Unanalog

I've subscribed to Netflix since february 2001, and I've really enjoyed the service. Great website, great selection, great customer service, what else can you ask for? Well, last year we started hearing rumors about their online streaming service, was this the holy grail for movie enthusiasts, easy (legal) online access to a huge library of movies? It seems the dream is coming true. With this feature recently out of beta, all subscribers should now have the "Watch now" tab on their home page, which lets you access the selection of movies ready for streaming (not all Netflix movies are available online yet). What else can you ask for? The answer is probably "not much", if you happen to run Windows and use Internet Explorer! So of course, that doesn't work too well for me unless I want to watch movies at work. But fortunately I own an Intel Mac, and have Parallels. Setup was a breeze: just say yeah yeah yeah to the ActiveX installation alert boxes, let IE acquire the DRM rights, and you're good to go. Performance seems acceptable, with only a few dropped frames here and there, and with no audio glitches at all. The picture shows an IE window running Parallels in Coherence mode, which doesn't seem to affect performance. Using the full-screen mode of Netflix Movie Viewer made the playback and little choppier, and the refresh didn't seem uniform across the screen, with refresh "bands" appearing, which can probably be attributed to the lack of graphics hardware acceleration in Parallels.
This is the first time in two and a half years I really miss something that's available to Windows users only. I can't use this solution on my Powerbook laptop, but for the moment, I'm quite happy with the fix Parallels offers. I doubt we can expect a Mac version anytime soon as the service is relying on Microsoft DRM. I hope I'm wrong...

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.

After my last entry, I was asked to show what a "bruised LCD" screen looks like, here it is. The damage is the grey halo around and below the red Pantone logo in the menu bar. My iMac showed four of those, along the top of the screen, most likely corresponding to the four fingers of the perpetrator of the crime. I had personally never seen anything like this. Dusting for fingerprints on the frame, in the hope of finding prints of the thumb of the criminal, yielded no results.

Hey, I'm back online. Almost a month without an update but I had serious matters to deal with: my iMac just got back from the Apple hospital. My 24" was diagnosed with a bruised LCD panel. The doctor suspects it might have been mistreated while being lifted, at packaging maybe.
The bruises appeared over the course of a month and manifested themselves as dark spots on the top of the screen, and could have been left someone who squeezed its top portion, instead of holding the computer case. Had my machine not been under warranty, that would have cost me 1300 USD. Somebody tried to strangle my iMac! Should I be scared too... ?