Christian Spanring wrote today about using ArcGIS on Mac OS X using VMware Fusion (his throw to YouTube). Hopefully all of you who were interested in this kind of experiment back in the early days are still reading.
Bernhard Jenny of jenny.cartography.ch just released a 1.0 of his QuickLook plugins for Leopard’s Finder. These are really nice additions to the OS X GIS experience, which is becoming increasingly more fluid and enjoyable thanks to standup muthas like Mr. Jenny.
I’ve been raving about Parallels lately because it allows me to run Windows on my MacBook Pro. Well, the problem with that is that it allows me to run Windows on my MacBook Pro. Which means I can be going about my business and have Windows be a real pal and pop up a number of messages that just linger until I go dismiss them. Is this absolutely fucking necessary, Windows? Would it kill you to just keep to yourself by default? You’re telling me you have nothing better to do than remind me about how I have icons on the desktop I don’t use very often or how I should probably turn on your firewall? Get a hobby, brother. You don’t need me to validate your feelings.
So Parallels does other nice things like put .app aliases (or maybe they’re shortcuts?) outside of the Windows virtual disk so you can launch the guest OS applications like you would normal OSX .app packages. Trouble is, they still look Windowsy. In fact, putting them in your dock makes Dock look like it’s got two bad teeth.
So despite my constant complaining about having so much work to do (a complaint which is itself despite the fact that I’m not important enough to possibly be that busy), I did waste about 15 minutes making new, higher resolution, more Appley icons for ArcCatalog and ArcMap. They’re not outstanding, but they’re better. Smile, dock:
Edit (2008-02-17): phabe makes a good point: here’s a zip with both icons in it. I’ll reiterate that these are not professionally-rendered icons, but they’re still better than a blotchy slob of pixels arranged to approximate an icon.
It’s been a while since I said anything about how well Parallels was running on this MacBook Pro to which I seem to be married. First of all, there is at least one major upgrade that has been rolled out by the Parallels team, and that’s full OSX disk access from within the guest OS (Windows XP Pro, in this case). IT happened a long time ago, I think. Primarily for me it meant that budgeting for 25GB of disk space for Windows was completely unnecessary; that the Windows OS needed only enough virtual disk to account for the Windows OS.
But I’m simultaneously busy, lazy, and stupid and I couldn’t figure out how to shrink the size of the Parallels virtual disk (I tried Compressor but it didn’t seem to register within the Windows OS). At any rate, I only use it for ArcGIS anyway, which believe it or not isn’t a completely difficult installation. So made a new Windows OS, and this time told it to optimize for OSX use instead of guest OS use. I think this is what made the difference, but either way I’m here to report that these two are running very well together.
Better than ever, anyway, and OSX isn’t nearly as sluggish as it was before while Parallels is actively running the guest OS. So with that, with the shared profile feature (my OSX “Desktop” becomes the Windows “Desktop,” and with Coherence I’ve never been closer to an idyllic Mac/Windows machine. Naturally, a Mac ArcGIS would be better still, but I have to say that uDig and Geoserver and qvSig and all of these other pretenders are coming along just fine and make it possible to do a lot of good work outside of a Parallels-run Windows to begin with.
If I weren’t so lazy that I didn’t even bother to tag my files, this would personally be of interest. Instead, I’m generally pleased to see Geo search in Leopard Spotlight from High Earth Orbit.
Stand-up Comic Voice: Why don’t they make the whole OS a GIS?
And I agree. Would that be so hard, Apple? Can’t you come in on the weekends for a few months?
On the eve of a potentially-interesting announcement at MacWorld, The Map Room is reminding everyone that Garmin’s POI Loader is out of beta and that MapInstall and MacManager are up and available.
I think I’ve mentioned before that Parallels’ “Cohesion” is nearly priceless. I’m on build 3106 and its speed is really pretty good. It’s a little peculiar that the speed of the XP OS within Parallels is often much better than working with the Parallels .app itself. Anyway, I should report that last night Parallels crashed very suddenly, with nothing to report about why. Just instantly shut down. And right now ArcMap was drawing a pretty simple polygon layer and then just stopped, froze. The Parallels .app is still responding, but ArcMap (actually, entire Windows OS) isn’t and the “Send keys” option doesn’t do anything.
In better news, I managed to get the personal version of ArcSDE (inc. SQL Server Express) onto Parallels’ XP and somehow it was easier than doing it on my desktop. Permissions problems, I guess.
Well, first here’s the most recent Rumsfeldian metric: another in my line of running tallies of unread RSS articles is the following (a new record):
That’s right: I got so far behind this last week that I had over 7,000 articles waiting for me. Hm. Groan. Eh, if you’re not busy you’re not doing enough, perhaps.
Another thing waiting for me was VerySpatial’s Part 1 of a series on GIS on Macs. Naturally, I haven’t watched/listened yet.
Mostly. Quickly, I have to register this news about my new ability to run ArcGIS 9.2 from within my nice, easy, powerful, beautiful OS X. The Intel Macs can do it either through Boot Camp (maybe this weekend) or via Parallels. The Parallels version now offers (in beta) an operating mode called “Cohesion” that makes it seem very much like you’re running OS X and XP apps (ArcGIS 9.2, though, which is another story) right next to each other. It works and it’s fast.
Edit for the coolest part yet (Cohesion works with Expose):
