If you love your Macintosh software and would prefer to use Macintosh applications over Windows applications, but you either have to use a PC or can't resist the low cost of PCs, why not simply use the PC to run the Macintosh software? What a simple idea! What Mac Word user really wants to use Word 2000 or Word XP? The look-and-feel problem - While many Macintosh applications do have Windows equivalents, most Macintosh users prefer the look and feel of the Mac OS and the way that the applications look and behave on a Mac. While it may be inexpensive to replace the old Macintosh computers with PCs, it is not a trivial matter to rewrite millions of lines of computer code or to purchase thousands of dollars of new software which may not be able to read the old files. The custom written software problem - Many schools have invested thousands of dollars and years of time in developing customized educational software. The Mac applications that created the document do not exist for the PC, or the Windows version of the application lacks the ability to do the conversion. The non-standard file format problem - Some file formats simply can't be converted from Mac to PC. Each time the file may lose font, formatting, and layout information and may require tedious editing to fix to get it back to the way it was originally.

Then copy it back to a Macintosh and editing it using the original application. The round trip problem - Create a file on a Macintosh. None of these simple file copy utilities are really a good solution for the problems faced by real world Macintosh and Windows users: But they do not solve the 'round trip' problem of moving a Mac file from a Mac application to a Windows application and then back to the Mac application. Other tools, costing up to hundreds of dollars, do exist to allow Mac and PC computers to network together. This type of utility is a bad idea if you plan to ' round trip' the document back to a real Macintosh. But the act of conversion may destroy the font information and change the document layout.

Some popular commercial utilities even go so far as to convert the file format for you, say from Mac Word 5.1 format to Word 2000 format. We even provide such a free utility to read Mac disks on a PC, which is handy for reading a Mac formatted disk that contains a common file such as a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, Photoshop document, or a GIF or JPG or HTML file. Utilities do exist to read Macintosh files on the PC. Since 1984, Macintosh and PC users have grappled with the problems of reading each other's disks, loading each other's files, and running each other's applications. Emulators Online - Apple Macintosh EmulationĬross-platform compatibility between Mac and Windows is not a new concept.

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