Yes.
As for MacOffice, we never ported Access (would’ve been a nightmare porting relational dbase code and performance would’ve made Word 5.1 look like greased lightning) nor Visio. We will display Visio files and support the format under Insert | Picture, but there’s no OLE support. WinOffice folks work with Filemaker to ensure that the latest Access files can be handled by them and not simply reverse engineered.
ERage 2008 has many of these things now - Calendar and Scheduling, sharing, etc.
Out of curiosity (since there seems to be some real Mac guru’s in this thread) how do Windows games work using either an XP VM or other alternatives listed in this thread? Myself, the only thing I use Windows for is…games (I use VMWare to allow XP VM’s on my Linux box…and thus far all the games I have play fairly well, though some tweaking has been necessary occasionally). And I have quite an investment in games, so…
-XT
I’m not really a gamer these days, but I was looking at this for AutoCAD. Basically, to see the Mac’s actual video card and its 3-D support, you have to install Windows in a Boot Camp partition and use it natively. The video card in the VM is somewhat… generic. VMWare says that Fusion has ‘experimental support for DirectX 9.0 accelerated 3D graphics (without “shaders”)’, but I have not verified this. Maybe I’ll try installing Sims 2 on it this week.
Thanks for the info Sunspace. I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting a Mac…a lot of my clients have them and I like to have stuff to play with at home so I can get more proficient with it in front of the customer.
-XT
The funny thing is that the hardware differences are evaporating very quickly. The superiority of mac has always been in its OS, not so much in its hardware. We are tinkering in my shop right now with building what are affectionately called “Hackintoshes” running Mac OS on typical off the shelf PC hardware. We have one of our test machines right now running OS X on a machine that might cost $500-$600 retail including the OS, works fine. I am playing with it here and there just to become more MacOS fluent even though I have always preferred Windows myself.
Most annoying (for me), Mac Office 2008 no longer supports Visual Basic
I hope it’s true, but I can’t find any confirmation of it.
In bootcamp, they’re run at full native speed. The only thing I’ve played in my VM is WarCraft II, but only because there’s no non-Classic installer available for it on Mac OS X! Granted, it’s not a 3D game, but it does run flawlessly (and is targeted for processors that have to be 10 years old now). I’ve been meaning to try “Eve Online” to see if it’s more stable than the Cider version. Ah! Cider is a commercial WINE implementation that’s available to publishers to easily port their Windows games to the Mac OS. So for example, the Mac version of “Eve Online” is actually the Windows executable running on top of a Windows-compatible set of libraries. It’s definitely a 3D app, so it’d be interesting to see.
The thing is, I’m stuck on Windows at work, but can and do VPN into the work system. Entourage 2008 will do the very basics like emails and calendars, but I can’t share my contacts (super important) and can’t share my PST’s (also super important). So I either use the Outlook web client (severely reduced functionality under FireFox), or boot into Parallels and use IE7 for web client, or a native version of Outlook (none of which let me use my PST’s).
What do you mean about the WinOffice team using FileMaker?
You shouldn’t need a 3D video card for AutoCAD. I think I used to run AutoCAD under VirtualPC, even. And not every CAD or even 3D program necessarily needs a 3D graphics card, if it’s software rendered. For example, my company’s proprietary tooling CAD program actually runs better in Parallels than it does on my work-issued laptop, including all the fancy kinematics!
I’ll need it for the 3D rendering part… but that’s a couple of courses from now.
The Radeon X1600 video card in my Rev C Macbook Pro is specifically mentioned on the AutoCAD site as being supported for 3D, which is fortunate, considering I had no idea I was going to be studying AutoCAD or installing Windows when I bought this computer.
Thanks for that. I searched the linked site and here (PDF) is a link to the specific license supplement.
ETA: Interesting that this license says instead of installing directly on the device, you can run it in a virtual computer. I think that means you can’t - in a full dual-boot machine - use the same license on the same hardware in a virtual machine inside the non-Windows OS.
My understanding was that Apple does not license its OS for use on non-Mac hardware. While I’m sure that won’t stop people from doing it, it should stop shops from selling that configuration, right?
I don’t think that’s what it means. I think it means that you can’t do both simultaneously (ie, run it on hardware and in a virtual machine at the same time).
And, indeed, you physically can’t run the Boot Camp installation of Windows natively and in a virtual machine at the same time.
But if you installed Windows directly into a VM, not onto a Boot Camp partition, I see nothing that would stop you from copying that VM, and then running both copies. Of course, when both copies were started, Windows activation would eventually discover that something was amiss.
I’m actually pondering getting a second copy of Windows to run exclusively in a VM for basic tasks like connecting to work. I’ll do this if my Boot Camp copy needs to be so tailored for AutoCAD that it does not work well in a VM. I could see the same happening for games.
Possibly. One could sell the hardware, mention that it’s possible to run OSX with it, and not sell it with OSX installed, and be okay legally. The odds are, however, no one will do it, as the demand probably isn’t great enough to justify that. There are websites which discuss how to do it, though.
That is true. But the Applescript dictionaries were beefed up to ensure that most (admittedly not all) things that could be achieved in VB on the WIndows side have an equivalent in Applescript.
Simply that there are contacts in the group that allow the Filemaker folks to be able to make a converter for Access files without having to simply reverse engineer the thing. Kinda like our relationship with Apple to do certain things in their OS without developing in a vacuum.
It should be noted that one of the strengths of OSX is its inability to run Windows programs. Sure, it’s nice to be able to run your office programs, or the latest game, but if you can run those, then you can also run all of the malware to which Windows is vulnerable. While it is possible to protect a Windows system (running on any hardware) from malware, it’s harder than it is on a Mac.
Considering the bulk of what defines mac hardware these days is a case with an apple logo thats gonna be mighty tough to enforce.
and like it or not the vast majority of major virus problems come from poor browsing habits, running as administrator all the time, and the sheer volume of attacks on windows machines, not just from huge gaping holes in the OS. Macs are not immune to viriuses, there are just so few written that target macs the have an immense needle in a haystack defense.
If windows is booting from its own partition there is no reason I can think of that would make it any more difficult to protect than any other windows install.