by Rob Woods - ex Granthams IsoDraw Support.
As you know, with the release of IsoDraw 7 and the acquisition of ITEDO by PTC, the Macintosh platform was dropped from the development programme. So where does that leave us? Either we buy additional hardware just to run IsoDraw on, or we migrate completely from Mac to PC. Both are costly options and it means leaving the friendly environment of the Mac OS behind, and moving over to the dark side of the PC world.
Well, perhaps not. There is an option for Mac users who have Intel based Mac’s or who are considering the options for purchasing a new Mac. With the release of OS X on the new Intel chipped machines, there was an option to be able to run the Mac in ‘PC Mode’. This option is called Boot Camp and essentially allows a user to launch the hardware in either Mac or PC mode. The downside to this approach is that if you run IsoDraw along side other Mac applications (Mail, Safari, Illustrator etc.) then the machine is constantly being rebooted in order to swap operating systems, not really practical.
During my last months at Granthams we did hardware tests to prove that a PC version would in fact run successfully on a Mac booted in PC mode. These were the days, however, of the good old USB dongle which has now also been dropped by the development team in favour of PTC’s Flex LM licensing technology. For those not familiar with this system, the software requires a text file to be present before the application can be fully installed. This file has to be requested from PTC and is hard coded to the PC using the internal network address.
We’ve also been waiting for a reliable and more user friendly way for users to run PC applications from within the Mac OS in much the same way that Virtual PC used to. Well there is now a solution in the guise of applications like VM Ware Fusion and Parallels. Now we get the best of both worlds, a copy of IsoDraw 7 in a PC window, running just like any other Mac application. I have only had the opportunity to test the VM Ware solution up until now, and the results are very good. As VMware Fusion uses the Boot Camp partition of the Mac’s hard drive, the machine can still be completely rebooted as a PC if you wish, and will still have access to IsoDraw and the preferences and files which were created during the Mac sessions.
Testing has not been exhaustive, and so far we’ve identified one keyboard shortcut that doesn’t work as expected. The zoom in and out shortcut keys on the Mac (CMD & OPT) are mapped as CTRL & OPT on a PC. On a Mac, a CTRL click works like a right mouse click giving us a pop up list. So when we try to zoom in or out, we get the pop up list, however we can select the zoom level from that pop up list. Or perhaps one of you Mac geeks knows how to switch this option off, I can’t find it! This anomaly doesn’t occur when the machine is running in PC mode.
So we now have a reliable way to continue with the IsoDraw upgrade path. If you would like further information and a quote to bring you up to the latest release please contact Concurrent Engineering on 0845 1298421, email sales@concurrent-engineering.co.uk or complete the enquiry form below:-
