Articulate for Mac? Please!!!!!

Apr 03, 2012

kurt frazier
By kurt frazier


Hello everyone, this has to have been asked hundreds of times, but those of us at large company's we are soon going to have to say goodbye to Articulate unless a MAC version comes out quickly!  I know the standard response from Articulate is "we can't announce a launch time at this time", but what are we supposed to tell our company's that are dropping support of Windows?  Last week I just purchased two competitors programs to test them out on our MACs.  If everything goes well we're going to be forced to begin purchasing more licenses and switching from Articulate.  Sorry, but Bootcamp/Windows isn't being supported by our IT dept anymore.  And it just doesn't pay to purchase premium software and have to find work arounds to have it developed or viewed on non flash playing devises.  Articulate.....step up!  Many love the program, and don't want to switch, but we're being forced to.  Someone give us a MAC implementation date.

111 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 8 years ago11/12/15 at 7:58 pm (UTC)

Hi Jo,

We did recently updated our Support article here with some more information on working with Storyline in Parallels. 

And just since it's on an earlier page, I did want to share a snippet from my colleague Justin's previous reply:

Justin Wilcox

Exploring different ways for our customers to create engaging  e-learning content is something that we are actively working on. No one here at Articulate can share specifics about our road map beyond what we have publicly announced. I hope that you will be as excited about what we are working on as we are excited about creating it. 

Hope that helps! 

Steve Flowers
over 8 years ago01/14/16 at 6:49 pm (UTC)

For Storyline, Parallels / VMWare should run the same or faster on a Mac VM than through Remote Desktop for most operations. That's my experience so far with SL.

On a related note, I ran a comparison between a dedicated windows gaming laptop and the Mac VM for publish of a fairly large Story file. The windows laptop was slightly faster publishing. Didn't notice any difference in operating the tool.

You might see a slight improvement to publish speed on a dedicated RDC connection, depending on how beefy your machine is. Personally, I don't like using remote desktop for a long time due to the hiccups, occasional delays, and display artifacts (depending on the client used)

Justin Wilcox
8 years ago02/04/16 at 7:15 pm (UTC)

Hi Cindy. 

I run Parallels without any issues. I run virtual Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 environments. Here is a helpful article that outlines some best practices to do this. The success you have may be dependent on the amount of RAM you allocate to your Windows environment, the total available RAM you have on your mac and also the speed of your mac. I also run two windows machines and my virtual machines run our software the same, if not faster in some cases. If you are having specific technical issues with using the software, please feel free to reach out to our support team and we will be more than happy to help you out. 

cindy lucas
8 years ago02/04/16 at 7:34 pm (UTC)

I had parallels and storyline wouldn't work correctly. I tried troubleshooting with you guys for weeks before giving up. I'm just saying that if you don't catch up to 2016 and get a Mac version then you're going to lose customers and miss out on new ones. It's been years. I'm not sure why this isn't a priority for your company. 

jo wold
8 years ago02/04/16 at 9:30 pm (UTC)

I find it interesting that despite the years of pleading for a native mac version, the continued answers we get is “Parallels works fine.” While Parallels has not worked fine for me, that really is not the issue. The issue is the decision by Articulate not to support a native Mac version in spite of continued requests. Very disappointed that we keep getting patronized. I, for one, gave up some months ago.

Steve Flowers
8 years ago02/04/16 at 9:49 pm (UTC)

Just noticed that this was a thread for Studio. Both Studio and Storyline use Windows frameworks for development. For Studio, there are very specific reasons that a Mac version might not be in the cards. Microsoft controls what can be accessed and automated to / from Powerpoint and Word.  The lack of a Mac version of Studio is VERY likely due to an inability for *anyone* to integrate with Mac versions Powerpoint to the level needed for Studio to function. This could have changed recently but the older versions of Mac Office were significantly constrained. 

For Storyline, while I would LOVE to see a Mac version, I'm not sure it's even in my top 10 wants / needs. Two code-bases ends up being a split in attention. Development slows and parity becomes a pain.

As mentioned by multiple folks in this thread, Parallels and VMWare Fusion both can be made to work and perform (for the most part) on par with equivalent hardware in a native Windows machine.  Phil and I both produce pretty high volumes of complicated outputs without touching PC hardware. Happy to help work through issues you're having.

Bobby Carlton
8 years ago02/16/16 at 8:47 pm (UTC)

Hi Kurt,

Parallels is great way to run Articulate software on your Mac. But it appears that many folks have already suggested that.  The only thing I'll add is to make sure you have at least 8GB's of RAM on the Mac.  Parallels will slow up your machine if you're running anything less than 8GB's.  

The other thing you could do is partition your Mac HD using Boot Camp, and then have a dedicated Mac and dedicated Windows side.  The only downside of this, is it's a either or scenario.  If you want to check something on the Mac side, you'll have log out of Windows and sign into Ma, and vice versa.  That's why Parallels is probably the better option.  

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