Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Some time back in Janu­ary, I spoke about the adjust­ments and trans­itions I had made when migrat­ing from PC to Mac.

One of my biggest prob­lems was that Paint Shop Pro pro­pri­et­ary files (.psp, .pspim­age) would not, could not and in fact, blatantly refused, point-blank to be opened or edited on a Mac. This was a big deal. Why? Because this entire site was designed in Paint Shop Pro. (Go me and my budget new-kidz-on-da-intarwebs soft­ware, baby!) In Paint Shop Pro’s defense, it pretty much does what Adobe Pho­toshop can do, just at the lower end of the price scale. To be hon­est, I’ve not yet found any­thing that I could do in Pho­toshop that I couldn’t find a way to do in Paint Shop Pro, be it when edit­ing pho­to­graphs, or design­ing the graph­ical aspects of websites.

Paint Shop Pro suited me and it did what I wanted it to do; it cost less than £100 and it gave me a decent level of con­trol without mak­ing me feel like I needed to have a Mas­ters Degree in Graphic Design in order to feel qual­i­fied to use it. When it refused to play with my iMac, I was most def­in­itely gut­ted. Although migrat­ing my digital dark­room activ­it­ies over to Adobe Pho­toshop Ele­ments was a fairly pain­less task (as it was the soft­ware used and taught on my Open Uni­ver­sity Pho­to­graphy course), using it to come up with new blog designs just didn’t come nat­ur­ally at all.

If you’re a long-time reader here (and I mean long — my site design hasn’t changed in about 18 months), you’ll know that my designs have a tend­ency to segue into one another; ele­ments from past designs always make it into the new one as I try to update the “face” of my blog whilst keep­ing it recog­nis­able. You see that ori­ental lily up there in the left-hand corner? That’s been here since Feb­ru­ary 2006 and weathered at least 3 dif­fer­ent tem­plate designs. I wanted to cre­ate a new design and obvi­ously keep the lily, but was unable to return to the files I’d used in pre­vi­ous designs as they were saved as .pspim­age format. I could have used the ori­ginal pho­to­graph, but that would mean dig­ging it out from the depths of my hard drive back-ups and labor­i­ously cut­ting that par­tic­u­lar flower out from its back­ground and the rest of the bou­quet ALL. OVER. AGAIN. The same is true again of any other design ele­ment I wanted to carry over, I would basic­ally have to recre­ate it from scratch.

Now, before some Smart-Arse-SallyAnne pipes up with “But, you can save .pspim­age files as .psd and open them in Pho­toshop”, can I just politely say: That idea is a big load of knob.

Re-saving as .psd oblit­er­ates vec­tor lay­ers (parts of the file that con­tain text and drawn lines/shapes) and then pixelates the edges of ras­ter lay­ers (when used with trans­par­ent back­grounds) bey­ond all com­mon decency. For the non-technical-minded that read this blog, that basic­ally means that it takes my nice files and breaks them rather shitast­ic­ally and renders them use­less. Oh, goody.

When I told you how Paint Shop Pro wouldn’t work on my Mac back in Janu­ary, I asked for advice on how to use .psp/.pspimage files on a Mac and expli­citly stated:

I have no desire to run Win­dows on my iMac

See? I italicised it and everything. Sadly, only one per­son offered a sug­ges­tion. That sug­ges­tion involved run­ning Win­dows on my iMac. (Yeah, I know… It took everything I had not to reply with some­thing “witty”.)

As much as I love Paint Shop Pro, I just couldn’t bring myself to fork out, in terms of both time and money, in order to install Win­dows on my machine. Regard­less of the route I went down, whether I upgraded to Leo­pard in order to gain Boot­Camp and ran Win­dows nat­ively, or whether I pur­chased some­thing like Par­al­lels or VMware, I was still required to go out and line Micro$haft’s pock­ets by buy­ing a ver­sion of Win­dows XP on top of that.

Well, until a very nice per­son, who was very nice indeed, men­tioned the joys of Cros­sOver Mac on the Mac Gen­eral OUSA Conferences.

Look!

Now I can get to all my old files without even hav­ing to boot-up my PC. Squee!

Cros­sOver Mac is based on the Open Source Wine Pro­ject, which allows Win­dows soft­ware to be installed/run on Unix-based sys­tems (Mac OSX, Linux etc) without need­ing to install a Win­dows Oper­at­ing System.

I’m cur­rently using a 30-day trial of Cros­sover and have installed and mer­rily run Win­dows ver­sions of:

• Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 (I also have PSP X, but it doesn’t cur­rently work on Crossover)
• Adobe Pho­toshop 7
• QuarkX­press 5

If you have an Intel Mac and want/need to run Win­dows soft­ware, I thor­oughly recom­mend con­sid­er­ing Cros­sover. Check out the ever-growing list of com­pat­ible soft­ware that works on Cros­sover, which is due to expand again when Cros­sover 7 is released in the near future.

I also tried my Inter­act­ive CD-ROM game. Sadly though, it didn’t work. Sob.

I know what you’re think­ing: There’s a Prince / com­puter game?!

Yup. It came out about 15 years ago to the tune of £50, which back then was noth­ing short of extor­tion. The recom­men­ded specs included Microsoft Win­dows 3.1 and 4MB of RAM(!). I play it every time I want to remem­ber what top-of-the-line gam­ing looked like in 1994:

For­tu­nately, it still goes like a champ on WinXP (Vista just stamps its feet at me). There’s part of me that’s just dying to do a write-up on it, it’s such a fant­ast­ic­ally kitsch piece of memorabilia.

And I’m secretly hop­ing that one day Crossover/Wine will have evolved enough to make it work so that I can keep it forever. Ok, maybe not-so secretly…