[TrunkCom] scanner software and the Mac?

[David I. Emery]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 11:11:03PM -0500, Jeff Kenyon wrote:

> Hi everyone, I was just curious if all of the scanner software to date
> including what is provided with the latest units will work with the Mac
> and if so what are people's impressions?

	This is a bit ambiguous...

	All recent Intel based Macs can run Windows programs under
Bootcamp or some kind of VM (VMware, Parallels and various others).

	Support exists for XP, Vista, Win7 and Win8 on relatively modern
Intel Macs, really moldy MS OSes before XP SP3 are not particularly
supported and because of BIOS and hardware differences may not run
without some rather skilled and serious effort.

	In general almost all common Windows programs will work in this
mode just as on any other Intel PC.  Performance in Bootcamp (native
Windows on the bare hardware) can be very good depending on the Mac,
some are very fast compared to typical Windows machines, others not so
much.

	Performance on the virtual machines (VMWare, Parallels etc) is
usually a bit slow compared to running on the bare hardware, but with
tuning and modern multicore processors can be pretty respectable.
But running on a virtual machine allows mixing of Mac programs and
environment and the Windows one... rather than booting one or the other.
And Mac programs can typically access Windows files and visa versa.

	Macs do not have native serial ports so Windows scanner programs
that depend on PCI bus or motherboard serial ports (COMx) may or may not
work when used with USB based serial port adapters.   It is possible to
do normal serial type stuff with USB serial adapters on a Mac
(particularly FDTI chip based ones for which MacOS drivers are
available) but some scanner hobby programs are deeply dependent on low
level access to serial ports for timing and parsing data and this cannot
work with USB serial ports on any Windows compatible hardware Mac or non
Mac.

	AFAIK there aren't many (well very few) scanner oriented
programs natively available for MacOS X... this is because nobody has
written them, not because it is impossible to create them for a Mac
(which is BSD Unix more or less under the hood).  There are some
interesting ham radio native MacOS applications around... and porting
apps from Linux to MacOS is not impossible depending on how Macish the
UI has to be..


-- 
  Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, die at dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493
"An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten
'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in 
celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either."