The trick behind Parallels Coherence
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26/02/07 19:55 |Mac
Back in the PowerPC days, Mac users
were able to run Windows inside OSX thanks to Virtual PC. This
software was emulating an Intel platform well enough to fool XP
into believing it was talking to a Pentium, and not an IBM PowerPC,
albeit with a little compromise: performance. Now that Apple has
finished its transition to Intel, the landscape has changed quite a
bit for Mac users who depend on / have to run / are curious about
some Windows-only applications.
The first choice is BootCamp, Apple's solution to dual-boot your Intel Mac. Just like dual-booting on PCs, this requires you to partition your hard drive and to reboot whenever you want to access the other OS. While I consider this acceptable for games (to which you want to dedicate all your RAM and CPU horsepower), this can be a bit of a pain for application you occasionally access, or worse, if you want a Windows and a Mac application to run concurrently.
Enter OS virtualization for OSX: VMWare Desktop and Parallels Desktop. These let you stay in OSX, and booting your virtual machine running Windows (or Linux for that matter) is just like running another application: double-click on your virtual machine disk image, and low and behold, Windows will boot inside an OSX window! I won't do a full review of those two applications in detail, other sites have done that better than I would. But having recently bought Parallels, I thought I would cover a few things I've found out after using it for a couple of weeks. In future entries, I will give you some real-world performance numbers where I will compare an existing PC to a "PC inside a Mac".
Now with today's feature: Parallels Coherence display mode. Build 3036 of Parallels introduced an eye-candy everybody (i.e. geeks like me) was very excited about, which was the possibility to have your Windows windows run side-by-side with your OSX windows. This is really compelling: imagine having two machines in one, only their displays are combined, you can drag'n drop from one OS to the other, copy and paste... this is great. As you can see in this screenshot, you even have the Windows taskbar at the bottom of your screen (or wherever you want it to be), plus all Windows apps will also show up in your dock. In the picture, above the Automator icon you can see the IE icon, on top of which is an Explorer icon, and above that the virtual machine icon with the picture what the display would look like had I not used Coherence. Pretty impressive!
And now for the only letdown of Coherence: how it's implemented. Coherence isn't a Finder extension (or plugin, or hack...). It's actually "just" a way of rendering the windows in which your virtual machine executes. This clever hack consists in giving this window a transparent background, so you'll believe all your windows are running together. They're not. As you can see in the screenshot, the XP windows (IE + Explorer) are in front of the OSX windows (Firefox + Automator). Now let's say you click on the Automator window, both OSX windows will now cover the XP windows, instead of just Automator. So if you're juggling with windows quite a bit, it takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's not that bad. You just have to remember that clicking on a Windows window will bring them all the the front.
See you next time for some benchmarks.
The first choice is BootCamp, Apple's solution to dual-boot your Intel Mac. Just like dual-booting on PCs, this requires you to partition your hard drive and to reboot whenever you want to access the other OS. While I consider this acceptable for games (to which you want to dedicate all your RAM and CPU horsepower), this can be a bit of a pain for application you occasionally access, or worse, if you want a Windows and a Mac application to run concurrently.
Enter OS virtualization for OSX: VMWare Desktop and Parallels Desktop. These let you stay in OSX, and booting your virtual machine running Windows (or Linux for that matter) is just like running another application: double-click on your virtual machine disk image, and low and behold, Windows will boot inside an OSX window! I won't do a full review of those two applications in detail, other sites have done that better than I would. But having recently bought Parallels, I thought I would cover a few things I've found out after using it for a couple of weeks. In future entries, I will give you some real-world performance numbers where I will compare an existing PC to a "PC inside a Mac".
Now with today's feature: Parallels Coherence display mode. Build 3036 of Parallels introduced an eye-candy everybody (i.e. geeks like me) was very excited about, which was the possibility to have your Windows windows run side-by-side with your OSX windows. This is really compelling: imagine having two machines in one, only their displays are combined, you can drag'n drop from one OS to the other, copy and paste... this is great. As you can see in this screenshot, you even have the Windows taskbar at the bottom of your screen (or wherever you want it to be), plus all Windows apps will also show up in your dock. In the picture, above the Automator icon you can see the IE icon, on top of which is an Explorer icon, and above that the virtual machine icon with the picture what the display would look like had I not used Coherence. Pretty impressive!
And now for the only letdown of Coherence: how it's implemented. Coherence isn't a Finder extension (or plugin, or hack...). It's actually "just" a way of rendering the windows in which your virtual machine executes. This clever hack consists in giving this window a transparent background, so you'll believe all your windows are running together. They're not. As you can see in the screenshot, the XP windows (IE + Explorer) are in front of the OSX windows (Firefox + Automator). Now let's say you click on the Automator window, both OSX windows will now cover the XP windows, instead of just Automator. So if you're juggling with windows quite a bit, it takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's not that bad. You just have to remember that clicking on a Windows window will bring them all the the front.
See you next time for some benchmarks.
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