Experiences with Storyline on Mac via Parallels
May 25, 2012
By
Brian Houle
Hi, folks!
So, I once lived in a Linux world in college. Then, when I started work, I moved to a Windows world.
I just accepted a new job and the question has arisen: PC or MAC? I'm tempted to make the move to a Mac world to broaden my skill-set (how hard can it be???!!), but Storyline is going to be a real bread-and-butter app for me, and I'm concerned that it's not natively supported on the Mac.
How have you found working with Storyline on a Mac via parallels? Is the performance acceptable? Have you run into any serious productivity log-jams?
Thanks!
Brian
62 Replies
Hi Brian, I have used it via parallels for 10 months no problems. Max out your memory is all the advice I can give. Performance is acceptable.
I think most of the development team use Macs, I know Arlyn was running Storyline from a Macbook Pro
For Parallels specifically, avoid the bundled Kapersky AV. I was having regular BSOD's on the windows side while I had it installed. Once I removed it, smooth as silk.
Another thing to be aware of; there is some software that does not appreciate being run in a virtual machine. There's an avatar program I use regularly that behaves very badly in a virtual environment. That generally means a trip to bootcamp when I need to work with it. Which often means that I'm working in bootcamp while using SL (or Studio 09) as well.
I am amazed by how well Storyline works on an old MacBook Pro core duo with only 4 gigs of RAM. I am waiting for the new Macs to come out and wasn't sure it would work on tho old thing, but I am impressed. Works way better than Studio. (Probably because it don't have Powerpoint baggage.)
I will be getting more RAM on my new Mac, but I am still impressed by the performance on this old on.
I am using Windows 7, BTW.
It works great on the mac using parallels. Again boost up your memory, mine is running with 16GB RAM.
Thanks for the responses, folks!
I am curious. How is the performance compared to a Windows computer?
I dont see any noticeable difference, I believe Storyline only uses a single core to run, definitely works as fast as my XP machine with 4gb
I just got a new MacBookPro with 16gigs. Runs as smoothly as it did with 4 gigs on my old MBP but now I can keep all my Adobe CS apps open on the mac side. I am using Windows 7. Works great.
I have a macbook pro with 12GB of ram. Most of the time, I just give 2gb to my windows install. Storyline surprisingly runs great with this meager amount of RAM, but then when it came to publishing (encoding videos) it took forever. I'm sure if I gave paralells more RAM for times when I'm publishing it would be great.
No one mentioned all the problems that can arise if you have your story file or the output destinations on the mac harddrive (you must keep them both on the virtual c drive in parallels) I have wasted over a week trouble shooting this issue
Hi all,
Here are a few important tips for running Articulate software in a Mac environment with Parallels:
Also, follow these best practices when working with the Articulate products in Parallels:
That's weird. I have all my projects on external drives and they are not in the Windows environment. I use a shared profile and export all my Storyline projects from the external drives/Storyline files to my mac desktop.
Everything works fine.
I use the shared environment and works fine, I have a problem sometimes publishing but this is fixed by publishing to a physical drive then all works well again.
I've always found that publishing or working on external drives is great until it isn't.
I don't do it, just to eliminate on other possible problem up front.
sean
Parallels 9 with 8G of RAM on a Macbook Pro is running as smoothly as I could have imagined. Per the feedback offered in this thread, I have windows and mac running separately, but may experiment with the shared profile.
For storage, I use Copy and their desktop client. I have not experienced any corruption issues or errors when syncing projects between multiple computers.
Thanks for sharing Luke!
Luke, are you using Windows 7?
Hi Cynthia! I'm assuming you're reaching out to Luke about the same issue that you posted here. In case Luke isn't subscribed to the thread, you may want to shoot him a PM.
I just purchased the MacBook Pro with Retina 16GB and have installed Parallels 9. Unfortunately, I'm not having much luck running Storyline and I know it probably has something to do with the way I've got it configured. I've maxed out everything and am not using the Shared profiles as directed. I've got Windows 8 installed with all the latest drivers.
Unfortunately, on my Mac, my Storyline files appear as though they are not completely rendered. Meaning that images on the slide appear as disconnected artifacts. I've attached a screen capture hoping someone can help.
This same file will open in Windows Storyline with all the images intact.
You need to change the dpi settings
HI Martinique,
Phil is referring to the fact that Storyline is supported when Windows is set to a DPI of 96.
Changing the DPI settings didn't work for me alone. However, clicking on 'custom sizing options' in the DPI settings area and then selecting 'Use Windows XP Style Scaling' fixed the issue.
I'm using Macbook Pro Retina, with Parallels 9 on OSX Mavericks.
Hi James,
Thanks for sharing the additional information you had to change on your Mac. Welcome to the Heroes community!
I don't own Articulate Storyline but recently made the decision to purchase it. Then, when reaching the last page to purchase I read that it is not available for Apple/Mac. How is this possible in 2014?
With computers moving towards flash storage and cloud-based storage, it isn't reasonable or feasible for me to run parallels or bootcamp on my machines. I currently have 2 MacBook Pros with Retina Displays (13 inch and 15 inch). I am ready to enter the Articulate Storyline camp, but every gig is precious. My entire ecosystem is Apple and I despise Microsoft Windows and Office.
I tweeted with Articulate about this already, but I wanted to voice my frustration here as well.
Please open the barrier for those of us (many these days!) that use Mac so that we can natively run Storyline.
Hi Joseph,
I appreciate your feedback on this and the time you took to share it. Have you had the opportunity to share your suggestion with our development team as well, yet? If not, I would definitely recommend doing so.
It's been a popular request, as you've no doubt seen, for quite some time. We are hoping that this will be an option for a future version of Storyline. However, the more feedback we see the better. If you know anyone working on a Mac that would like to see this type of functionality, share the information with them and have them submit a request as well.
It's definitely on our list of popular requests, both from here in the community and with the support team.
Thanks again for the feedback and welcome to the community, Joseph!
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