| The many new faces of Mac |
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| Written by Darryn Lowe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 20 September 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The simple answer is that with the Intel Macs we are in a better position than we were with PowerPC Macs. With PPC we had emulation. It was slow, but it did pull off the job. With Intel we have 3 options. Yes 3 options for getting Windows applications to run on Macs! This review looks at all three methods. They are in order of what I call the "cool factor" (which basically means sexiness factor too) and I've ordered them from what I think is the least to most coolest. Boot Camp
Many call it strange that Apple would develop an application that allows people to run Windows natively on their Macs...but I'm with the few that call it a great marketing coup.
People come along looking for a nice Windows machine that is simple to use and can run their old applications. The salesman would traditionally steer them away from the Macs, but now these salesmen ('salesperson' if you're really PC) can have Windows running on the Mac and say "Here you go. Oh but wait there's more...". And if the customer is smart enough, they will overlook the initial cost and realise they are actually spending less money on the Mac than any of the Windows based PCs.
The Boot Camp installer takes you through the process of partitioning a portion of your hard drive to have Windows installed on it and creating a CD with important drivers. Windows runs flawlessly under Boot Camp due to this swanky feature and the drivers on the CD means that Windows picks up and functions with your Mac mouse, keyboard and recently added, iSight camera and the Macs internal hardware. Swapping between the OS's is simply a matter of holding down the 'Option' key whilst rebooting your Mac. This bring up an OS selector, similar to the one we used to use, back in the days when we could boot out of OS X and back in to OS 9. Of course you can set your default OS in the "Startup Disk" option under System Preferences (which is also installed on Windows believe it or not) to decide which operating system you want as the default (Mac of course!). All in all Boot Camp has a good 'cool factor' on account of this method, which no doubt will get many people interested in Macs. It's the most complete solution allowing you to play Windows games with the greatest amount of reliability (if such a thing is achievable on Windows). It's 'cool factor' takes a hit though when you consider that you leave the Mac OS X environment in order to use Windows. This leads me to.... Parallels
Parallels is to Intel Macs, as Virtual PC is to PPC Macs....only it isn't. VPC is an emulator, which means it spends a great deal of its processing time emulating (or pretending to be) the Intel code, so as to allow it to run Windows. But this emulation isn't necessary on Intel Macs because obviously, they already have Intel processors inside. As such, Parallels is what is referred to as virtualisation software.
Virtualisation creates a virtual PC just like VPC, but differs in the fact that it directly communicates with the hardware of the machine. Processor calls go directly to the processor, so that it does all the work instead of PPC VPC's processor calls going to the virtual machine's (VM) virtual processor which then gets translated into the physical machine's processor. As such virtualisation is seriously faster than emulation. It does take a performance hit though but this is minimal and related to the fact that you're running an OS inside another OS.
Parallels works very well and works in much the same way as VPC in that you can drag and drop files between Windows and Mac OS You can install other operating systems like Linux, DOS (still Microsoft's most reliable operating system) and others. Where it fails is with games, due to a lack of hardware support. That being said, this support is coming in the next version of Parallels. Parallel's 'cool factor' is huge, on account of multiple OS's being able to run at once, the fact that you don't have to boot out of Mac OS X to run Windows and you can share files between the multiple OS's simply by dragging them over from the desktop to the open window (and vice versa). Its 'cool factor' takes a hit though when it comes from the fact that you're still leaving the Mac OS to run Windows applications. And this leads me nicely to... CrossOver
This has 'cool factor' oozing out of every orifice. CrossOver is the commercial version of Wine, which is a set of APIs that emulate Windows APIs. "But you just said that emulation is slower??!" True.....only this emulation isn't the same as VPC's on account of the fact that it doesn't need translation as such. It's a little hard to explain but I'll try my best.
In Windows, programs use Windows APIs (Application Programming Interface if you really want to know what it stands for) to communicate to the operating system so that they can run. What Wine does, is create APIs that mimic those calls but the communication is to whatever operating system is running Wine (believe it or not there's actually a Windows version of Wine which to me seems a little redundant). So what happens is something like this:
What this means is that Windows applications then look more like the Mac's interface instead of a Windows interface. So how does CrossOver stack up? Well it does pretty good actually. There are two hits against the 'cool factor' for CrossOver...not all applications work and it needs X11 installed (at the moment). The applications that do work are pretty much all of Microsoft's products like Office, IE, Project, Visio, etc and for that fact this is a major coup for me. I can now access my company's call system from IE6 on the Mac in such a way that I don't need Windows installed on my machine. I can even run the only Windows application that I need at home on my Mac without having Windows installed at all.
Like I said, not all applications are supported and much of this comes from the fact that Windows coders tend to be lazy. They do things their way or try to do things in a way that isn't supported by Windows, so they make a workaround which is incompatible with the APIs. But there are a lot of applications that do work. When you go to install applications CrossOver has a list of supported applications but you can also install unsupported applications. There is a huge database of applications at http://winehq.com which allows you to see what applications do run. In a move similar to Parallels, which has virtual PCs, CrossOver/Wine uses what they call bottles. When you think of a bottle you think of something that stores things and that's what these bottles do. They store all the relevant APIs and applications in one bottle. It's a very nice analogy and fits in very well with the Wine name. CrossOver is the commercial version of Wine so you could download the source code for Wine and build it using XCode. It's not easy to do, so for novices you will need to pay for the commercial version. It is worth it though. So who's the best?
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a guest
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We all know Mac has been able to run Windows with programs such as Virtual PC. But with Microsoft pulling development of this product for the Mac, where does that leave us?
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As a recent windows to Mac converter this is exactly the introduction I needed. Many thanks |
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