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mr ginge · Apr 26, 2006, 10:25 AM

HI

A question from an noobie to your forum (and an about to be iMac owner) - which I find most helpful.

I am about to make the shift from PC to Mac and have a couple fo questions around Photoshop, Dreamweaver on the PC side used concurrently with website management on the iMac side.

My concerns are purely with the efficacy of operating a website via iMac/Firefox/Safari to access our website for site development, management, etc while using Photoshop at the same time on the PC side to edit, manipulate and save files that would then be directed to be uploaded to our host site from within the iMac side. Is anyone doing this sort of thing yet?

Being a first time almost owner of an iMac am I correct also in assuming there is something equivalent to Notepad to do scratchpadding bits on snippets of HTML as you work on the store.

Whatever insights you can provide with respect to the realities of day to day business use of both sides of the system would be most appreciated. It is not economically feasible to reinvest in Photoshop, Dreamwerave, Office, etc in exchange for the elegance and reliability of the OSX system at this time

Thank you for whatever feedback you can provide

ghporter · Apr 26, 2006, 11:07 AM

Boot Camp lets you run EITHER OS X OR Windows XP on your iMac. You cannot just switch between the two; you have to reboot to go from one to the other.

OS X offers "Text Editor" which has the same functionality as you're used to with Notepad (plus some; it's smoother and has a better feature set).

mr ginge · Apr 26, 2006, 11:21 AM

Thanks Glen. I am quite aware of the methodology of Boot Camp and Parallels and am fololowing those threads with great interest. In fact I just got an email from Parallels indicating that Beta 5 is now available and they have over 100,000 beta testers out there. That is a great way to improve products rapidly.

My question perhaps should be directed towards those using Parallels and hopefully in a biz app environment.

Thanks again

ghporter · Apr 26, 2006, 08:03 PM

Ahhhh. That makes more sense. It looked like you were talking about switching back and forth in a dual-boot situation. Sorry.

rm199 · Apr 27, 2006, 02:39 AM

I'm finding it faster to run office 2003 in XP/parallels than mac office 2004. As a bonus Visio runs faster than on my corporate stinkpad. In fact everything in XP/parallels is faster than the stinkpad which definitely raises some eyebrows.

Can't comment on photoshop et all though.

mr ginge · Apr 27, 2006, 10:18 AM

Is there an issue with taking an Excel or Word doc from the XP window and pasting into anything on the OSX side? I guess my main area of interest is in just that - say being able to generate and save files on the XP side and access them from within OSX and not have any file compatibility issues - especially with Photoshop!

And the bullet was bit yesterday and my new iMac ordered (2Gb Ram + 256MG Vid + second 20" screen) so in about a week I should be able to crash, burn and ask really informed questions :-)

Mithras · Apr 27, 2006, 10:30 AM

Parallels supports text and image pasteboard operations.
And it's easy to set up shared folders so you can save from XP into locations on the Mac drive.

torifile · Apr 27, 2006, 11:05 AM

Yeah, Geoff. I think you'll just have to try it out. What you want to do sounds complicated but, in practice, I think it'll be much simpler than all that. I've only played around with parallels for a couple of days, but I've been able to see my home folder as a network drive and saving, etc, to it has been very fast and easy. Like the other said, I don't know how well photoshop will work since it's pretty demanding but you can always use bootcamp if you don't (understandably) want to buy a Mac version of it.

mr ginge · Apr 27, 2006, 11:15 AM

As long as I can access the image files in their folders stored on the XP side from the OSX side - where I will be working on the website then it is a non issue. They are only being ftp'd from the storage area on the machine to the host Rebooting each time is not really an option as I make adjustments to the image and view from my storebuilder side but do the actual image manip on the XP side.

I suspect it will not be an issue because I suspect that is essetially what many users of XP biz software would want to do while enjoying the elegance of the OSX side and the folks at Parallels really seem to have their act together.

ghporter · Apr 27, 2006, 11:40 AM

That sort of depends on what formatting is used for the XP partition. If it's NTFS (XP's prefered format), OS X can only read it, NOT write to it. Now if you're going to save results somewhere else, that's no problem... A shared (probably FAT32) partition somewhere, or a network drive, would be perfect for this sort of work.

torifile · Apr 27, 2006, 01:25 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

That sort of depends on what formatting is used for the XP partition. If it's NTFS (XP's prefered format), OS X can only read it, NOT write to it. Now if you're going to save results somewhere else, that's no problem... A shared (probably FAT32) partition somewhere, or a network drive, would be perfect for this sort of work.

What's interesting about the parallels solution is that it's able to read my OS X partition without a problem when I mount it as a network share. No special formatting was needed.

mduell · Apr 27, 2006, 06:48 PM

Originally Posted by torifile

What's interesting about the parallels solution is that it's able to read my OS X partition without a problem when I mount it as a network share. No special formatting was needed.

Mounting as a network share means you're not directly accessing the disk from the remote computer; the local computer translates between the disk partition and the network protocol being used.

torifile · Apr 28, 2006, 12:08 AM

Originally Posted by mduell

Mounting as a network share means you're not directly accessing the disk from the remote computer; the local computer translates between the disk partition and the network protocol being used.

I guess what I found interesting was that an HFS+ partition could be read and written no problems. I realize this isn't revolutionary or unique to Parallels, but it just had me saying "hmm. I wonder why that is". Thanks for the explanation.

That said, you don't need to do ANYthing at all to get sharing working between parallels and OS X. No need to worry about fancy partitioning schemes or anything.