Friday, May 18, 2007

Finally, My Apple MacBook Can Do MetrobankDirect!

First off, let me just reiterate how much I love my Apple MacBook (and my Apple iBook before that) and using those machines is a real joy considering the amount of exasperation and frustration I often get whenever I use a Windows machine. However, despite of praising my laptops to high heavens, there's still one thing that it can't do: transact with the internet banking facility of my most favorite bank in the whole wide world.

To solve that problem, I opted to install Parallels and run Windows in my laptop. This seems like an overkill solution to a seemingly simple problem but since I also work in a Windows-centric company, running Windows from within a virtual machine on my laptop gives me additional advantages. Through the windows installation within Parallels, I can do my internet banking transactions in the comforts of my own laptop but I find it rather tedious to boot up Windows just to do a balance inquiry online.

CrossOver Mac

Enter Crossover Mac -- a product by CodeWeavers. This is a derivative of the original WINE project the objective of which is to run Windows-based programs from withing a *NIX (UNIX, Linux, etc) environment. After downloading and installing Crossover Mac, I was able to easily set up Internet Explorer 6 on my computer. After a long installation routine (the IE6 installation file had to be downloaded from the 'Net), I was pleasantly surprised to see my bank's internet banking facility running from a native Apple window!

CrossOver Mac

Crossover Mac costs around $60 (a little less than Php 3,000). A cost that may be well worth it for Mac users who depends a lot on online banking transactions.

1 comment:

ohbrilliance said...

Thanks for your article. Have you considered contacting your bank to suggest they support web standards? That way their customers will be able to access online banking without jumping through hoops.