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The Coastal Plants CD is (unfortunately) not available in a Macintosh version.
However, the good news is that it is easy to organise a windows emulator so you can run the Coastal Plants program on your Mac. This approach comes courtesy of one of our mac using members, Ralph Cartwright.
For those of you, like me, who use a Mac computer rather than a Windoze box, our CD has been something we only heard about, rather than got to use.
I recently was forced to buy a PC emulator to run some special PC-Only software. This has, however, had an added benefit that I can also now use our CD :-)
The next bit is the technical stuff of what my system is, then I will give step by step instructions on how I installed it.
My desk-top machine is an iMac. It has a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor running OSX 10.5.4 with the latest updates. The memory was 1.5GB
My Laptop is a MacBook Pro with the same processor and OS, but with 2GB of memory.
The first thing that I did was to download from their web-site a copy of Parallels Software. This came as a free demo version which runs for 30 days. Payment was by credit card via their secure payment web-site and included a back-up copy sent to me via post. The cost was $108. The web address is: http://www.parallels.com/en/.
Next, I had to get a copy of Microsoft Windows. I installed Windows XP Professional. Probably easier and cheaper to get than a Vista version. Once installed, starting up the Parallels/windows system is very easy, just one click from the dock icon is required.
Because I regularly have a minimum of 4 and often 6 or more programs running at once, I found that with Parallels running too, my machine slowed noticeably, so I upgraded the memory. I took out the half GB module and replaced it with a 2GB module for a total of 3GB and it now runs fine.
The program puts a new Icon on your Mac desktop called RNP Plants.lnk.
It also puts another called RNP Plants, with a nice Waratah picture on the icon on your Windows desk-top, too.
You will need to shut down Windows and re-start to be able to view the icon.
Double clicking on this icon on the Windows screen starts the program. Double clicking on the Mac screen icon first starts Parallels and Windows and then runs the CD program. You don't need the CD in the drive to run the program.
If you buy a current copy of our CD, then the two upgrades on the web-site are already installed.
Enjoy :-)
Ralph Cartwright
