Xara on Mac for those who want it now!
Hi, thought I would pass on a cool experience for others. A month ago I purchased a Mac Mini, 1.66ghz Intel Core Duo processor, 2 gigs of ram, 80 gig HD, CD/DVD RW drive along with a very nice Apple 20" Cinema display. It was splurge time. I was doing this in anticipation of the Xara port to Mac OSX. But since the Mac version is lagging behind the Linux version I knew I would have to come up with a solution to not be without my beloved Xara. I have been running Xara on a Pentium III 1ghz machine with a pretty decent video card for about 5 years. I had no complaints. So my first decision was to also buy a DVI KVM switch so I could use one keyboard, mouse, tablet and monitor for both machines and that worked well, but I wanted something more. The Mini sits on my desk 2" tall and 6 1/2 " sq and you have to get up real close to it to hear anything. Everytime I powered my PC tower (20 times the size of the Mini) I would wince at the noise. Anyway I was aware of a product called Parallels Desktop for Mac and had read some good reports on it. It allows you to run WinXP or other OS's in a virtual machine on Intel Macs. So last week I found a good deal on WinXP Pro SP2 and bought it for $100. Next I downloaded the trial version of Parallels, read the manual and went for it. the install of Parallels went easy, next the install and activation of WinXP went smoothly with no problems. Then install Xara and behold I am running Xara in a VM (virtual machine) console on my Mac. I want to tell you that WinXP loads, runs and shutsdown faster than my old Pentium. and Xara runs very fast, much faster than my old machine. As the VM opens in a console window all you have to do is click a button and you are in full screen mode and it automatically matches my Mac video resolution. Very nice. You enable shared folders for moving files between the host OS and the VM. So I have been moving my old files from my old Machine to the Mac and from the Mac to the VM. The only complaint I have is Parallels could use a slight improvement in the mouse control and movement while in XP. But it is very useable as it is and since this software is a Release Candidate I look forward to good things. If you want to know more go to www.parallels.com. It only runs on Intel Macs. The picture attached is one of my latest doodles in Xara running in a VM console on the Mac desktop, in the upper left is iTunes playing an internet radio station. If anyone has questions fire away.
regards,
sunland
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