In which ZDNet Australia's reviews editor plays with Microsoft Mac apps, learns some interesting new terms from the Mac community, and makes a surprising swerve to the dark side.If you haven't read the previous articles in this series, they can be found here:
A month with a Mac: Week One: The little things
What happens when you make a long-time PC worker use a Mac? First of all, all the little differences come to the fore.
A month with the Mac: Week Two: Apple-cations
Is the Mac application-starved? Our intrepid reviews editor investigates in the second part of our special Mac feature.
Now, if you have read the previous two entries, the more observant amongst you might be noticing that week three seems to be happening at the end of week four. There's a very simple reason for this; your intrepid reviews editor fell sick for the vast majority of week three, and unless your idea of a good feature is me writing about the rather unusual green things that were forcibly taking up residence in my lungs, it seemed wise to put the Mac writing on the shelf for a while. If anyone is interested in me writing about green things in lungs, by the way, just drop me a line.
What having two weeks break in-between columns did allow me to do was generate a reasonable quantity of reader feedback. Some of you were appalled, some of you were impressed, and more than a few decided to inform me that I was, in fact, descended from some kind of unkempt and diseased howler monkey, except in less flattering terms. I'll direct the persons responsible for those less than flattering emails to my colleague Josh Mehlman's column on OS fundamentalists, which quite neatly sums up my mood regarding your missives.
This week I've been playing around with Mac applications. As noted last week, the perceived lack of Mac applications puts many a PC user off, although as I've seen, for the vast majority of computer users there are more than enough applications out there to cover most uses. I've concentrated mainly on the really obvious ones with PC parallels, so if you wanted to know about the Mac CAD market, you've sadly come to the wrong place. These aren't intended to be full-on reviews, but more observations from the PC side on the viability of working on a Mac, as I stated all the way back in week one.
Mac Office v.X
It's got a silly name, and as noted last (ahem) week, it comes in the stupidest application packaging known to man. Having said that, and bearing in mind that Microsoft hasn't updated its Mac Office all that recently, I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I could move documents between versions of Office -- as long as I was working in Word, Excel or Powerpoint. There's no Mac version of Access -- and Apple owns Access competitor Filemaker. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
One thing that I did notice with Word v.X is that I almost automatically had to zoom the screen size up a little to see things properly, although that could just be my screen resolution. Office v.X also comes with what could be termed the Mac version of Outlook, Entourage, although I haven't investigated that, as my existing mail file weighs in on the multi-gigabyte scale, and as such has remained on my PC.
Turning to the dark side
OK, here's the bit where I may offend the real Mac zealots. This week I also installed Windows XP on my iMac, via Virtual PC for Mac 6.1. Not that long ago, Microsoft bought out Virtual PC maker Connectix, a stunningly clever move for a company that, after all, sells operating systems, not PC hardware. Well, there's the XBox, but that's a bit different anyway. Getting Mac users to install Virtual PC gives Microsoft yet another market that can be sold Microsoft OSes, and at the same time it could be seen to weaken the Mac's position; why buy a Mac that you're going to run PC software on anyway? Microsoft also uses Office v.X to plug Virtual PC (or vice versa) in offering Office v.X Professional Edition, which bundles both together.
I was curious to see, however, if the reality lived up to the hype. Installation of Windows XP was no more or less painful than it always is, but the biggest drawback to running XP on the Mac (or at least, on my particular iMac) is that it sucks up system resources like nobody's business. Those of a sarcastic bent may insert the words "So, it's just like every other Microsoft OS, then" here.
As an aside, while the variety of waiting clock animations and spinning circles on the Mac annoys me no end, I must admit that I'm impressed with how many applications I can keep on the boil on the Mac; if I tried the same thing on a PC I'd be staring down the unfriendly end of a BSOD before I could say "forgot to save my work, bugger..."
Possibly running an MS OS with smaller system requirements -- say, Windows 3.11 -- could improve Virtual PC's performance, although what I'd do with Windows 3.11 is anyone's guess. It's also somewhat annoying that the best part of an integrated Windows/Mac installation only becomes available once the Virtual PC additions are installed; I can't for the life of me work out why they're not the default, as without them dock integration and copying features don't work properly.
What did work properly, however, was something I'd been searching for since week one; a Mac version of NoteTab Light. Well, OK, this was the PC version of NoteTab Light running on a Mac, but it's very nearly the same thing. What it does demonstrate, however, is that (in most cases) Mac users should be able to do everything that PC users can, whether it be via native applications or emulation of the PC platform. I'm not sure I'd want to run any graphics-heavy applications via virtual PC, but for smaller applications it works quite well, as long as you remember to use the command and control keys when you switch between operating systems.
Next week: The stunning conclusion: Is the Mac for me?
Alex Kidman is ZDNet Australia's Reviews and Gamespot Editor. You may send hate mail, threats and, if you're feeling particularly wacky, encouragement to edit@zdnet.com.au.
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