Flexi Vs Illustrator

[DeeHutch]

I'm doing a design only station and really want it to me a MacBook Pro for home use as well. I know Flexi and Photoshop. That's it. I've used Flexi since 2005. As you can imagine, In my quest I'm learning that there is not a current version of Flexi available for Mac.

my option of course, is Illustrator. Can anyone share what the pros and cons will be, if I stick with making this station a Mac and using Illustrator on it. My 3 production machines are of course, PC and all running Flexi and using Versaworks as a rip at one of the stations.

Am I going to be a fish out of water with Illustrator? Can I do the exact same things with Illustrator that I can Flexi?

 

[mark-s]

I run both at the shop CS5 and Felxi Pro 10 on a PC.
Flexi seems do do things a a bit more straight forward.

mark-s

 

[brycesteiner]

You could run Flexi on your Mac using virtualbox. I do and it runs just fine. I also have illustrator and it works fine in both virtualbox or native. Nowadays it doesn't have to be either or.

 

[LittleSnakey]

The biggest problem you will have is that Flexi and Illustrator do not play well together. Any gradients you use in Illustrator will come into flexi as multiple masks and tend to be hard for flexi to deal with.

I'm doing a design only station and really want it to me a MacBook Pro for home use as well. I know Flexi and Photoshop. That's it. I've used Flexi since 2005. As you can imagine, In my quest I'm learning that there is not a current version of Flexi available for Mac.

my option of course, is Illustrator. Can anyone share what the pros and cons will be, if I stick with making this station a Mac and using Illustrator on it. My 3 production machines are of course, PC and all running Flexi and using Versaworks as a rip at one of the stations.

Am I going to be a fish out of water with Illustrator? Can I do the exact same things with Illustrator that I can Flexi?

 

[Snydo]

If your fluent in Photoshop and Flexi, Illustrator should be easy for you to figure out. Or you could just buy a real computer and not look back.

 

[DeeHutch]

You could run Flexi on your Mac using virtualbox. I do and it runs just fine. I also have illustrator and it works fine in both virtualbox or native. Nowadays it doesn't have to be either or.

what exactly is VirtualBox? Is it the same as just running windows on Mac?

 

[brycesteiner]

what exactly is VirtualBox? Is it the same as just running windows on Mac?

Virtualbox is similar to Parallels or VMware but I think it's better in some ways (free). Load windows up then install your software, serial numbers, print drivers, network shares, etc., just like as if it was a native windows box.
The great thing about it is, especially if your mac has a decent amount of memory, is you won't notice any speed difference. Somethings may even be faster such as when grabbing my paper size from the Mutoh. Before it would take a few seconds. In Virtualbox it's instant. Perhaps Windows 7 (in VB) is just faster than 8 (on PC).
It puts it in it's own desktop (spaces?) if you run full screen so it's very easy to know which you are in, you can slide back and forth with the magic mouse or the apple touchpad with swipe.
One other nice feature is, and this is my favorite, the ability to back up the machine in just minutes. You get it to the place it's just right and backup. If something happens it takes 5 minutes to restore the virtual machine back to what you had even across a network, even while you are working in another VM or native OS.
virtualbox.org