shuffle January 2006 content

[Magnus]

A word from the editor - New beginnings
by Magnus

In the previous issue I said that we had some exciting things coming for this issue, the first issue of 2007. It's new beginnings in a number of ways. Perhaps the biggest change is the new look for the newsletter. One of our more recent EMUGers, Latifa, has worked hard for quite some time testing out different options and this is the result. We hope you like it as much as we do. Latifa didn't have a simple task, that's for sure. But we gave her a pretty open mandate which included something about a contemporary and simple design that has something of an Apple-style to it. Personally I think she did a wonderful job and shuffle now has a very appealing and professional look. We can also announce that we now have a sponsor for the newsletter. Apple IMC Middle east is supporting the production of the newsletter. For a start, it enables us to acquire some much needed equipment and consumables, and perhaps if we can get more sponsors on board, we can eventually distribute copies of shuffle to EMUGers, stores, cafes, and other places. In the Mac world, MacWorld Expo coming up next week in San Francisco is of course the talk of the town. What will Apple announce? Will we see some new Mac? New software? New iPods? Perhaps even an iPhone? Obviously I don't know more than you do, but a safe bet is we will see a new iLife and iWork suites. After that it's a bit more tricky. I think we'll see some updates of computers but my guess is that it's the minis who are in line to get a Core 2 Duo makeover and perhaps even more. I think it's pretty likely there will be an iPhone sooner or later but not next week. And perhaps they will show some new glimpses from Leopard but I'd be very surprised if they actually started shipping Leopard. Whatever news are announced it'll no doubt be exciting and surprising. Our next issue of shuffle is out on February 2nd and I'm sure it will be full of MacWorld Expo news.

[Magnus]

Interview with a Mac-loving graphic designer
by Magnus

Charles Epres is a member of the EmiratesMac User Group and an active user on Emiratesmac.com. We got the opportunity to talk to him about what he does, Macs, and other things.

EM: Tell us about yourself!
CE: I'm Charles Epres, a 25 year old native of Manila, Philippines. I've been in graphic design for over 5 years and on my 2nd year here in UAE. Married to an equally Mac-crazed lady named Michelle and we plan to bring Mac-crazed kids as well into this world.

EM: Can you remember the first time you saw or used a Mac?
CE: The first time I saw a Mac was back in 2002 when I did large format printing for my thesis and I was amazed at how the iMacs looked at that time. My first job gave me the chance to work with a Mac, a very old PowerPC G3 - the one with the beige casing and horizontal CPU. I even questioned the reason for using such a machine for it was still in OS9 and Windows XP back then was such a big hit. It just seemed to me during my days with it that it was impossibly dependable. Save for the rare hiccups and the crappy GUI, it worked like you want it to work: efficiently. When OS X was released, I wanted to upgrade the system but the G3 had very limited resources and was obviously out of OSX's range. Since then, I was hooked to Macs and everything related to Apple.

EM: You are obviously a very talented artist. What do you do for work?
CE: Im working as a senior graphic designer in a publishing / advertising firm right now and on my free time, I do photography.

EM: Can you tell us something about how you use Macs in your work? What is your workflow like?
CE: The whole graphic design department is run by G5s, the reason being CS3 is not released yet and the Adobe Creative Suite works better *for the moment* with PowerPCs. We only use one Windows machine to open buggy files such as Word, Excel.... er, Microsoft files to be exact. The workflow is basically to open the files either by Macs (if its fine) or with Windows (if its buggy), do the entire creative work i.e. graphic design, layout, color proofing & final artworks on the G5s, juggling the files from one software to another until it reaches approval. Finally, PDFs are sent to a *mother G5* that handles the final processing of the files for digital plate printing and eventually, final printing in production.

EM: We've seen the portraits you have made that are on EmiratesMac.com. How did you create those?
CE: I've been into caricatures as early as high school but I never thought it would be profitable until one of my college friends commissioned me to make caricatures of a whole hospital department. I start by drawing the main lines of the face by hand with a black and white version of the picture in front of me so I can take on the shadows and highlights better. This first step is the most tedious since it will define the level of similarities of the portrait and the photograph. After I'm satisfied with the pencil work, I scan the hand-drawn portrait into my Mac and re-draw it on vector based software such as Illustrator or Corel Draw - the reason for this, aside from the digital conversion of the portrait, is that the lines here are much more flexible and I can adjust them as I please - line thickness, stroke style, color... - as opposed to drawing by pencil. Color rendering follows either by Photoshop or Illustrator, depending on how the client will want it to look, be it cartoony, realistic, exaggerated, etc.

EM: What's the thing you like the most about Macs?
CE: Dependability.

EM: What's the thing you like the least about Macs?
CE: Aside from the big price tag, nothing else.

EM: What's the thing you like Apple to come up with in the future?
CE: An iPhone and (holds breath) a 12-inch widescreen MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo.

EM: Apple and Macs are not very well known here. What do think should be done by Apple IMC and others, like Emiratesmac, to increase the knowledge and awareness?
CE: More advertising. There's nothing like visual presence everywhere. Apple is getting beaten here by PCs because they get saturated with advertising. Its not like Apple has nothing to prove, it has more to show and I think Apple carriers here are doing a poor job on getting that message across. As for Emiratesmac and EMUG members, spread the word!

SIDEBAR:
Charles Epres is a Mac-crazed graphic designer based in Abu Dhabi. He works in a wide range of areas including Corporate Identity, Visual Solutions, Print Media, Illustration, and Multimedia.

Website: http://charlesepres.tripod.com

[Magnus]

Hidden gems among Apple's Developer Tools
by Magnus

You may not be aware, but Apple gives away their Developer Tools for free (developer.apple.com/tools/). All you have to do is register for a free online membership in the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) and then you can download the Developer Tools. Once you have installed the Developer Tools you have one more folder on your hard drive. The folder is called "Developer" and it's full of different goodies. Obviously the main purpose of everything in Developer Tools is to write code and develop software, but some of it may be interesting in even if you are never going to develop software.

XCode
XCode (in Developer > Applications) doesn't really belong here because it's not "hidden", it's the core of the whole Developer Tools package. If you don't know what XCode is, it's what's called an IDE or Integrated Developer Environment. Basically that means it's an application which programmers use to write their code, test their code, and compile the code into double-clickable applications or whatever it is they are developing. If you want to develop any kind of software with your Mac, chances are you'll end up using XCode sooner or later.

Core Image Fun House
Arguably Core Image Fun House (Developer > Applications > Graphics Tools) is the most fun and potentially also useful application out of the ones mentioned here.


Repeat After Me (Developer > Applications > Utilities > Speech)
The manual for Repeat After Me says "Repeat After Me is a tool that is designed to improve the pronunciation of text generated by the Text-To-Speech (TTS) system, by means of editing the pitch and duration of phonemes". So what does that mean? "EmiratesMac", for example, turns out to be "_1EHmUXrIXts _m1AEk.". Not exactly something you can read easily, I would imagine. But that's how the Mac sees the text that it speaks. You can then edit the phoneme-text and experiment to see how your changes affect the way the Mac speaks the text.

FileMerge
Have you ever had two pieces of text and wondered what exactly is the difference between them? With FileMerge (Developer > Applications > Utilities) you have to wonder no more. The utility takes two text files and displays them side by side, showing you the difference between them. Many text editors have similar functionality built in but even if it doesn't, FileMerge gives you quite advanced functionality.

Pixie
Pixie (Developer > Applications > Graphics Tools) is a simple magnifying glass application. Run it and it will show you a small part of the screen magnified up to 1200%. This will let you inspect up close one or more pixels somewhere on the screen which could be helpful if you're working on a web page and something doesn't align correctly, and other similar situations.

That's just a small selection of what's available when you install the Developer Tools. And since it's all free what do you have to loose more than some space on your hard drive? Download it and start exploring. Who knows, perhaps you'll start developing some software while you're at it.

[Magnus]

EmiratesMac.com tips and tricks
by Magnus

We continue our series of tips and tricks for how to do certain things at Emiratesmac.com. The intent is to tell our users about some of the perhaps less well known features and functions on the site in order to make their experience with the site a bit better.

User reputation and infractions
For each post a number of small icons are displayed at the lower left corner of the post. Starting from left, the first icon tells you whether a user is online or not (green if they're online). The second icon that looks like scales is for you to add to a user's reputation. Every user has a reputation level (a number) which depends on how long they've been registered on the site, how many posts they've made, etc. Basically the longer you're registered and the more posts you make, the higher your reputation becomes. Other users can also add to a reputation by clicking on this icon and filling in a brief form, saying they approve or disapprove of the user and the post. Each user can see their own reputation rating on their User CP page. The third icon is for reporting an infraction for a post. It could be a spam message or a violation of some other rules for the site. This icon is not something all users see, only higher levels can report an infraction. Different infractions result in different number of points added up and different durations. When enough points are accrued, a user can be suspended or even banned. And finally it's the icon for reporting a post for violation. It lets you send a message to the administrator or a moderator saying that you think a post has violated the site's rules. Then it's up to the administrator or moderator to take action if they deem it necessary and appropriate.

Subscribe to calendar
I'm sure you use and love iCal, right? How about keeping up with Emiratesmac events and dates in iCal, wouldn't that be nice? Well you can do just that. If you go to the Events page on the site, and look for where it says "Note! You can also subscribe to our iCal Calendar". Click on that link and iCal should open and ask if you want to subscribe to the calendar. Now you should automatically be updated in iCal whenever any changes are made to the official Emiratesmac calendar.

Subscribe to pictures with iPhoto
I know many of you are very interested in the Gallery we have on the site, and some of you even upload photos regularly. Believe me, I know the kind of interest you have in seeing photographs of different things, and I hope you keep uploading even if it causes problems with bandwidth, storage space, and other things. The site's home page shows thumbnails of the four most recently uploaded pictures, and just glancing there is a good way to keep up. But there's an even better way. The Gallery has it's own RSS feed and you can subscribe to it with iPhoto. To do this, you choose File > Subscribe to photocast inside of iPhoto, then you type in http://feeds.feedburner.com/emiratesmacgallery. That will now show you the most recently uploaded photos to the Gallery.

Rate pictures
Continuing on with another Gallery tip, we turn to rating pictures. You can rate every picture uploaded on a scale from one star("Terrible") to five stars ("Excellent"). And it's as easy as opening the picture you want to rate and clicking on the "Rate file" text, then on the number of stars you want to give the picture. Rating a picture is a nice way to say to someone else that you really liked (or didn't like) their picture.

[Magnus]

What Google has to offer a Mac user
by Magnus

Google, the online juggernaut and reigning king of everything online, has not always been known for its inclusiveness of Mac and Mac users. But it seems they have warmed up to Mac lately and they now sport quite a line of downloads and online services that are Mac compatible. They have also started addressing the Mac community directly by a blog dedicated to issues of Google and Mac (googlemac.blogspot.com/).

Online services
The crown in Google's collection of online services is undoubtedly their search engine. That's where they started and that is still at the core of most anything else they do. Gmail, for example, takes advantage of Google's search technology to allow you to quickly sort through lots and lots of email. If you feel that Apple's .Mac email is not enough for you, chances are Gmail (gmail.com) delivers on everything you want and more. Over time it's grown into a fully-featured email system that can rival and perhaps trump the best of them. Curiously though, it's still in beta after many years. Google Calendar (www.google.com/calendar) was when first launched not working in Safari but now it is. It's a similar situation with Google Docs & Spreadsheets (docs.google.com). Google acquired online word processor Writely in early 2006 and toward the end of the year they had integrated that software into their other offerings and now it's called Google Docs. Into the mix Google has thrown an online spreadsheet. Unfortunately Docs & Spreadsheet are not working in Safari, but Google says "Safari support coming soon". Finally we'll mention Google Reader (reader.google.com), an online RSS reader, which works just fine in Safari and can in functionality actual rival some of desktop RSS reader applications.

Downloadable software
When it comes to downloadable software specific to Mac (www.google.com/mac.html) Google has improved considerably of late. The Google Notifier has seen some recent upgrades and now checks your Google Mail as well as Google Calendar. The Google Toolbar for Firefox gives you access to a number of features and functions right there in the browsers. Google Earth is of course a major application from Google, and it's so much fun just playing around with. It's a 30Mb download but well worth it. If you want to build 3D models, Google SketchUp is a good choice, and amazingly it's free. If you want to have a look at what others are building, check out Google's 3D Warehouse (sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse). There are even some models from the UAE, including the Bur Dubai. If you like Dashboard in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger you may want to look at Google's widgets. So far Google has released three widgets. One for posting to a Blogger blog, one for reading Gmail email, and one for Google searching. Google has a very nice application for photo organization and simple editing called Picasa. Picasa is Windows only, but there is a Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac with which you can upload photos to the Picasa online storage. So all in all Google offer a lot of online services compatible with Mac, and there's more to come, I'm sure. They also offer quite a range of downloadable software, most of which will extend or enhance your Google experience.

Tools for web masters
This article has focused on Google's services and tools for end users and we've been ignoring a whole other side to Google's universe. That other side is Google's tools for people who run web sites. There's Google Adsense of course, which is their online advertising program, Google Analytics, online statistics, and much more. We will come back to those tools in a future issue.

[Magnus]

How do you explain how great Mac is?

In a thread on EmiratesMac.com (www.emiratesmac.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1725) we asked "how do you explain how great Mac is to someone who has never used a Mac and has very little knowledge about Mac and Apple? We're not talking iPod here, that's a totally different ball game, we're talking Mac. Without showing something on a Mac, just talking about it, how you explain how great Mac is?" The question produced some really interesting and inspiring answers so we thought we'd highlight a few here. If you have something to contribute, please log in on the site and post your reply.

Acutabove kicked off the commenting with some very valid points:
"Ask the PC guy how many times he:
- Updates his anti virus in one year
- Gets infected with a new virus that his antivirus didn't even knew existed at the time of update.
- Restarts his PC because it crashed from that new virus or just simply, it crashed.
- Reformats his system due to some unfixable system error.
- Installs security updates and patches to make his system more "secure".
- Closes pop up windows and adwares while surfing the net.
- Defragments his system to make it run smoothly.
- Keeps track of all the drivers that came along with his hardware."

MacUAE reminisce about his days as a PC user before going all-Mac some years ago:
"Before converting to Macs, I remember my life as a PC user as:
- I never got viruses and was always up to date.
- I think I never got attacked or hacked.
- My system was never hogged with adware or junk.
But, that took a lot of work and effort of updating, searching for latest drivers, download latest patches and yearly purchase of Norton SystemWorks. When I moved to Macs the first few days were weird. I didn't have to do the above which took a lot of my PC time. All I can say is Macs are just more fun to use and you have the space, time and tools to be creative about life. A PC was just a tool for games and internet for me. The Mac is a personal family system that forces you to involve it in your life rather than seclude it to mundane tasks. I am happy and will never go back."

Zaid argues that buying a Mac is the best choice for most users because with a Mac there is less need to be a computer expert:
"I share views of acutabove, for a common Windows user, all you've stated is true. MacUAE, you were and still an expert user on Windows, to stay up-to-date with all protective add-ons. I know few people who are like you in old days, they don't complain about any viruses, spyware and the like, yet they admit spending 10-15 minutes of each morning performing preventive medicine for their PC. The level of most Mac/PC users in maintaining the machine daily is at its best None. That's why buying a Mac for the common user is preferable so he/she will keep doing what they want to perform without worrying about behind the scene issues."

According to ultrablue662, people are basically lazy and want to stay with what they're used to (Windows):
"You cant. Well, you can, but no one, especially in this country, will listen. Seriously, I've tried all of the above, even pulling out statistics from Wikipedia for people, and what I get is Oh, I know Mac/BSD/Linux is better. Oh really, um, if you KNOW this and its cheaper or free. This is where common sense comes into play. And no, they still use their Windoze boxes and still come to me three times a week asking me stupid questions like "How do you reformat your HD?" and "What Virus scan do you use?" People are lazy and like a comfort zone. they'd rather put up with all those problems, or spend half their time trying to get rid of them, than take two weeks to get used to something new and be happy afterwards."

EMUGer istara says that "tact and patience" is what's required:
"Honestly? You cannot explain how good a Mac is. You have to wait until they finally agree to try one. And bear in mind given the lies that have been fed PC people about Macs over the years, it takes some pride swallowing for them to do this, and then have to admit that they were wrong, and you were right. So I think tact and patience is the best way. One of the major things that people need to be convinced about is being able to run all their regular applications. 99% of the time this is no issue, plus there is a lot of stuff for Mac that runs better and cleverer than PC equivalents."

MacAddict, another relatively recent switcher rounds out the discussion with some very pertinent observations from his own experience:
"No one can tell how many crashes I had and how many data I lost with my earlier PCs. Million times I had viruses, bugs , computer crashes, etc. I tried many ways to fix and retrieve all the data i lost even if you have all the softwares that can make your PC safe from all of that, still you will face those problems no matter what. But I when tried using Mac, it was kinda of a relief from all of that. Seriously you feel like your data is in a safe place plus of course the quality of the operating system and the hardware. It's been more than year and a half since I became a Mac user and I didn't get any single problem with my Macs. I really wanna thank Apple for giving us the quality we've dreamed of. I believe you all agree with me in this."

SIDEBAR
The "Macintosh insanely great" graphic is borrowed from the introduction of the very first Macintosh computer in 1984. You can watch a short video from the event at YouTube.com (www.youtube.com/watch?v=izASLl0PvAk). At the introduction, Steve Jobs was showing off the considerable graphics talent of the Mac and the computer "wrote" the text itself across its screen, something pretty much not seen before that time.

[Magnus]

Inquisitor - Spotlight for Safari
by Magnus

If you're a Safari user you probably use the Google search box in the menu bar quite a bit, don't you? Have you ever wished for some more functionality, some better options? There is something small, simple, and free that will change the way you search in Safari. It's called Inquisitor and it's basically a plug-in for Safari that enhances the search-box functionality. The developer claims that Inquisitor learns from what you search for which should mean you get better results over time. I haven't used Inquisitor long enough to really see if that is true or not. The software also flags websites that you've visited previously and keywords you've used before show up before the rest of the results. Inquisitor is now available in version 3.0 beta 2 and it's free from www.inquisitorx.com/safari.

[Magnus]

Review: Missing Sync
by Magnus

Palm has long been seen by many as the PDA platform that works best with Macs despite Palm dropping support for Mac in 2004. They still ship Palm Desktop which is now up to version 4.2.1 Rev D, but apart from some vital fixes it doesn't seem to have been significantly improved for years. If you have Microsoft Office for Mac, you can sync Entourage with a Palm device and it works well. We tested Missing Sync for Palm OS version 5.1 together with a Treo 650 smartphone. Missing Sync works with a lot of different Palm OS devices as well as Windows Mobile and PSP devices.

New in 5.1
The main news in version 5.1, released in March 2006, is that it is now Universal Binary, meaning it runs natively on Intel Macs. Among the other news we find: fixed numerous issues syncing PIM conduits, and updated assistants to include information about Tungsten TX and LifeDrive. Even though the release notes doesn't say so directly, arguably another improvement in 5.1 is stability. I've not personally used Missing Sync before but after talking to some long-time users, it seems like 5.1 fixes some stability issues that have been present in recent 5.x versions. And using it for a number of weeks I've had no problems. On Versiontracker and Macupdate, Missing Sync 5.1 gets mixed reviews, ranging from "dangerous" to "fantastic". I wouldn't say that users' opinions posted on these sites should be taken too seriously but they can be an indication on the performance, functionality, and stability of a piece of software.

Conduits
Missing Sync comes with a lot of conduits for all kinds of documents formats and applications. In fact, there's a rather long list of supported conduits. A conduit is basically a piece of software needed for the sync software to be able to connect to and sync with another document format or software.

Installation and setup
What can I say? No problems at all. I downloaded Missing Sync (about 20Mb) and started the installer. When starting up Missing Sync it took me through a wizard that step-by-step asked questions about how I wanted the software configured for use with the Treo.

Pictures and music
Missing Sync comes with support for syncing iTunes and iPhoto with your Palm device. You pick albums in iPhoto and playlists in iTunes that you want to put on your device and Missing Sync transfers all the data for you. In Missing Sync you can choose where the photos and music should be stored, whether internally or on a storage card. A good idea is obviously to buy a large storage card to save the internal memory. One thing to remember if you're syncing over Bluetooth is to have patience. Music and photos are going to take time so don't expect a quick sync. Obviously that's not Missing Sync's fault, but it's something to keep in mind. Photos from iPhoto are automatically resized to a size appropriate for the Palm device. Since the screen on my Treo is 320x320 it doesn't make much sense to put 3000x2000 pixel photos on there.

Folder sync
A nice feature of Missing Sync is that you can select a folder on your hard drive which you can sync with your handheld device. Save or copy a file into that folder and on the next sync it's placed on the handheld as well. It's an easy way to transfer certain files to the mobile device.

Wrapping up
I found Missing Sync to be an excellent product. It installed without problems and I've run it for a few weeks now, syncing a few times per day without any issues. Music from iTunes and photos from iPhoto flow smoothly across to my Treo. Events from iCal and contacts from Addressbook sync without problems as well. But it's with mixed feelings I say that everything went so well because this is something that Palm should put in the box of any Palm-powered device they sell. This is not something that customers should have to pay extra for. That said, if you own a Palm device and a Mac and want to sync the two, there is simply nothing else around that compares to Missing Sync.

SIDEBAR
Missing Sync is available for purchased and download at www.markspace.com for $39.95. Mark/Space provided a copy of Missing Sync for our review. Since we wrote the review, Missing Sync has been updated to version 5.1.2. It's a free update for owners of version 5 and it's available from www.markspace.com/downloads.html.

[Magnus]

MJ visits the Mother Ship
Part 1

During a recent visit to California I had the great pleasure of spending some time at Apple's headquarters and some other tech companies in Silicon Valley. I wrote about my experience and here is the first part, in which I introduce you to the Mother Ship.

Appleholic has been abducted. Yes, you read it correctly, abducted. Aliens known as iMen took me away in their Mother Ship on the 25th of November 2006. I know a lot of you don't believe in abductions or even aliens, and most of the time people who are abducted never have proof of them ever been taken. This time I have proof of their existence, and in this series of articles you will know all about them. I am going to tell you about the way they live, where they eat, how they act, and most importantly how amazing they are. My proof is not only words but also pictures, cause pictures is worth a thousand words. I do know one thing, being abducted by iMen and held hostage in their Mother Ship was the most amazing experience I have ever had. This is one abduction where I wish they took me away for good, and took me in for adoption and the chance of never having to come back to reality for the rest of my life.

First of all let's get this cleared up - the Mother Ship is real. It's huge, breathtaking, nothing like I have ever seen before. These Aliens are the most advance species in the world. They are the most innovative aliens on the face of any planet. They have the most advanced technology that any human has ever seen, and every month they tend to share some technologies with us humans. They have brought us things like iPods, and integrated light and motion sensors in computer, and so much more. They made operating systems fun, good looking and more stable, and made the old operating systems made by humans look like garbage.

They call Apple the Mother Ship, and they tried to brain wash me before I left there, so that I don't tell on their location; but it seems like I was too excited that there is no way any brain washing machine can take away that memory from me. Located in Cupertino, California, USA, Apple Headquarters is in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's not far from where Apple got started some 30 years ago. The Mother Ship was an oval-shaped area and very wide in diameter. It consisted of six buildings in a loop, Hence the name Infinite Loop as its street. Each building is designed for specific tasks. One is made to develop the most advance operating system on the face of this planet, Mac OS X. We know this as the most virus free, stable, and sexy operating system behind the machines it controls. Another building is for building the hardware, and another building is like the Big Boss' den and for visitors to pay their respect to the all mighty innovator. Other than these six buildings that makes up the Mother Ship, there are other little "space ships" buildings around the vicinity. They are there to protect the Mother Ship from any harm, by building other amazing gadgets to impress the mere mortals on planet earth. They got a building that is specifically made for the creation, development of the famous iPod. They got a separate building too that deals with just the software that integrates the iPod with our computers; this software is called iTunes. Very interesting don't you think?

After being abducted for a whole day in that place, I fell in love more with the Mother Ship and the Aliens that live, work and eat there. For someone like my self, who loves Apple: breathes, eats, drinks and dreams of nothing but Apple, a day in the Mother Ship is a day no Appleholic would mind dying happily and peacefully after. After seeing what I have seen, and heard iMen talking about Apple, and sharing thoughts and experiences with me about their lives as aliens, I have gotten to love Apple more than I ever thought any human can love a product, a machine, and a whole culture. This culture that Apple people have is not a myth, it's a reality, specially when you get to live a life with Apple all around you, with MacHeads such as I and you sharing the same love, interests, rumors, dreams and last but never least use the same products that iMen develop just for us. I Mohamed Jawad, better known as Appleholic, have been around and inside the most amazing, most innovative company on the face of this planet. I was not disappointed a bit, I was nothing but amazed, amused, thrilled and even speechless the whole day. I am well known to be very talkative and always have something to say, specially when it deals with Apple; but that day, I could not think of anything. Speechless is what I became, and was overwhelmed, dazzled of the one places every Appleholic on this planet would dream to be in. I could confidently say after being in the Mother ship that it was the one Abduction no MacHead would ever want to be brought back to earth or even reality.

In part two of this series we will continue along on my journey at the Mother Ship.

[Magnus]

Run parallel operating systems on your Intel Mac
by Magnus

Mac users have pretty much always had some interest in being able to run Windows on their Macs. Many of us work in organizations which require some type of Windows software for various tasks but we don't want to give up our beloved Macs. There has been various solutions to this problem over the years, including SoftWindows and Virtual PC. None have been satisfactory mainly because they've been emulation-based, meaning they translated Intel code into what the Mac understood, making them slow and full of problems. With the advent of Intel-based Macs that's not necessary anymore.

BootCamp
Apple themselves introduced BootCamp with which you can install Windows on an Intel Mac. And BootCamp works very well but it requires you to re-boot when you want to switch operating system. BootCamp also requires you to partition your Mac's hard drive into one part that is dedicated to Windows, and then the rest for Mac OS X. And presently you can only install Windows XP with BootCamp. Enter Parallels Desktop for Mac.

Virtualization
Parallels takes advantage of the Intel processor's virtualization support. Basically this means one Intel processor can act like it was really distinct processors and run different operating systems on the different virtual processors. Even Apple sort of recommends Parallels (www.apple.com/getamac/windows.html) and there have been recurring rumors that upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will have some kind of virtualization in it but Apple has denied those rumors.

Setup
Installation is a breeze really. Parallels takes you through the steps with a wizard and gets it all set up and running for you. There are some questions to answer and options to select along the way but nothing too technical and most users shouldn't have a problem with getting through it. Once Windows is installed, Parallels Tools are installed. It is a set of utilities and drivers that installs into Windows XP and makes the integration between Mac and Windows. With Parallels, the operating system you install becomes one file on your Mac's hard drive. This means it's easier to manage for copying and backup, and you can have as many separate operating systems as you want installed. This could be great for web developers, for example. They could have any number of virtual computers and run them with Parallels, checking web pages in the different environments.

Running Parallels
Once it's all set up, Windows running in Parallels is really like Windows running on any regular PC. On our test Mac everything wasn't as snappy as on a good-spec PC but that's not to be expected. That it runs as fast as it does is a small miracle in itself, I think. It's fast enough for what most users do with their computers. I installed Adobe CS2 and Microsoft Office 2004. Photoshop will certainly never be any speed demon in Parallels but it runs well enough to be used occasionally. Windows runs in a window in Mac OS X but it can also take up the full screen. The mouse goes between Windows and Mac without problems, and in the future there will even be drag and drop support (see sidebar). I have an external monitor hooked up to my iMac and I have Mac OS X set up so it spans the desktop across the two monitors. In Parallels I could not figure out how to get Windows to do the same, but I could run Windows fullscreen on one display and Mac OS X on another, conveniently going between them. Obviously most users would want Parallels so they could run Windows on their Macs. But with Parallels you can actually run any number of operating systems for Intel processors. To get information between Mac OS X and Windows in Parallels, you can share a folder. In the same way you can share folders between Macs on a network, you can share a folder on the Mac so that Windows has access to it as well. It's a convenient way to transfer information between the two operating systems. Since you can run many operating systems in addition to Windows with Parallels, I tried installing the latest version of Ubuntu Linux and it installed, booted and worked just fine. After finding a solution in the web, even networking works just fine from Ubuntu. Apple's slogan "It just works" could be equally applied to Parallels Desktop for Mac.

Downsides
So what are the downsides to Parallels? Not many that I could find really. It's an amazingly stable technology and after using it several times per day for a few weeks I did not have any crashes or anything like that. For what it does it very stable. There seem to be some issues with getting Parallels to work in some network environments. For example, since it does not have a physical network adapter it may cause problems in networks that filter access and traffic based on what's called MAC addresses. For most users graphics may be the biggest drawback. Don't expect to play any of the latest, graphics-intensive games with Parallels, for that you need BootCamp.

Wrapping up
One thing is for sure, buy as much RAM as you can afford and that your Mac can take. I would say 2Gb is the bare minimum of RAM your Mac should have to comfortably run Parallels. Think about it, you're basically running two operating systems at the same time and they both need RAM. Bottom line though, Parallels is amazing. It' makes running Windows alongside Mac OS X as easy as it can be. With Parallels Desktop for Mac you can keep using your favorite computer (Mac) running the best operating system in the world (Mac OS X) but also get access to the most common operating system in the world (Windows).

SIDEBAR
We tested Parallels on an Intel iMac 17" with a 1.83GHz Core Duo processor and 1Gb RAM, with 512Mb dedicated to the Windows XP in Parallels. Parallels Inc., the makers of Parallels Desktop for Mac, provided us with a copy of the software for the review. Parallels Desktop for Mac is available for purchase at www.parallels.com for $79.99. From their web site you can also download a 15-day trial version.

SIDEBAR
In early December 2006 Parallels released a public beta version of Parallels Desktop for Mac, build 3036, and it reportedly contains a number of new features that shows some of what is to come. Among the bigger news is that Parallels can now use a BootCamp partition as a virtual drive and can boot directly from it. Graphics performance has been improved, and users can drag and drop files and folders between Windows and Mac. A feature called Coherency will apparently show Windows applications as if they were Mac applications. In the beta we also find Transporter which should make it easy to migrating virtual PCs from VMware or Virtual PC VMs to Parallels virtual machines.

SIDEBAR
BootCamp and Parallels on Intel Macs is actually not the first products for Mac with which you could run DOS/Windows without software emulation. Back in 1994 Apple introduced the Power Macintosh 6100 DOS Compatible which had a card with a 486 processor on it (docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=112292). It was discontinued in 1996.