I blogged a few weeks ago about how I had recently purchased a MacBook Pro after having using Windows based PC’s my entire professional life. I knew going in that the transition to a Mac wasn’t going to come fast, I had spent years learning shortcuts and applications inside the Windows environment and honestly some things about the Mac are total opposite. While I still have continued to use my Dev1 and Dev2 machines for client projects and actual production, I have been tinkering around w/ the MacBook as much as possible to familiarize myself with it.
Going into this whole thing w/ the Mac, I knew that I would have to have some sort of virtual environment for me to run native Windows applications because some of my day to day applications don’t have a Mac friendly counterpart. Two cases in point, PHPRunner and WS-FTP Pro. Well, in the case of WS-FTP Pro, the manufacturer, IPSWITCH, has a Mac alternative called Fetch, but you can’t import from WS-FTP Pro into it. To the normal user, this probably wouldn’t be an issue, but for me, I have over 700 client FTP connections loaded in WS-FTP Pro and I wasn’t about to re-enter a single one of these by hand.
Well, I looked into Boot Camp, a free product from Apple that would basically allow me to boot up in Windows or Mac OS, but to me that just seems a little too much like work. I then checked out the VMWare product for the Mac and it didn’t impress me as much as the Parallels solution so I installed Parallels. A short while into the installation process it asked me to insert a Windows XP or Vista disk. I found an old XP Professional and loaded it up. The Parallels solution installed Windows XP on my machine and I now have a start bar docked w/ my native Mac applications as well as my IDE, PHPRunner, which also is a native Windows application. I also was able to install Office Professional 2003 very easily and now, instead of trying to wrestle with getting my .PST files from Outlook imported into Entourage, I can just run Outlook on my Mac.
The best thing about Parallels that I can tell right now is that it allows Windows and Apple based applications to coexist w/out having to boot out of one OS into another.
I've not used Parallels (I'd have to buy a copy of Windows to do it) nor do I use boot camp (same reason), but I think you made the right choice. For a couple years I had my Mac set-up to dual boot OSX and Ubuntu and eventually got rid of the Ubuntu partition because it was too much of a hassle to reboot. That's one of those Mac things, you get used to not rebooting your machine except after some software updates.
I've contemplated Parallels but the only justification I have is to see what my sites look like in IE and I've gotten so grouchy in my old age that I really don't care. My users who haven't downloaded Firefox, Chrome or Safari don't care what things look like or how well they work so I don't worry much about them.
LOL, if they are still using IE there's little we can do to help them. 🙂 On the Parallels thing, I have been very surprised how I can just stick my windows programs in and install them right onto this machine. Parallels doesn't run heavy in the background either, I can't tell a performance difference at all. I wish I would have made this switch a few years ago but I am hardheaded I guess.
Well, good news for me, thanks!