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I took a step backwards today in my migration to Mac.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Microsoft Publisher doesn’t exist for Mac OS X…

I installed Windows XP on my Macbook today, not writing over OS X, but as a second operating system. Apple, of course, made this easy with Boot Camp, a nice utility that sets things up on the Mac side, and once you have Windows installed, there’s another part of Boot Camp that installs all the necessary drivers on the Windows side.

After the 88 (and then another lot) of security updates were installed, and Office and it’s security updates were installed, my new “PC” was ready to go.

The next step was VMware’s Fusion, which allows me to run Windows (and Windows applications) as a “virtual machine” inside my Mac. So easy to install, it recognised that I had Boot Camp set up, started up Windows and dropped some tools into Windows to make things play nice (mystical magical stuff, I’m guessing). And, hence… Publisher running on the Mac as if it was supposed to be there. I can just drag a Publisher file from my mac’s desktop, straight into Published and it all works.

Why bother? Well there are a couple of things that I’m still going to need Windows for.

As school is all Windows based, I needed somewhere to play with applications that I’ll be using there (e.g. dynamic geometry software). Then there are a few minor things:

1. Publisher (not to use, but when others send me files, I can convert them to PDF and upload to the web; there is an online service that does this though)
2. Windows Media Encoder – to encode audio to Windows Media formats (can do this with Flip4Mac, but it’s not free like Windows Media Encoder).
3. Internet Explorer – oh the joy… just to check out it’s misbehaviour when designing web-sites.

That’s a short list.

Don’t expect to be using Windows much, but Boot Camp and VMware Fusion certainly make it convenient.