interrupting the viewing experience. If and as I learn more, I’ll be sure to share my findings here. In the meantime, if I have missed something, please drop a comment below.