Parallels on Mac - Storyline is unusable with retina display

Hi, Michael -- Thanks for reaching out and for noting that you have already taken a look at the article you linked above regarding the use of Articulate Software on a Mac with Parallels Desktop.

And as you requested that you'd like to hear from those who have recommendations based on experience (apologies, but I use VMware Fusion instead of Paralells), I will defer to your fellow community members to weigh in with their thoughts. 

I did, however, want to pass along the following discussions and resources that may be of interest:

• Experiences with Storyline on Mac via Parallels
• Articulate Storyline 2 with Mac
• Running Storyline 2 on a Mac
• How to Use Articulate Storyline on a Mac (with Videos!)

Hope that is of some assistance! 

Hi Michael,

In order to change the  Retina setting on Parallels Desktop for Mac, you'll need to make sure that your virtual machine isn't currently running. Also, depending on the version of Windows operating system you have installed, the Retina resolution option may differ.  Please refer to this article which generally applies to Windows-based programs resolution issues for Parallels Desktop:  http://kb.parallels.com/en/119926

Thanks to both of you. I'll continue to see if I can fix this. Kind of hoping for feedback from people who have worked with various versions of Windows, Parallels and Mac. Unfortunately Victor the virtual machine was not running - and I still could not change the setting.

In addition to Parallels 10 on OSX Yosemite I maybe should have mentioned also it's Windows 7.

M

Hi Michael,

I see you're also now working in a case with Victor (case # 00808974), so he'll be able to take a better look at your settings within Parallels. He's one of our internal Parallels guru's - so you're in great hands! 

Hi Ashley. I appreciate the fantastic support but I probably will be telling Victor that I'm okay. For now Parallels use on laptop can wait because I successfully got BootCamp going on my iMac, and after resizing the Win7 display I have Storyline 2 looking fine. 

Excited to start creating some things. It looks like fantastic software. Right now I'm as excited as I was when I first encountered the power of After Effects.

Thank you.

Mike

Happy to hear it Mike - and I'm sure Victor won't be too offended. ;) 

I haven't used BootCamp before - but I'm sure others in the forums have, so let us know if you run into anything odd. I use VMWare on my Mac - and it works better than my previous native Windows machine. :) 

Bad news. Bootcamp on my iMac has worked in the past but was horrible now so I uninstalled it. Five years ago when I was switching to Mac Bootcamp was very useful and reliable.

This time however it had a meltdown and I ended up with blue screens and horrible startup loops that showed error messages. Disappointing. So I'll either use my small Windows machine (Yoga 11") or give up for now. 

Really hoping for the future you can create a Mac version. 

Sorry to hear that Michael - I've never used Bootcamp myself, but if you still have questions about Parallels you can connect with Victor again by responding to the email he previously sent. He'd be happy to assist. 

Thank you to all the supportive Articulate staff for your involvement so far. I'm happy to offer an update that though I had serious issues earlier using Mac (with Parallels and then BootCamp) that I installed VirtualBox and Storyline 2 is now working. It's not especially sharp on my iMac screen but totally usable which is what counts. If anyone is curious I have the view set to 175% and resolution at 1024x768. It fills the whole 27" screen and looks adequate. Where Parallels wanted to use the high res display immediately VB just went with 800x600. I'm not sure of the performance yet. I've only successfully opened a demo project to have a cursory look. More testing to come. Thanks.

Delighted to hear you are seeing improvement, Michael, and updates are always appreciated, as it may help others who encounter this post in the future. :)

I use VMWare. The settings are a little different than Parallels as I understand. On my retina screen I adjust the windows desktop resolution depending on the display I'm using:

• 27" Cinema: Native resolution @ 2560x1440
• 15" Retina: 1440x900 (half of native resolution)

It's not as crisp on the retina as it is at native resolution but the scaling is bearable and scales well to the screen real estate.

Oh and - just in case you are using VMWare - similar article and steps here. 

I wanted to update this thread that I finally ended up using a VMWare trial and I had no issues with using Articulate this way. My VirtualBox was more problematic and using BootCamp with Win7 on my iMac was a disaster but those are for other threads I suppose.:)

I am happy that I ended up getting to play around with the Storyline 2 software. I'm pretty impressed. However I'm doubling down on my encouragement that Articulate develop a Mac version. I had too much fuss all around with trying to use Windows on the Mac!

Thanks again staffers and everyone else who posted to this thread.

Glad you were able to get it working and thanks for the update. As far as Storyline for Mac, it's definitely a feature request we've heard and we'll keep folks posted if there are any other updates to that, but we're unable to share our product road map or timeline. You may want to just put in a feature request for tracking purposes and we can use that to contact you directly if any information becomes available in regards to Storyline for Mac.