In the office we’re at the stage of replacing our computers. My boss approached me and asked what I thought we should get. Being a self confessed Mac zealot, I obviously said without thinking about it “MACS!”. His face said it all, “yes I knew you were going to say that, now be serious”. So I put forward the case that if we as a team are being asked to support Apple Macs in the department then I should have one to work with. I’m even happy for this to be my work machine rather than an additional box.
After a short pause he said well if you can get E-Prime to work on it then we’ll seriously consider it. Now for those of you that haven’t read on my blog about this software, it’s a nasty piece of software. It crashes all the time without warning and is just generally a pain in the rear. I’ve spent the last couple of day doing something I hoped I would never have to do. I installed windows on a mac, god it hurt! No really it hurt so much I wanted to cry, I mean why would you install windoze on something so beautiful as a mac! I did warn you that I was a little bit of a mac zealot. First time I installed windows, it managed to trash the whole thing, good ol’ windows installer 
. A second attempt was a little closer but the installer decided to corrupt some files. Finally on the third attempt I managed to get a succesful install of windows xp running under boot camp.
Excellent I thought until I realized that this isn’t really going to be helpful for me. I spend the majority of my day work with E-Prime. Someone will pop down and say can you make a quick tweak to this project or create a new script to test an idea, which would mean that I’d have to reboot the mac into window. So in general I’d be spending most of my time either rebooting or sitting in windows which is what I’m trying to get away from. So I was reading around and found out that parallels also supported virtual machines installed via boot camp. Excellent news I thought I could have the best of both worlds use virtualization when I need to quickly change something in E-Prime and reboot into it only if I needed, but all the time only having one copy of windows and supporting software on the hard drive, thus saving disc space. So I grabbed the copy we had in the office (version 3) and installed it. Alas this didn’t play well with the USB license key for E-Prime and so wouldn’t work. I was almost ready to throw in the towel and say to the boss buy me a new PC when I spotted that there was a new version of parallels. Soon after installing I had tears of joys! Ok, maybe there weren’t tears of joys, but you get the idea it all worked. The new version of parallels plays ball with the USB license key and whats more E-Prime doesn’t moan about video problem when running under parallels as it does any other software virtualization and remote clients. So we’re one step closer to having macs in the office and even better there is talk of us either getting Mac Pros or the new mac mini which should have dual screen support in the next release.
I’m one very happy bunny at the moment.