Central To Everything and Close to Nothing | I run a new MacBook Pro with VM Ware's Fusion running Vista as a virtual machine inside the Mac OS. That allows me to run SMS advanced, Apex, and my accounting software. I set up the Mac with Vista Boot Camp partition which allows me to boot the Mac to Vista at startup if I want all of the horsepower dedicated to my mapping applications. Otherwise the Fusion virtual machine works pretty good. I've only had this for a few weeks now but so far so good. I haven't found the sweet spot yet with virtual machine as far as giving Vista enough resources to not bog down and vise versa with Leopard. I haven't had much opportunity to give SMS a good run in the virtual machine, but I think for building simple maps, it works just fine. Apex seems unaffected so far.
This is my first Mac. First off the machine is very cool looking, I love the speed and simplicity of the operating system and after years of putting up with Dell and HP substandard products, this one feels right. The trackpad is awesome, it's hard to believe how intuitive it is to use. I decided to go with MS Office for Mac which is a bit of a step back from Office 2007 for Windows, more specifically Entourage, but it works and I'm not huge a Office user anyway.
Will the ag GIS developers ever make Mac versions? Probably not considering they only sell by the thousands (if that) and not millions like consumer software does. So for that reason, if you want a Mac, you will still need to have a copy of Windows kicking around. |
Ag GIS on a Mac
