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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Developer Center > Flash / Win IE on a Mac 2007?

Flash / Win IE on a Mac 2007?
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skalie
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Dec 29, 2006, 05:33 AM
 
After the last "palava" of issues that my windows box had I've decided to make a clean start and get a macmini dedicated solely to web development.

Questions, hows Flash running on OSX these days? I'm thinking of waiting for Flash 9.

Secondly, the only thing I really need from the windows world is IE ( groans ), would I be looking at virtual PC, or do the new intel driven macs have a better option?

TIA
     
Macola
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Dec 29, 2006, 01:18 PM
 
Originally Posted by skalie View Post
After the last "palava" of issues that my windows box had I've decided to make a clean start and get a macmini dedicated solely to web development.

Questions, hows Flash running on OSX these days? I'm thinking of waiting for Flash 9.

Secondly, the only thing I really need from the windows world is IE ( groans ), would I be looking at virtual PC, or do the new intel driven macs have a better option?

TIA
If you're just using Windows for IE, get Parallels and install Windows. No need for a separate PC if you have an Intel Mac.
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skalie  (op)
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Dec 29, 2006, 02:08 PM
 
or Linux ( tip from elsewhere ) and Main Page - IEs4Linux !!
     
SirCastor
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Dec 29, 2006, 08:44 PM
 
How's the WINE project doing on OSX ? Are we at the point of running Windows apps decently? That's an option.
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alex_kac
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Dec 29, 2006, 09:17 PM
 
You can run IE6 under Crossover Office very nicely indeed.
     
Visnaut
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Dec 29, 2006, 09:26 PM
 
Originally Posted by SirCastor View Post
How's the WINE project doing on OSX ? Are we at the point of running Windows apps decently? That's an option.
There's CrossOver, but IE7 does not currently work with it.

Bootcamp and Parallels are probably your best bet because together they let you boot your mac as a regular Windows box, and run it inside a virtual machine inside Mac OS X respectively. Either environment should be more than suitable for web development.

This is the route I'm going to go as soon as I am able to afford a new Mac.

As for Flash performance, the player isn't bad, it runs decently, version 9 really improved in a lot of areas, but I still find it does not perform as well as it does on Windows especially on rather complex Flash sites (on a similarly spec'd PPC machine anyway). The universal versions of the player seem very snappy, though I haven't spent a lot of quality time with those.

I also find the Flash IDE rather sluggish on my 1.5 Ghz G4. It simply flies on my 1GHz Windows box at work with less RAM. I also seem to have a lot more stability issues with the Mac version.

Mind you, your mileage may vary, and you might even find it works well under Rosetta on the faster Intel macs out right now.

Quite possibly what I will end up doing is waiting until the Flash 9 IDE is released and then give it a go on a few Intel Macs, and then see what will be more worth it for me: running it as a native app, or getting the Windows version (and running it in Parallels). Why would I do the latter? Because in Flash 8, Macromedia did not complete implementing the advanced font features for Mac OS X, and as such, you can't author SWFs in Mac OS X that take advantage of the kerning and few other advanced font features of the new Flash 8 type engine. Put simply, I'm not going to pay for a version of the authoring tool that doesn't have all of the features of the Windows one. I'm hoping Adobe handles the Mac version of Flash with a bit more finesse than Macromedia did.
( Last edited by Visnaut; Dec 29, 2006 at 09:54 PM. Reason: added comments regarding Flash performance and features.)
     
   
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