Quote:
Originally posted by lendaddy
Ok, that makes sense. But the competing views on compatibility are what is stopping me. For instance I KNOW that my wife has sent me files from her MAC (can't recall if they were office or .pdf or .Zip or what) but I could not open them. Others have said they have seen problems as well. Then there are those that say there are no problems or that if there are they are really caused by X Y or Z. But the point remains that people do/will have file problems between the two(for whatever reason) and my customers don't want that song and dance, they just want to open the file with a click.
Did that make sense?
So, if the parallels thing is every bit as reliable or more so than a windows machine(when running windows) and the files are identical then I would probably use Windows for everything and only browse in OSX. But, if my customers are sending me autocad files or other files where no Mac solution exists(or is a pain in the ass), then suddenly I'm back in the virus/ad-ware game (which is my only reason for considering this).
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The "incompatabilities" issue was directly related to the way the OS's handled files.
With PC's you had the old 8.3 limitation, a file name could not be longer than 8 characters and had a 3 character extension that identified what program it belonged to.
With Macs you had 2 parts to a every file, a data fork that was the actual data. and a resource fork that contained the icon and info to tell the OS what app to use.
So you had 2 issues, Mac users were using longer filenames and never appended a file extension. So when it went to the PC it lost the resource fork and had no extension so Windows did not know what to do with it. All anyone had to do was add the proper extension and everything worked fine.
Oddly enough these days Windows hides the extensions by default while OS X adds them to just about everything by default.
So long story short, the incompatabilities were insignificant, most of it was end user related.
Scott