Hello, again;
Today I discovered something new. I downloaded the beta of the next version of Parallels Desktop and boy, is it neat! They've taught it a new trick! Now you can run your Windows programs, and Parallels Desktop can be configured to hide all traces of Vista (or XP). It looks as if the Windows program is running directly on the OS X desktop. And yet, it is easy to access the Windows menu or taskbar if needed. The Windows program you are running can be noticed by a slight flicker if you move the window it is running in around on the desktop, but other than that, it seems to be as if it was any other program on the desktop. This is really cool - now I can have most any program I might need.
Not only this, but the documentation mentions the ability to import virtual machines created in VMware. If this works, I can bring over the Windows XP VM I created that way last year. Then I'll have access to XP if I need it.
Printing from the Parellels Desktop programs works with no problems.
I am a happy camper!
-Pop
Friday, February 16, 2007
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 6
Howdy, Friends;
This evening I prepared to make a slide show on DVD to show at my wife's birthday in a few days. I planned to use digital photos taken over the last several years, as well as a great many old photos which I would have to scan on my Microtek scanner. I was in a hurry; because of other things going on, I only had about an hour to scan 40 or 50 pictures.
Because I haven't had time to work with the scanner directly with the Mac, and all the needed software to acquire the pictures was already on my XP machine, I figured I would scan the pictures on the XP machine and then transfer them to the Mac via flashdrive or the network. So I logged into XP, fired up the scanner, and got started scanning pictures into Photoshop Elements. I was doing this by invoking Microtek's scanning software using the import function in Elements. I would prescan a sheet full of photos, window each one, and scan it into Elements. This worked as expected.
Then, because of text on the Microtek software page that made me think this would work, I tried holding down the shift key and making multiple selections before invoking the scan button. Bad idea. The Microtek software locked up. Elements locked up. After doing the usual 'Die, Die, Die' functions to kill the frozen programs, and telling the system that no, I don't want to send info to Microsoft, thankyouverymuch, twice, I tried logging off and logging back on, hoping that would let me proceed. Remember, I was in a blinding hurry. After logging back in, the system still wouldn't let me run Elements. Shut it all down and restart the machine, and wait, wait, wait for it to reboot. Login again and wait for everything to load. Why the heck is it even possible to make multiple selections in a situation where the program can't handle it? Stupid, stupid design.
Didn't make that mistake again. I finished scanning the pictures, one at at time. Moved pictures to USB flashdrive, then plugged that into the MacBook Pro. Used iPhoto to import the 90 plus photos. Using the default selection set (the pictures I just imported) I told iPhoto to make a slideshow (one button). I watched it cycle through once, then told it to burn a DVD. It sent the slideshow over to iDVD where I picked a theme, changed the title, and told it to make a DVD, which it did. I made two copies. Tested one of them, worked fine.
Notice the irony here. I've been using Windows since version 3.0 on top of DOS. That's a long time, friend. Many, many hours learning how to make Windows go. And in this scenario, just completed, Windows XP and Windows software gave me major hassles just to scan some pictures. The complicated part of the process, producing the slide show, worked flawlessly the first time on the Mac. On a system I've used for just a few weeks. Using software I was pretty unfamiliar with. Using iDVD for the very first time ever. Amazing - again!
At this point, I'm pretty much convinced that I am not going back to Windows except as necessary to do my job. Unfortunately, to do what I do, I will have to be intimately familiar with Vista, as I am already well versed on XP. But I am now pretty well convinced that OS X is the way to go. It's not perfect - but so far it sure is a lot less painful than XP. And Vista is built on top of an XP foundation, so this type of problem isn't likeley to go away in Vista. On the other hand, realistically, sooner or later I'm going to have problems with OS X - but I haven't yet.
Y'all have a good evening!
-Pop
This evening I prepared to make a slide show on DVD to show at my wife's birthday in a few days. I planned to use digital photos taken over the last several years, as well as a great many old photos which I would have to scan on my Microtek scanner. I was in a hurry; because of other things going on, I only had about an hour to scan 40 or 50 pictures.
Because I haven't had time to work with the scanner directly with the Mac, and all the needed software to acquire the pictures was already on my XP machine, I figured I would scan the pictures on the XP machine and then transfer them to the Mac via flashdrive or the network. So I logged into XP, fired up the scanner, and got started scanning pictures into Photoshop Elements. I was doing this by invoking Microtek's scanning software using the import function in Elements. I would prescan a sheet full of photos, window each one, and scan it into Elements. This worked as expected.
Then, because of text on the Microtek software page that made me think this would work, I tried holding down the shift key and making multiple selections before invoking the scan button. Bad idea. The Microtek software locked up. Elements locked up. After doing the usual 'Die, Die, Die' functions to kill the frozen programs, and telling the system that no, I don't want to send info to Microsoft, thankyouverymuch, twice, I tried logging off and logging back on, hoping that would let me proceed. Remember, I was in a blinding hurry. After logging back in, the system still wouldn't let me run Elements. Shut it all down and restart the machine, and wait, wait, wait for it to reboot. Login again and wait for everything to load. Why the heck is it even possible to make multiple selections in a situation where the program can't handle it? Stupid, stupid design.
Didn't make that mistake again. I finished scanning the pictures, one at at time. Moved pictures to USB flashdrive, then plugged that into the MacBook Pro. Used iPhoto to import the 90 plus photos. Using the default selection set (the pictures I just imported) I told iPhoto to make a slideshow (one button). I watched it cycle through once, then told it to burn a DVD. It sent the slideshow over to iDVD where I picked a theme, changed the title, and told it to make a DVD, which it did. I made two copies. Tested one of them, worked fine.
Notice the irony here. I've been using Windows since version 3.0 on top of DOS. That's a long time, friend. Many, many hours learning how to make Windows go. And in this scenario, just completed, Windows XP and Windows software gave me major hassles just to scan some pictures. The complicated part of the process, producing the slide show, worked flawlessly the first time on the Mac. On a system I've used for just a few weeks. Using software I was pretty unfamiliar with. Using iDVD for the very first time ever. Amazing - again!
At this point, I'm pretty much convinced that I am not going back to Windows except as necessary to do my job. Unfortunately, to do what I do, I will have to be intimately familiar with Vista, as I am already well versed on XP. But I am now pretty well convinced that OS X is the way to go. It's not perfect - but so far it sure is a lot less painful than XP. And Vista is built on top of an XP foundation, so this type of problem isn't likeley to go away in Vista. On the other hand, realistically, sooner or later I'm going to have problems with OS X - but I haven't yet.
Y'all have a good evening!
-Pop
Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 5
Howdy, Folks;
The transition is going well. If you're willing to learn the interface differences between Windows and the Mac, go for it.
As mentioned before, I am running Vista Business in a virtual machine (VM) under Mac OS X. Into that VM I installed my primary Windows programs, including my cad software. (Note to anybody interested: I did this legally in every case, either by removing the software from the old machine, or because the license allows it. Yes, you do have to have a license for software running in a virtual machine.) It works flawlessly, either in a window on the OS X desktop or full screen. When not running full screen, copy and paste between Vista apps and OS X apps works just the way it should. Running the cad software, I noticed the view translations are a bit slower than on my other machine, and I expected this because of the lack of hardware video acceleration in the VM; but it is still perfectly usable, and the speed of the program over-all is just as fast as it was on my old machine, maybe faster. Ultimate usability of the cad software remains to be seen, however - I haven't had the opportunity to load any really big assemblies into it. Running my PIM, Info Select in Vista in a window on OS X works just as well as running it directly on the desktop of Vista. Also note that the Parallels VM has the ability to pause the VM - this basically puts Vista and everything running in it on hold, and removes it from the running processes of OS X - instantly.
One major feature to notice about Parallels Desktop - you can back up the entire virtual machine to disk. If something gets screwed up in your VM, you can restore your backup and be back on line in 10-15 minutes. So build your virtual machine, get it just like you want it, and back it up. Then back your data up daily, elsewhere.
Running the Mac's activity monitor shows that even when running the cad program in the VM - Vista, I never maxed out the CPU or memory. This shows that the machine has the resources to do the job.
As far as Vista itself goes, well, it seems pretty smooth. I installed the shareware version of Eset's NOD32 antivirus (recommended), since I'm not willing to run Windows connected to the internet without antivirus protection. Vista has a nice desktop, and I like what they've done with Windows Explorer. The feeling I get, though, is that Vista is almost a knock-off of Mac OS X. Most (maybe all) of the interesting new features in Vista have been in OS X for over a year, although all of it is new to me. I do not see as many security pop-ups as I expected to from what I had read before. Vista did better than XP at finding the XP network, but it wasn't as simple as it was on the Mac. The short of it is, Vista is better than XP (based on a few hours of fooling around with it) but so far as I can see, there's nothing in Vista that wasn't already in Mac OS X. And OS X is about to get a new version, with several new features, in the next couple of months.
Am I being biased about this? Possibly. I've been beating my head against Windows for a long, long time - and I'm ready for a rest. So far, the Mac has performed flawlessly, and the bells and whistles are awesome. It's pretty much (at present) the same bells and whistles that are in Vista. But on every previous version of Windows, it wasn't uncommon for me to spend an hour a day trying to make it do what i needed it to do. So far, with Mac OS X, that hasn't happened at all. The only time-consuming part of making this transition has been learning the differences in the interface.
One thing that took some getting used to on the Mac is mounting and dismounting drives. You don't just eject a disk at the drive - you eject it from the desktop by dragging it to the trashcan (and there are a couple of other ways to do this). One thing I really, really like is that software you install comes as a disk image file. Once installed, software written for the Mac is usually all stored in a single file- which acts as a disk image. On Windows, an installed application may have hundreds to thousands of files associated with it, some in the Windows directory, some in the application directory, some who knows where? On the Mac, the entire application is, in most cases, in one file. To uninstall the program, you drop it in the trash. Elegant. The exception to all this, of course, is Windows programs that have been ported to the Mac. Which I am avoiding whenever possible.
Another thing I noticed is that a lot of good Mac software is relatively inexpensive. A good example of this - the Parallel Desktop for Mac, which is the VM software - $79. Go price VMware Workstation, or whatever the current version is. Quite a bit more, and doesn't work as well. Info Select for Windows costs $250 for a new license. On the Mac side, Omni Outliner is in the box, but you can buy the Pro version for $79. The excellent Circus Ponies Notebook program sells for $50. This is nice. And I haven't needed to purchase Zone Alarm, or antivirus software, and spam turns out to be a non-event.
So, things are going well, still. And I'm still impressed by the Mac, and OS X.
Y'all have a nice day!
-Pop
The transition is going well. If you're willing to learn the interface differences between Windows and the Mac, go for it.
As mentioned before, I am running Vista Business in a virtual machine (VM) under Mac OS X. Into that VM I installed my primary Windows programs, including my cad software. (Note to anybody interested: I did this legally in every case, either by removing the software from the old machine, or because the license allows it. Yes, you do have to have a license for software running in a virtual machine.) It works flawlessly, either in a window on the OS X desktop or full screen. When not running full screen, copy and paste between Vista apps and OS X apps works just the way it should. Running the cad software, I noticed the view translations are a bit slower than on my other machine, and I expected this because of the lack of hardware video acceleration in the VM; but it is still perfectly usable, and the speed of the program over-all is just as fast as it was on my old machine, maybe faster. Ultimate usability of the cad software remains to be seen, however - I haven't had the opportunity to load any really big assemblies into it. Running my PIM, Info Select in Vista in a window on OS X works just as well as running it directly on the desktop of Vista. Also note that the Parallels VM has the ability to pause the VM - this basically puts Vista and everything running in it on hold, and removes it from the running processes of OS X - instantly.
One major feature to notice about Parallels Desktop - you can back up the entire virtual machine to disk. If something gets screwed up in your VM, you can restore your backup and be back on line in 10-15 minutes. So build your virtual machine, get it just like you want it, and back it up. Then back your data up daily, elsewhere.
Running the Mac's activity monitor shows that even when running the cad program in the VM - Vista, I never maxed out the CPU or memory. This shows that the machine has the resources to do the job.
As far as Vista itself goes, well, it seems pretty smooth. I installed the shareware version of Eset's NOD32 antivirus (recommended), since I'm not willing to run Windows connected to the internet without antivirus protection. Vista has a nice desktop, and I like what they've done with Windows Explorer. The feeling I get, though, is that Vista is almost a knock-off of Mac OS X. Most (maybe all) of the interesting new features in Vista have been in OS X for over a year, although all of it is new to me. I do not see as many security pop-ups as I expected to from what I had read before. Vista did better than XP at finding the XP network, but it wasn't as simple as it was on the Mac. The short of it is, Vista is better than XP (based on a few hours of fooling around with it) but so far as I can see, there's nothing in Vista that wasn't already in Mac OS X. And OS X is about to get a new version, with several new features, in the next couple of months.
Am I being biased about this? Possibly. I've been beating my head against Windows for a long, long time - and I'm ready for a rest. So far, the Mac has performed flawlessly, and the bells and whistles are awesome. It's pretty much (at present) the same bells and whistles that are in Vista. But on every previous version of Windows, it wasn't uncommon for me to spend an hour a day trying to make it do what i needed it to do. So far, with Mac OS X, that hasn't happened at all. The only time-consuming part of making this transition has been learning the differences in the interface.
One thing that took some getting used to on the Mac is mounting and dismounting drives. You don't just eject a disk at the drive - you eject it from the desktop by dragging it to the trashcan (and there are a couple of other ways to do this). One thing I really, really like is that software you install comes as a disk image file. Once installed, software written for the Mac is usually all stored in a single file- which acts as a disk image. On Windows, an installed application may have hundreds to thousands of files associated with it, some in the Windows directory, some in the application directory, some who knows where? On the Mac, the entire application is, in most cases, in one file. To uninstall the program, you drop it in the trash. Elegant. The exception to all this, of course, is Windows programs that have been ported to the Mac. Which I am avoiding whenever possible.
Another thing I noticed is that a lot of good Mac software is relatively inexpensive. A good example of this - the Parallel Desktop for Mac, which is the VM software - $79. Go price VMware Workstation, or whatever the current version is. Quite a bit more, and doesn't work as well. Info Select for Windows costs $250 for a new license. On the Mac side, Omni Outliner is in the box, but you can buy the Pro version for $79. The excellent Circus Ponies Notebook program sells for $50. This is nice. And I haven't needed to purchase Zone Alarm, or antivirus software, and spam turns out to be a non-event.
So, things are going well, still. And I'm still impressed by the Mac, and OS X.
Y'all have a nice day!
-Pop
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 4
Howdy;
Amazing. It's still going well. I did encounter one glitch on the Mac, however. This is related to the Logitech VX Revolution mouse I installed in Chapter 3. It seems that if the mouse looses communication with it's USB key, OS X turns grey and calmly informs you that it needs to reboot. This happened twice before I figured out what was going on. Note that OS X very gracefully recovered, no fuss, no muss, just need to reboot. I am somewhat surprised, even so, to find that something like this can force a reboot in OS X. And I am seriously annoyed at Logitech's crappy documentation on this product, which is so unlike their normal quality. Note that this is a subjective interpretation of what is going on and not definitive.
The other new news - this afternoon I bought a full copy of Windows Vista Business. First, I installed the Parallel Desktop software I had previously purchased, told it to look for updates, updated it, created a virtual machine using the default settings for Vista, and installed Vista. This was amazingly easy! Everything without fail worked on the first try. I have used VMware Workstation in the past, with XP as the host OS and another (full, purchased) copy of XP in the virtual machine, as a means of backnig up my entire programming environment. I also used VMware with Linux in a virtual machine, to experiment with it. So I've had some experience with other virtual machine software. On a 3 Ghz XP machine with 1 GB ram and 160 GB disk, VMware was always a bit jerky and slow.
This Parallel Desktop is far and away better than VMware, at least on this machine and in this environment. You can run it in a window, or you can run it full screen; there's a nifty transition where the entire screen rotates as if it is on the surface of a cube - neat eye candy. I installed my favorite PIM into Vista, following the setup of the shared directory which is used for passing files back and forth between OS X and Vista. Switching between the OS's is intuitive. Speed is excellent - I haven't installed any really resource intensive tasks in Vista yet, but running Info Select (the aforementioned PIM), the performance hit from running Vista in a VM is undetectable. Amazing. Smooth mouse motion, and so far, everything I've tried works. I immediately had internet access in Vista via OS X and Airport. This is the first time I have used a virtual machine within which the performance is such that it will actually be NOT frustrating to use. The only shortcoming I see is that, so far at least, the Parallels Desktop does not appear to allow Vista to run the Aero interface, probably because of lack of hardware video accelleration in the virtual machine.
I am not yet ready to offer an opinion about Vista in depth, but with a couple of hours behind me, I feel a bit unimpressed. The interface is smoother, and a lot of stuff has been moved and rearranged. The wallpaper is prettier than in XP, for some reason. The security wizard (or whatever you call it) covers firewall and spyware detection, but I don't see any direct mention or advice regarding anti-virus software. I will have a better idea after I've used it for a few days.
Here's the synopsis so far. MacBook Pro is a marvelous piece of hardware, OS X is just mind-blowing marvelous after using XP since it came out, and Vista is pretty but does not seem (at first glance) to have anything on OS X. And now I have a laptop that I can theoretically run any piece of software that is either OS X or Vista compatible. Without being annoyed by performance issues. This is not trivial.
The saga continues...
-Pop
Amazing. It's still going well. I did encounter one glitch on the Mac, however. This is related to the Logitech VX Revolution mouse I installed in Chapter 3. It seems that if the mouse looses communication with it's USB key, OS X turns grey and calmly informs you that it needs to reboot. This happened twice before I figured out what was going on. Note that OS X very gracefully recovered, no fuss, no muss, just need to reboot. I am somewhat surprised, even so, to find that something like this can force a reboot in OS X. And I am seriously annoyed at Logitech's crappy documentation on this product, which is so unlike their normal quality. Note that this is a subjective interpretation of what is going on and not definitive.
The other new news - this afternoon I bought a full copy of Windows Vista Business. First, I installed the Parallel Desktop software I had previously purchased, told it to look for updates, updated it, created a virtual machine using the default settings for Vista, and installed Vista. This was amazingly easy! Everything without fail worked on the first try. I have used VMware Workstation in the past, with XP as the host OS and another (full, purchased) copy of XP in the virtual machine, as a means of backnig up my entire programming environment. I also used VMware with Linux in a virtual machine, to experiment with it. So I've had some experience with other virtual machine software. On a 3 Ghz XP machine with 1 GB ram and 160 GB disk, VMware was always a bit jerky and slow.
This Parallel Desktop is far and away better than VMware, at least on this machine and in this environment. You can run it in a window, or you can run it full screen; there's a nifty transition where the entire screen rotates as if it is on the surface of a cube - neat eye candy. I installed my favorite PIM into Vista, following the setup of the shared directory which is used for passing files back and forth between OS X and Vista. Switching between the OS's is intuitive. Speed is excellent - I haven't installed any really resource intensive tasks in Vista yet, but running Info Select (the aforementioned PIM), the performance hit from running Vista in a VM is undetectable. Amazing. Smooth mouse motion, and so far, everything I've tried works. I immediately had internet access in Vista via OS X and Airport. This is the first time I have used a virtual machine within which the performance is such that it will actually be NOT frustrating to use. The only shortcoming I see is that, so far at least, the Parallels Desktop does not appear to allow Vista to run the Aero interface, probably because of lack of hardware video accelleration in the virtual machine.
I am not yet ready to offer an opinion about Vista in depth, but with a couple of hours behind me, I feel a bit unimpressed. The interface is smoother, and a lot of stuff has been moved and rearranged. The wallpaper is prettier than in XP, for some reason. The security wizard (or whatever you call it) covers firewall and spyware detection, but I don't see any direct mention or advice regarding anti-virus software. I will have a better idea after I've used it for a few days.
Here's the synopsis so far. MacBook Pro is a marvelous piece of hardware, OS X is just mind-blowing marvelous after using XP since it came out, and Vista is pretty but does not seem (at first glance) to have anything on OS X. And now I have a laptop that I can theoretically run any piece of software that is either OS X or Vista compatible. Without being annoyed by performance issues. This is not trivial.
The saga continues...
-Pop
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 3a
Howdy Everyone -
Just finished previous post. Decided to do something useful on my old XP machine, and guess what? It had failed to log off last time it was used because some blasted program or other decided it didn't want to obey the shut-down command. It took several cancel-this and terminate-that and log-off, blast it! commands before I could get it to log off, so I could log it back on under my user profile. This kind of stuff happens all the time on XP. And people seem to think this kind of aggravation is normal!
Nothing like that has happened on the Mac yet. One hopes that will continue to be the case.
Just thought you might be interested.
-Pop
Just finished previous post. Decided to do something useful on my old XP machine, and guess what? It had failed to log off last time it was used because some blasted program or other decided it didn't want to obey the shut-down command. It took several cancel-this and terminate-that and log-off, blast it! commands before I could get it to log off, so I could log it back on under my user profile. This kind of stuff happens all the time on XP. And people seem to think this kind of aggravation is normal!
Nothing like that has happened on the Mac yet. One hopes that will continue to be the case.
Just thought you might be interested.
-Pop
Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 3
Howdy, Everybody!
Things are going great with the transition. Hooking the Mac up to the network at my Day Job was a no-brainer. I had an old 5-port hub already, so all i needed was a couple of ethernet patch cables to split the wire in my office between my desktop and the new MacBook Pro. I plugged it in, and was surfing the internet within instants. I browsed the network, identified myself, and it mounted the shared directories I needed. I should probably mention that it is a peer-to-peer network with everything else running XP. I was also able to print without any problems. On my XP machine I shared my HP Deskjet, then went and found it on the Mac and I was in business.
It's amazing. We upgraded a couple of machines on our network from Windows 2000 to XP partly to make it easier to get them all to talk to each other. Here I go, plug in a Mac, and I'm cooking within five minutes, tops. It blows me away how much easier this was than if it had been an XP machine.
The Mac is multi-homed, too. I don't have to do anything at all to switch between work and home. I do manually turn Airport on and off on the laptop to save battery life, but if it is turned on, it works. When I get to work, I plug in the ethernet cable before I wake the laptop up, and it is transparent.
You're probably wondering about file compatibility. Transfering files is no problem. OS X handles PDF files natively, as far as I can see. It is far easier to create a PDF than on XP. You basically print something, and select 'save as PDF' option. This requires extra software ($$) on XP. As far as office files, I bought iWork 06 when I bought the machine, and it is supposed to open Doc files; but I haven't tested it yet. So far, I do not have an analog of Excel, but there are a couple of programs out there that claim to be competent spreadsheets that can open XLS files. I haven't gone there yet. There is also a version of Microsoft Office trial version that comes on the machine, but I haven't played with it yet - I'm trying to avoid it. File compatibilty of common types like JPG or TXT are of course no problem.
Last night I bought a Logitech VX Revolution mouse for the laptop, to use when I have a desk handy. The instructions were less than informative. For the Mac, you have to download the Logitech software - it's not on the CD. The other thing that I found odd was that there was no clue in the User's Guide or on the mouse itself as to which way to insert the battery. I looked it over carefully and could not find a polarity mark. Logitech makes the best mice out there, as far as I am concerned, so these issues were a surprise to me. The software also required a reboot, unlike most Mac software I have installed so far. But once I got to that point, it does seem to be working well.
I am still exploring the software that comes on the Mac. I really like the integration of the Address Book with other applications. The Mail program makes it really easy to select alternate email addresses if you want to send a mail to a non-default address for somebody. Other applications seem to use the Address Book, too. One of the really nifty features of the BeOS operating system was an actual data type in the file system for contacts, that was shared by any program using the system. One of my pet peeves of Windows is that there is no similar facility. This would be such a useful thing to have- no more retyping or exporting/importing contacts between different email or PIM programs; but not in Windows. The Address Book in OS X seems to be pretty close to this, with many programs able to access the data. For instance, Notebook has the capability of associating a contact with an entry in the Notebook. (Notebook is a shareware Personal Information Manager). This interoperability seems to be missing from Windows, probably due to Microsoft's desire to sell you a copy of Outlook.
I have (for the moment) settled on Safari as my browser. It's native to OS X, and so far at least, I have had no funky website problems with it, once I had downloaded and installed the Flash plug-in. It works pretty much the same as FireFox so why not use it? But I do have Firefox installed in case I come to a site that won't work in Safari.
I could go on for quite a while. Looking back, I see that I keep using phrases like 'no-brainer' and 'working well' and 'no problem'. I do have to say that this is really looking good so far. The only reason I can think of at this point why anyone would hold back with going with a Mac is if there is some program out there that doesn't have a Mac equivalent. There are a few; for instance, at my Day Job, I use the Solid Edge cad system daily, and it has no analog on the Mac. There are cad systems out there for the Mac, but the company has this investment in Solid Edge (years of data accumulation), and so far as I could find, none of the available OS X compatible cad products approach Solid Edge in capability.
Which brings us to what comes next. I bought a copy of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. This product is a virtual machine emulator for the Mac. You run Parellels Desktop and install an operating system in the virtual machine, which thinks it is running stand-alone but is actually running inside the emulator on the Mac. So in the next few days I will be buying a copy of Windows Vista to install in Parallels Desktop on my Mac. I have used VMWare in the past on my desktop, so I have some idea of what I'm getting into. I'm hoping this Mac has enough horespower to make it practical, what with the dual processors and 3 GB of ram and everything.
Why am I doing this? Well, primarily for training - I want to learn the ins & outs of Vista because I usually wind up trying to help other people a lot, and the only way to know how is to go there first. Secondarily, I want to see if it's really a practical alternative for those programs mentioned above that won't run on the Mac. If I can run Solid Edge under Vista inside of OS X on a Mac with acceptable performance, that will really say something about the practicality of the transition to the Mac. If I can also run the company's (Day Job) accounting program as well, then there are no obstacles whatever to moving any user in our company to the Mac.
I'll let you know how it goes... See you next time!
-Pop
Things are going great with the transition. Hooking the Mac up to the network at my Day Job was a no-brainer. I had an old 5-port hub already, so all i needed was a couple of ethernet patch cables to split the wire in my office between my desktop and the new MacBook Pro. I plugged it in, and was surfing the internet within instants. I browsed the network, identified myself, and it mounted the shared directories I needed. I should probably mention that it is a peer-to-peer network with everything else running XP. I was also able to print without any problems. On my XP machine I shared my HP Deskjet, then went and found it on the Mac and I was in business.
It's amazing. We upgraded a couple of machines on our network from Windows 2000 to XP partly to make it easier to get them all to talk to each other. Here I go, plug in a Mac, and I'm cooking within five minutes, tops. It blows me away how much easier this was than if it had been an XP machine.
The Mac is multi-homed, too. I don't have to do anything at all to switch between work and home. I do manually turn Airport on and off on the laptop to save battery life, but if it is turned on, it works. When I get to work, I plug in the ethernet cable before I wake the laptop up, and it is transparent.
You're probably wondering about file compatibility. Transfering files is no problem. OS X handles PDF files natively, as far as I can see. It is far easier to create a PDF than on XP. You basically print something, and select 'save as PDF' option. This requires extra software ($$) on XP. As far as office files, I bought iWork 06 when I bought the machine, and it is supposed to open Doc files; but I haven't tested it yet. So far, I do not have an analog of Excel, but there are a couple of programs out there that claim to be competent spreadsheets that can open XLS files. I haven't gone there yet. There is also a version of Microsoft Office trial version that comes on the machine, but I haven't played with it yet - I'm trying to avoid it. File compatibilty of common types like JPG or TXT are of course no problem.
Last night I bought a Logitech VX Revolution mouse for the laptop, to use when I have a desk handy. The instructions were less than informative. For the Mac, you have to download the Logitech software - it's not on the CD. The other thing that I found odd was that there was no clue in the User's Guide or on the mouse itself as to which way to insert the battery. I looked it over carefully and could not find a polarity mark. Logitech makes the best mice out there, as far as I am concerned, so these issues were a surprise to me. The software also required a reboot, unlike most Mac software I have installed so far. But once I got to that point, it does seem to be working well.
I am still exploring the software that comes on the Mac. I really like the integration of the Address Book with other applications. The Mail program makes it really easy to select alternate email addresses if you want to send a mail to a non-default address for somebody. Other applications seem to use the Address Book, too. One of the really nifty features of the BeOS operating system was an actual data type in the file system for contacts, that was shared by any program using the system. One of my pet peeves of Windows is that there is no similar facility. This would be such a useful thing to have- no more retyping or exporting/importing contacts between different email or PIM programs; but not in Windows. The Address Book in OS X seems to be pretty close to this, with many programs able to access the data. For instance, Notebook has the capability of associating a contact with an entry in the Notebook. (Notebook is a shareware Personal Information Manager). This interoperability seems to be missing from Windows, probably due to Microsoft's desire to sell you a copy of Outlook.
I have (for the moment) settled on Safari as my browser. It's native to OS X, and so far at least, I have had no funky website problems with it, once I had downloaded and installed the Flash plug-in. It works pretty much the same as FireFox so why not use it? But I do have Firefox installed in case I come to a site that won't work in Safari.
I could go on for quite a while. Looking back, I see that I keep using phrases like 'no-brainer' and 'working well' and 'no problem'. I do have to say that this is really looking good so far. The only reason I can think of at this point why anyone would hold back with going with a Mac is if there is some program out there that doesn't have a Mac equivalent. There are a few; for instance, at my Day Job, I use the Solid Edge cad system daily, and it has no analog on the Mac. There are cad systems out there for the Mac, but the company has this investment in Solid Edge (years of data accumulation), and so far as I could find, none of the available OS X compatible cad products approach Solid Edge in capability.
Which brings us to what comes next. I bought a copy of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. This product is a virtual machine emulator for the Mac. You run Parellels Desktop and install an operating system in the virtual machine, which thinks it is running stand-alone but is actually running inside the emulator on the Mac. So in the next few days I will be buying a copy of Windows Vista to install in Parallels Desktop on my Mac. I have used VMWare in the past on my desktop, so I have some idea of what I'm getting into. I'm hoping this Mac has enough horespower to make it practical, what with the dual processors and 3 GB of ram and everything.
Why am I doing this? Well, primarily for training - I want to learn the ins & outs of Vista because I usually wind up trying to help other people a lot, and the only way to know how is to go there first. Secondarily, I want to see if it's really a practical alternative for those programs mentioned above that won't run on the Mac. If I can run Solid Edge under Vista inside of OS X on a Mac with acceptable performance, that will really say something about the practicality of the transition to the Mac. If I can also run the company's (Day Job) accounting program as well, then there are no obstacles whatever to moving any user in our company to the Mac.
I'll let you know how it goes... See you next time!
-Pop
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)