VMware Fusion’s Unity feature
VMWare Fusion lets you run Windows on your mac using hardware emulation virtualization (i.e., it’s fast) similar to Parallels. Parallels has been giving me grief lately, so I’ve been checking out the competition. I stumbled upon this video of VMware Fusion’s unity feature — it allows you to run windows apps as single windows on your mac. Parallels has a similar feature called Coherence mode, but it’s a terrible hack (it can’t even render non-square windows). Here’s a video of the Fusion feature –
Wow, that’s sweet.
Said by Caleb November 12, 2007 at about 3:50 pm
I used the Parallels trial, twice (I got a new key to try out their newer version when they added more features). It wasn’t as good as VMWare, and actually destroyed my Boot Camp partition. Despite my open source and free software bias, I had to buy Fusion… it was too slick.
But Xen and VirtualBox are getting close:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen
http://www.virtualbox.org/
The freedom to just hand people a fully configured machine is amazing once you have it. I don’t think there should be a cost barrier to doing so. So I hope VirtualBox/Xen will replace VMWare and Parallels, and I also hope ReactOS replaces Windows for legacy apps:
http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html
(And I hope programmers refuse to code for Vista. Just… don’t. Let it die.)
It’s interesting to see apps with the Windows XP UI (toolbars, window borders) merged in with the Mac. I know a lot of people hate this because it’s breaking consistency, but I think we’ll be seeing apps ship with their own VMs. Why would the developers of the Gimp want to make a Windows version when they can just ship a virtualbox and you run Gnome/Gimp in a sandbox?
http://hostilefork.com/2007/11/03/virtualization-and-the-integrated-circuit/
Said by Hostile Fork December 12, 2007 at about 11:33 pm