[APG Public List] Parallels on Mac OS X -- was Re: Publisher for Footnotes - Running Apps Not Native To Your Platform

[Meredith Hoffman / GenerationsWeb]

I'm cutting and pasting parts of two emails I recently posted to  
another genealogy list that I'm on, in response to Ray's long posting  
about running non-native apps on a Mac, because I'm a happy -- and  
totally not frustrated! -- user of Parallels on my MacBook Pro. Here's  
what I said there, with some of the salient points highlighted in red  
and underlined:

"For anyone who's interested, I also run Parallels on my MacBook Pro.  
I use it for three things -- my multitude of genealogy applications,  
Quicken (because the Mac version really doesn't cut it!), and my  
machine embroidery software....

It's easy to install, you can move back and forth with ease between  
the two platforms -- even cutting and pasting from one to the other.

I routinely run Legacy in Windows XP Pro on Parallels, working with  
files on my Mac desktop. The specs on the speed and performance of the  
Windows system is actually a bit better running under Parallels than  
it apparently is on an equivalently powered Dell PC; and it's a very  
rare occurrence, and means something's out of whack, to have the Mac  
performance affected at all.

I'm happy to answer any other questions anyone has."

and

"I've been on a Mac since 1985, and I started out with the first or  
second version of Reunion.

But as a publications consultant, my client work for many years meant  
that I had to run Word, Photoshop, Quark, etc. on Windows machines,  
and so for many years I was bi-platformal -- sometimes even carrying  
around two laptops, because I refused to give up my Mac for my  
personal use.

I loved Reunion -- for all the other good reasons that people do, and  
in addition because it enables Jewish calendar dating and Jewish date  
fields and computations -- and at the time, probably the best charts  
around....

But I started wanting better sourcing and project tracking, and  
Reunion didn't catch up with the various PC programs that were  
starting to appear that could do that. I started out on my PC with The  
Master Genealogist, and I loved what I could do with it, but as I got  
more into doing more and more genealogy, I found it too demanding --  
spending more time configuring the system than using it to do  
genealogy. I switched to Generations Liberty (which was somehow  
connected with the folks who made Reunion), but I eventually turned to  
Legacy, for its combination of ease of sourcing and project tracking,  
among other things.

Since -- as Julie mentions -- Legacy didn't do charts, and Reunion  
did, this was part of my incentive to start investigating running a  
Windows emulator -- and I started using MS Virtual PC so I could  
routinely move my gedcom's out of Legacy and into Reunion to do  
charts.... VIrtual PC was sluggish and prone to crashing, so I was  
still managing both a Windows and a Mac laptop, because it was too  
frustrating to try running all my clients applications on my Mac. When  
Parallels came out, I ported my Virtual PC Windows XP seamlessly to  
Parallels (I was actually floored how well they enabled the  
transfer!). Once I was running Parallels, I was able to ditch the  
second, PC laptop.

So, I mostly use Legacy, now. The charts are fine. I'm still moving  
gedcom's into and out of a variety of apps on occasion. I've found  
that I can't rely on the gedcoms to reliably convert secondary fields  
between programs, but for the primary fields, the conversion isn't a  
problem. I'll move into The Master Genealogist when I want to produce  
a variety of reports I've customized beyond the kind of customizations  
that are possible in Legacy."

Hope this helps.

And as I said, I'm happy to answer questions.... But take it from one  
happy user, running Parallels is easy to install, easy to use, does  
_not_ impact performance on the Mac side even when I have multiple  
Adobe programs running in OS X and both Legacy and The Master  
Genealogist running in Windows XPPro, and I can't imagine why anyone  
wouldn't want to take advantage of this.

--Meredith

Meredith Hoffman, M.A. Linguistics
GenerationsWeb / Plymouth, MA

JGSGB Publicity Chair
APG profile: http://tinyurl.com/genweb-apg
Co-editor JewishGen Success! Stories: www.jewishgen.org/jewishgen/testimonials
GenWeb blog: http://consultant.generationsweb.com

On 2010Sep13, at 11:38 PM, Ray Beere Johnson II wrote:

>     There are various ways - on _any_ platform - to set up virtual  
> machines which run another OS, so you can then use apps available  
> only for that OS. In most cases, you do _not_ have to reboot; you  
> can use one OS from within another - in a sort of "window". There is  
> always a technical hit; the severity depends on your machine's specs  
> and what you're trying to do. But for most machines, the hit isn't  
> severe enough to prevent you from making use of non-native tools.

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