Readers of my FireMonkey white paper and attendees of the FireMonkey webinar has asked me about the configuration I use to build Mac applications. Rather than hosting Windows and Delphi in a virtual machine on a Mac (targeting the virtual machine host), when I got the first betas of Delphi XE2 for Mac I decided to follow a different root. Since I want to have the best performance for the main Windows computer, I decided to stay on Windows as my primary system. However the problem is you cannot (legally, and partially also technically) host a complete Mac system on a VM. So I did buy an actual Mac, picking a Mac Mini because it is cheaper that most other solutions and not bigger than a laptop. 

 

Of course, using the Mac Mini on the road with a full screen and a keyboard will be cumbersome. So what I do is to control the Mac Mini from my Windows system using a VNC client (the VNC remoting server is built into the Mac). So I don't need a screen or a keyboard or a mouse: I have a direct network cable (one of those with reversed connection that let's you hook two computers directly without a hub) connecting the Mac and the PC, the Mac has a fixed IP address, so I can just boot the Mac and log in from within the PC.

All good, but a small but relevant detail. If the Mac Mini boots without a video cable, it disables the graphic card optimization and the GPU. The mac works perfectly, but if you run a FireMonkey application (which is my main reason for having a Mac) it will just crash. However I found that plugging in a small cable (I have one of 10 inches) with no actual monitor is enough to enable the graphic card to its full power and its GPU. So that does my trick.

In other words, when I need the Mac I travel with the Mac Mini, the power cord, the direct Ethernet cable, and the short video cable.  Seems to work at best for me, but you might have further suggestions...