Inside Nspire

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this question. I’ve done all kinds of conferences and at just about every one there is the Mac Guru that asks THE question… Will Nspire work on my Mac? Well, up until now the only way to get Nspire on your mac was by using Virtual PC. The downside… IT IS SLOWER THAN WORDS CAN EXPRESS. This left all our Mac fans out in the cold, waiting for the sunshine and looking for some church software that would work on their macs.

Well, all I can say is we have done it. No, we did not make a mac version of Nspire but we have run Nspire on a mac… with no real speed decrease. To explain how we did this, I went to my Mac guru friend (who by the way influenced me into purchasing my first mac a week ago), Josh. Josh drips Mac… and works for us at Nspire. He has tried every way imaginable to get Nspire on his Mac in the past but now I think he’s found the best solution. So here is what Mac-Josh says:

"So I’m a Mac guy.  Just like a lot of other Youth Ministers out there.  And when I got my first Mac I knew that there would be some software that just would not work on Mac, this is just reality.  But I really hate it when there is one program that you just really, really want, but there is no Mac version.  I’m talking about Nspire.  I have never seen a program do what it can do, and I’m in love with it.  The slight problem is, it is a PC only program.  No problem anymore.  With Apple’s switch to Intel Processors, I can now run Windows XP Professional at full native speed without any hiccups.  (Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking, normally I would never put Windows on my Apple, but for Nspire it was worth it.)  There is a program called Parallels that lets you run Windows (or any other Intel Operating System (OS) for that matter), inside the Parallels program on your Mac.  You can run Mac OS X and Windows at the same time.  I now have all of my Nspire and Mac problems solved.  I can run Nspire, MS Office, and do anything that I could ever want, just the same as my PC buddy."

I have Parallels on my Mac and it actually runs windows xp pro faster than my Inspiron 9300. So I have been impressed. Over the next few days, Josh will be a guest blogger for us and giving us some step by step instructions for installing Parallels and Nspire on your Intel Mac.