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VWA 9.5 on OS X


n ironside

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As a small office practioner, I can ill afford to have my staff trouble shoot problems. At home, I have VWA 9.5 installed on my PB G3 333 (Lombard) running OS X 10.1.2 exclusively. At home, I can catch up on unfinished work from the office without time being an issue, and can test out and learn more about VWA's 9.5 improvements.

I am happy to report that it is a beautiful thing working in OS X and a relatively problem-free VWA 9.5. About the only two things that are preventing me from making the switch at the office is that Microsoft has yet to release new drivers for the MS Intellimouse Optical devices we use at the office, and the concern about being able to plot to our HP 455CA. No doubt the former will come at the end of next month, but the former is problematic at best.

From the forums on printing/plotting problems, you can see it is bad enough with OS 9.x. It appears that my work around would be to reopen the file in Classic's VWA 9.5 to plot as we do now with our JetDirect server and HP RIP. Troublesome. The only two other options are to output to a bureau with PDF files or spend some fairly big bucks on a currently supported PostScript plotter with OS X drivers.

Hope this helps.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

OK, if you are using VW9.5 now, you will in my opinion see a =very slight= slowdown in MacOSX compared to MacOS9, coupled with a =significant= increase in stability and ease of use (that is, ease of use as regards memory managment). There are user interface issues, particularly regarding the Finder, that have many Mac users frustrated, but I have had little trouble making the switch. (I would regard some of the little differences in UI annoying but not negative in productivity.) I also expect many of the performance issues improve over time as Apple further tunes the OS, but I use OSX as my default Mac OS, and feel that a (minor) loss in speed is well worth it in terms of stability. My $.02.

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VW 9.5 has been working beautifully for us on OS X as well. It took Nemetschek a while longer than anticipated, but I think they did a great job. As far as interface issues are concerned, I have found that not having windowshades in the palettes has been a pain and has slowed me down somewhat. This is especially true since I work on a dual USB iBook and screen real estate is somewhat limited. It has been great to not worry about memory management and general system instability. I haven't have VW 9.5 go south on me yet, but it is nice that when other things crash, like Mail, they don't bring VW down with them.

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I just loaded os x and I am weeding my way through the process. I use Wacom and Kennsington 2 button/wheel mice and they have os x drivers for them that work fine. I too miss the windowshade aspects of os 9 in vws. Maybe there is a freeware version for os x? Still can not plot through my network yet. I thought having the computer that is running the rip program for the 455ca plotter would work running os 9, but even though I can see it on the network in os x's print center, it does not seem to have a PPD file to select that os x reconises. I guess I can run vw 8.5 ( because of the post script errors of vws9.5, see plotting problems ) in classic then export a file to it to plot (a pain!) or maybe save it in os x as a postscript then open it in the hp rip to plot? any suggestions out there?

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Kurt,

Did you physically put the PPD on your OSX machine? If not, try doing so. You will probably want to put it in the classic system folder. Try to then manually selecting the "Printer Model" in print center when adding the printer. If that doesn't work try the 1055cm ppd-- that should give you the paper sizes, although all the setting will not be right. That may or may not work.

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thanks for the reply.

I already have the hp455 ppd installed in OS9 (sys folder, prefs printr prefs parsed PPD folder & extentions) on the machine with OS X . I can see the plotter in the print center but can't select it maually because no ppd is in the list provided. I tried to drag the the ppd's to the OS X system but do not know where to put them. This is what HP said in some emails:

Kurt,Thank you for contacting Hewlett-Packard's Customer Care Technical Center.As long as all of the Macs on the Network are booted in native OS 9.x, thenyou may do as you're requesting. ANY Mac running OS X natively will not beable to interact with the RIP software.

Kurt,Thank you for contacting Hewlett-Packard's Customer Care Technical Center.Actually, it won't work with OS X native at all. Classic mode, OS 9.1 only.

I will try the 1055cm ppd and see what happens.

Kurt

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Kurt, You can get MacPlot (made by MicroSpot) to run on OS 10 and rip files to be sent to your HP 455 sucessfully.They just released a version to be compatible with OS 10 about a week and change ago.

[ 02-19-2002: Message edited by: Katie ]

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I just spoke with a customer support person at Microspot in regards to Mac OS X . She says they will have a OSX driver for the 500. 800. & 3500 HP plotters soon. She does not know when for the 455, maybe June? Just like HP, Microspot is writing the drivers for the current models first, then will pick up the rest after. Unlike HP they did say they will support the 455, eventually.

Kurt

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smile.gif" border="0

We've been pleasantly surprised by OS X 10.1.x (10.1.3 at this moment) and the interactivity of Vectorworks 9.5 and its Architect, Engineer and Renderworks plug-ins.

Noting that nothing is perfect - there are some interesting little things that may be taken care of in the future, but for now they are just annoyances, rather than true bugs or glitches.

One is that when you utilize OS X's new keystoke "Apple H" to minimalize the Vectorworks window, as it does most other OS X-savvy applications, it only proceeds to close the palette boxes, one-by-one. I would think NNA will address this in their upcoming r10 or even a 9.5 update.

Another item is the fact that you can now preview your plots (before wasting paper) but the interface is a little clumsy as it utilizes Acrobat Reader as its preview 'window' - thing is, it does not automatically take you back to the print command, and I've caught myself a few times closing (or quitting) the Acrobat window, which in turn requires you to go back to the print command from the beginning. MAIN THING here is that there finally IS a preview ability AND the entire print process from hitting the 'enter' key to actually having a printer or plotter come on-line and start, has been INCREDIBLY sped up and the time is comparable to those using an AutoCAD platform.

Other than these couple things, there is much reason to move over to OS X, not to mention the OS itself doesn't crash (knock on wood). There have been instances when Vectorworks crashes, but they have been few and far between and the fact that only the application has crashed - i.e. no more having to force quit the finder, restart or completely shutdown and restart the system.

Talk about nice!

ANYway - hope you're enjoying r9.5 as we are - good luck..

Oh yeah - it would be nice if the Mac versions had 'magnetic' docking palettes AND docked with each other along with automatically reoriented themselves to horizontal if you wanted to put them across the top below the menu bar, as the Wintel version allows...

Craig in Denver

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