articy:draft X is now officially available on Mac OS. Although technically the same version, there are some little differences due to the different operating systems.
The Basics series was designed based on the Windows version. In this short video we will show where Windows and Mac might differ, so that you will be able to easily follow the Basics series as a Mac user.
License
Let’s get one important question out of the way right away: All articy:draft X licenses are compatible with both Windows and Mac OS.
This means you won’t have to acquire a new license when you decide to switch from a Windows device to a Mac device and vice-versa. An articy:draft X license can be used on one device at a time, on Windows or Mac.
Mac Installation
There are separate clients available for Windows and Mac. To install the Mac version, download the Mac client, either directly from the link in your license email, or from the Downloads page.
Double click the installer.
Then drag the icon to the applications folder to initiate the installation.
When this process is finished you can locate articy:draft in your Launchpad and start it. Now you are prompted for your license key to continue.
The demo projects Dracula (1), which will be used in the Basic series, and Maniac Manfred (2), a more advanced demo project will be installed automatically into “articy draft X demo projects” inside your Documents folder.
In case you delete these projects or have changed them so much you want to get back to the original state, you can download them again via the website. Extract them anywhere you like and use Open from file to locate and open them.
Keyboard shortcuts
Mac OS uses different modifier keys, therefore the keyboard shortcuts differ from the Windows version. Windows has “CTRL” and “Alt”, Mac has “Command” and “Option”. For a lot of cases they are easily transferrable – for example for Windows the keyboard shortcut to open the Export dialog is “CTRL + Shift + E”, on the Mac it is “Command + Shift + E”.
Shortcuts involving numeric function keys on Mac usually include the “Fn” key as well. On Windows the shortcut to open the property sheet of a selected object is “F8”, on the Mac it would be “Fn + F8”. However, on Mac it is possible to change the way how the function keys work in the settings, so even if the standard shortcut displayed is “Fn + F8”, on your machine it might only be “F8”.
There are a number of shortcuts that are different though, for example emerging out of a node on Windows is “CTRL + Backspace”, but the Mac equivalent is “Option + Enter”.
You can find an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts here.
The Help Center will display either Windows or Mac specific shortcuts based on system and browser, but in a Browser you can always use the toggle switch at the top of the Navigation to select a specific operating system to display.
There is one keyboard shortcut I like to mention in particular. If you work on a MacBook or another machine without a dedicated “Delete” key, the default shortcut to delete an object is “Command + Backspace”. If you’d rather only use “Backspace” to delete something, you can add the Mac specific command line switch -ui.mac.DeleteWithBack to the articy.cfg to change that behavior. Please refer to the Advanced Configuration lesson for info on editing the articy configuration file.
Default profile path
As on Mac we have a different file structure than on Windows, the default path to the user profile where you can find log files or the articy configuration file is different to the one you will see mentioned in the Basics series.
On Mac your profile is located under: ~/Library/Application Support/articy draft X/Profile/4.x
The easiest way to access your profile folder is using the File menu (1) while running articy and selecting “Open Profile Folder in Finder” (2) from there.
Office exports
articy offers a number of Microsoft-Office based exports, like the object exports to Word and Excel, the Excel roundtrip export, the Flow to Word screenplay export, or the localization and VO exports to Excel.
These exports are tested for compatibility with Microsoft Office products only. The Mac products Pages and Numbers are not supported.
Useful links:
articy:draft X Mac Help Center
articy:draft X Demo projects download
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