For what it's worth, I ran UF on a Mac under Virtual PC for years, however when the Macs evolved from OS9 to OSX the performance of VPC went down the toilet bigtime. On the same machine, I found it to be something like 5x slower under OSX than it was under OS9. The only MacOS native fractal programs that I really like are KPT Fraxplorer/Fraxflame, but they're a tad pricy (now part of KPT Collection). I never found anything else that was even remotely suited for creating "art" (as opposed to mathematically oriented fractal images). I eventually gave up on using my Mac as a fractal platform and bought a fast PC, but I can't see many people doing that, especially a beginner. That said, once I got a PC I stopped looking for Mac-based programs and settled down with UF and Apophysis. I wish your friend luck. Blatte