Online Banking with Mac Intel

I have online bank accounts with DBS Bank, United Overseas Bank(UOB), and Citibank. So when I brought my Mac Mini home to replace my PC, I needed to get it working immediately. But there were some challenges:

Naturally, I tried with Safari first since it came with the Mac. No luck across the board. Apparently there were some security issues with the Java Runtime Environment that came with the Mac Intel. The login panels for Username and Passwords of all the above banks are some kind of Java Applets. These applets did not load up in Safari so either I could not even get the panel to show (and I see the coffee cup) or it shows but I can't input the password (UOB).

I decided to download Internet Explorer figuring that this may work. However, I get the note on Microsoft's Mac site that "INTERNET EXPLORER FOR MAC NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD" and is no longer supported after 2005. So I googled in and found a version (IE 5.2.3 for Mac OSX) downloadable from http://www.pure-mac.com/webb.html. This solved the problem for DBS and Citibank, but not UOB. Don't ask me why. I do not know.

Then last week (20-25 March 2006) Apple did an automatic software update on a number of things on my Mac Intel. See here for details. One of the patches was for Safari. After that was installed, Safari worked fine on all three banking websites.

There is light at the end of the tunnel!!!!!!! I await for more updates for Mac Intels....

Getting started with Mac Intel...

OK so I bought this cool little box - having read that it had limitation because of the Intel Chips, but I figured I was not going to be using Adobe products at home.

Set up was a breeze. I had my old LCD BenQ FP767, my wireless Microsoft keyboard/mouse, and my home network cable broadband. I installed MS Office Mac with no probs.

Then the problems began to pop up:

Boston Acoustic Speakers: I have these BA735 Digital speakers that are awesome. I have saved my sound card from that old computer so that I can use them on my PC. HOwever, that PC broke so I want to use those speakers on my new Mac Mini. No luck. I have posted on the MacUserSG Forum and the Apple Forum for help. No answer yet.

Safari: The Safari version that came with it did not run well. ACtually the Flash could not play on it unless I changed the setting to "run on Rosetta" or something like that. I posted on MacUserSG and got help (see above). Anyhow, there is a download that has resolved this.

Internet Camera: Still the biggest pain the butt. I have these cool DLink wireless cameras (DCS5300G and DCS2100G) that I have set up to monitor my house for a year now. They have their own web server and streaming video servers (with sound!). So my wife and I and my extended family have been watching from various part of Singapore and the world. So guess what? I can't see it because the camera servers use ActiveX. So I have stumbled onto an open secret - ActiveX only works on Microsoft Windows PERIOD.

So off I go to look for Virtual PC for MAC to see if I can bypass this ActiveX thing. Guess what? Virual PC does not support Intel Mac... yet. (see here)

So next I went onto to my online banking...

PC or Mac?

It's March 9th, 2006. My PC at home broke down a few days ago and have been looking for a CPU. I am not sure why it broke, but I hoped it was not the hard drive. So I started looking around at Dell and other brands and the cost for a CPU with 1GB RAM, decent chip, graphic card, sound card, mobo, etc was SGD 1,200 to 1,500. Then it struck me.. Why not look at a Mac?

So I step into Funan Mall and went to the AppleCentre who my colleague RX recommended. And guess what they had just brought in?



And the spec?
MAC MINI CORE DUO
1.66GHz Intel Core Duo processor
2MB L2 Cache
667MHz Frontside Bus
1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 SDRAM)
80GB Serial ATA hard drive
Double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0
Apple Remote

The Price? SGD 1,488 - for something that is about 1/10th the size of a PC CPU!

But there is a price for being an early adopter. Cool as the thing is....