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Jason Barker is Currently...
Computer Status
Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 9:40 PM by Jason Barker
I have largely transitioned from my old PC to my new Apple. There are still bumps in the process, but I'm becoming increasingly familiar with OS X, and have found a number of open source and freeware applications to replace the ones on which I relied on my PC (in the future I may give a rundown of these applications, as I did on the old blog of the applications I used on my PC for developing Bible studies).
The only primary development software I currently have for the Mac is Macromedia Director MX 2004 - I am waiting for Adobe Creative Suite 2 with Flash 8 to be delivered. Until these arrive, I am able to run Windows on my Mac, and thus can use the older versions of those products for basic development (as well as working on legacy projects like the Youth Worker 3 application for the Department of Youth Ministry).
The fact that the Mac has Intel processors, therefore allowing me to run both OS X and Windows on the same computer, is a tremendous breakthrough for people like me. By using Parallels Desktop to create a virtual machine running Windows, I am able to have both OSs on the same screen, making it easy to use whatever application is needed for a task. At this point, I've been amazed by how well Parallels works. Installing Windows was flawless, and I've been able to run all the applications I installed into the Windows VM (my beloved Fritz 9 chess program requires having the disk in the drive, but otherwise there have been no noticeable problems).
At the same time, Parallels isn't perfect; it uses a significant amount of memory (I've allocated 1 GB of RAM out of 2 GB to improve the use of Photoshop and Director MX), and its hardware support is limited (the current version does not support such things as Firewire, disc burning, or 3d graphics, and it reads USB ports as 1.1 rather than 2.0).
Edited on: Thursday, February 01, 2007 5:25 PMPosted in Jason Barker