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Dave Horrigan

Do you find computers confusing? Well, earlier this month Apple gave us the chance to get even more confused when it opened the Pandora's Box that runs Windows XP on the new Intel Macs.

The free Boot Camp Beta allows you to install Windows XP on Intel Macs as a separate partition. Once installed, if you hold down the option key at startup you will be offered the choice of having Windows or Mac do your bidding.

The full version of Boot Camp will come with the next iteration of OSX (10.5 Leopard), but for now it allows users to go slumming when they feel so inclined. Unfortunately, this version does not yet allow interaction with Mac files or documents. It is primarily for running PC-only apps on your Mac.

About 24 hours after Apple's announcement, Parallels Company (www.

parallels.com) announced the beta release of its Workstation application, which also allows you to run Windows XP on your Mac but in a window that offers full integration with Mac files and features such as drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste across desktops.

And it's not just Windows XP. It also enables you to run any version of Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation or MS-DOS.

Workstation runs in Mac OS as a virtualisation. Virtualisation is different from emulation, which is software pretending to be a PC hardware device. Emulation is what VirtualPC does and it really slows down the PC software.

Virtualisation takes advantage of features built into Intel's new processors that allow the OS to more directly connect to the hardware and share resources with the Mac OS. The end result is that the Windows applications are fast.

From many reports, Windows applications running on Intel Macs using either Workstation or Boot Camp run faster than they do on Windows-only PCs.

The announcements inspired investors to boost Apple's stock price on the assumption that IT managers would prefer Macs because the new machines run both OSes and have lower operating costs when compared with the alternatives.

This is all well and good, but the glory in this news is a boat load of new empowerment for existing Mac users. Now, those PC apps that require a tonne of computing power will run better on your new Mac.

Yes, I live in denial. I use ViaVoice for voice recognition, Concepts Unlimited for CAD Design and solitaire is the only game I play on my Mac.

My son plays electronic games but his good ones are all for Xbox. The Mac games are lame and, he says, the PC games 'rock'. Now (or at least on his

next Mac) he will be able to get the latest and fastest PC games to run on his machine.

As to the voice recognition, ViaVoice is the Mac standard but it has not been upgraded in many years. The industry standard for excellence is Nuance Software's Dragon Naturally Speaking (www.nuance.com).

With 99 per cent accuracy and almost no training required, it is everything voice recognition should be. I have not compared it with MacSpeech's iListen, which has been under constant improvement, but at least now I can compare the two.

As to high-end CAD design applications, for years AutoCad was the de-facto standard for all things corporate CAD.

I attended a conference recently at a large facility in Florida near Disney World. As my conference was winding down I watched another conference being set up: the SolidWorks design CAD (www.solid

works.com) users' conference. It was almost as large as MacWorld, but just for one software application. About six of my friends were at that conference and, after quizzing them on what the big deal was all about, I discovered that SolidWorks had taken over the industry.

SolidWorks is not necessarily a better application than Concepts Unlimited, but if I was looking for a job as an industrial designer I would want to be able to use what everyone else used. Now I can, so this is a big deal for Mac designers.

So now you can have a Mac that runs 30 or more operating systems (simultaneously, if you have enough Ram) and you can play with hundreds of new games and applications that were previously available only to nerds and PCers. Plus you can get even more confused while using your Mac.

'The glory . . . is a boat load of empowerment for existing Mac users. Now, those PC apps that require a tonne of computing power will run better on your Mac'



New PC applications bring freedom to  users - and confusion