Of course, you are correct, Philip. Ideally, native Mac apps would be programmed as anything else is a virtual bandaid. We can only use up CoffeeCup's storage and bandwidth in speculation at this point to see if the dreams come true.

I'm really liking the VMWare solution, and I've talked to some folks who have been using it successfully to run Windows and Linux together. Further, the Rhino 3D folks endorse it with their app, which is my primary modeling solution--though as I said that will soon become moot as they're already almost in beta with a full native Mac port for Rhino. Awesome. I have a couple of other apps (not counting the CC stuff) whose behavior I need to check on before I get too carried away with this evil scheme.

On the flip side, the XP my HP laptop came with has literally never crashed on me. It's been a rock-solid performer for the lifetime of my machine, which is a damned sight better than I can say for Vista. I recently stripped that crash-prone puppy from my wife's laptop in favor of XP and it's already behaving better. They "upgraded" my work laptop from XP to Vista today (I had no choice in the matter), and it was running for less than two hours when it crashed to a BSOD. All that was open was Outlook. Pathetic. I'm just starting to see signs of my HP hardware's aging and thinking on my graphics machine's mortality. If I'm going to replace it anyway, I'm thinking I could do worse than crossing over from the Dark Side.

I have a decent collection of custom smileys on my web server, I like to sprinkle them in every now and then. http://www.spinland.biz/smileys/icon_eyebrow.gif

Just another disappointed mac user whom would love to use your applications! No, I don't want to use boot camp i will just look for something similar from some other company!
Just to let you know! ...In case you care a bit!
Good luck!!

All you XP users, beware!!
Microsoft is hell bent to push Vista down the throats of anyone using a PC. The question is how much longer will Microsoft support XP? And in good conscious, will Microsoft continue to force Vista on the buying public knowing dog-on well that it's not as stable as XP, and it probably never will be.

I run XP on my desktop with little or no disruption, but on one of my laptops which I purchased in December came with Vista - is constantly crashing even with 4 Gigs of Ram, hardly nothing on the hard drive, and yes I too have issues when I open Outlook. It seems as if MS Products suck more of the System resources than 3rd party software.

But ... That's why I switched to MACs

I wonder when Microsoft will understand, that Stability comes first then innovation when it comes to the OS on a PC.

GM

I don't really rely on whether MS supports an OS any longer, anyway. My desktop PC still runs Win98SE and has been a star performer for a ridiculously long time. It serves a special purpose for which 98 is still just fine, and I'm not offended at all by the fact it can't get updates online any longer.

For that matter, I still have an old G3 iMac Snow. I proved you can indeed upgrade them when I replaced the hard drive with a larger one and boosted the memory to a gig using standard PC parts. It runs 10.3 like a champ, as well as the Mac version of Office. It sits in the guest room on the wireless LAN in case someone stays with us who doesn't have their own wireless and wants to check mail or surf the web or whatever. I don't believe in throwing stuff out just because it's old--not if it works.

My wife's laptop came with Vista; I ordered it right before Dell started offering XP as a "downgrade" option, alas. Still, they recently sold me a copy of XP and I spent the bulk of last weekend wiping her system and installing XP. Since then it has been notably faster, and thus far has not had a single crash or system hang, both of which were common with Vista. MS can cut off support for it tomorrow, I could not care less. I'll run what works and if support is available I'll take it as an extra bonus.

My XP laptop is back in running form again, and odds are I'll hold off replacing it until something really critical blows up on it. I'll be looking long and hard at the MackBook Pro option, and if I go that route I'll almost certainly add XP via VMWare so I can run the last few apps I need that don't have Mac flavors. Seems like there's always going to be at least one legacy app hanging around.

I have two Macbook pro's and they work great. I love the fact that you never have to power them down unless you're doing something that's really pulling system resources.

I know this topic is almost impossible not to become a MS bash-fest, but in all fairness, there's hit & miss success stories with Vista. Of course, we hear more nightmares than praises, but that's typical. If a computer is constantly crashing w/ hardly anything on it (and w/ apps like Outlook), something is out of the norm there. I'd sooner look into other issues like faulty RAM. I've run across my share of bad RAM sticks, bad sectors on hard drives, overheating cpus & video cards, unstable power supplies, etc. Point is, there could be countless reasons beyond Vista itself as to why people are having such bad experiences. I think that it's been a lifelong issue with PCs having more stability issues due to the fact that there's a gazillion different brands and models of hardware & software created for it, while the Mac has been in control of their own few tested models and configurations. I've been lucky to have a fairly good experience with Vista so far (w/ newer hardware and SP1, anyway). However, the name itself (Vista) has been so ruined before most have even seen it, it'll be a miracle if I get my company to upgrade to it. I'm sure it was a good move calling the next OS something completely different (Windows 7) versus Vista 2nd Edition.


Definitely can't argue there.

Well, interesting post, Adam.

Once upon a time it bothered me that Apple was so carefully protecting their hardware platform. I switched to Windows, built systems, used my best judgement on compatibility issues etc. and did pretty well through Win98SE. I had a few more issues with crashing and such with WindowsXP but when Vista came along not only did compatibilty and stability suffer but so did my hardware. I had a Laptop (major brand, 4gb ram) running Vista that crashed and literally burned in a bit over a year. It never worked well for the graphics and sound apps I needed to run and that's what pushed me back to MAC. Now to avoid MS bashing, which is just too easy, the comment regarding stability and hardware issues is valid. Except that my experience is that XP still crashes in emulator mode on Apple hardware. So that's my last contribution to that point.

The real question for me is whether it will make any sense for CC to look at MAC apps considering two factors: 1. The relatively small user base 2. The current poor state of the global economy.

This is a fun discussion but whether it will have any affect on changing or altering the development of new apps for MAC at CC is a very large and I'm afraid, disappointing question. And - I don't blame CoffeeCup at all - they are after all in business to make money. I would like to have MAC CC apps but in the meantime I'll continue using CC apps in Parallels. I just wish things were otherwise.

I hear you about trying to be fair, Adam, but in my case I've experienced two Vista systems: my wife's laptop and my laptop at my day job. In the former case, as I said, it's been shown the problems were Vista and not the hardware as a switch to XP cleared everything right up. In my case, my laptop had XP on it for over a year, functioned perfectly, and within two hours of them migrating it to Vista it crashed to a Blue Screen of Death and corrupted my local mail files. Same issue with the identical laptops of the people sitting on either side of me at work. Mine was the third to migrate, after two weeks of fooling with drivers and such they've finally gotten the first one to run reasonably reliably. I'm last in line. In the meantime I keep my local e-mail storage backed up on my Linux workstation and use the laptop as little as I can manage.

It's no accident Microsoft is fast-tracking the shift to the thing-after-Vista, methinks.

Spinny,
one things for sure ... MS has lost a big share of the market just on simplicity and stability. The "I'm a PC" commercials are a direct response to the loss of some of their market. Now, to be fair, to the average joe it may seem small regarding the market share, but if you look the trends this is a huge shift from a business point of view.

Colleges and grade schools across the country and around the world are switching to MACs. It's kind of like of silent revolution that will yield dividends in 5-7 years - that I believe will cut into the foundation of MS's market shares regarding computer use

Practically, the way Windows Vista works in theory is pretty heady, but again stability will always rule the day and Windows is simply not that stable.

To be fair I think Windows is going no where and its certainly not going to shrink over night but the stability issue have to get better or they (MS) will find themselves marketing PC's with Vista or some future operating system to Walmarts & Target customers - ONLY ... LOL LOL LOL

Philip mentioned that XP still crashes in emulator mode on Apple hardware - well we have to give Apple some credit for being able to carry their OS as well as supporting MS OS. Can Windows run Apple's OS or do anything that efficient?

(Smile)