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I’ve had an Intel Mac for a few months now, and I’ve been wanting to comment on Parallels Desktop for OSX, the software that lets a user emulate windows at nearly full speed while still in their native Mac environment.
I’ve been holding off on passing judgment for a particular feature to be released to the public: namely what the Parallels team calls “Coherence Mode”. Using Parallels Desktop in coherence mode is really quite a technological feat: it gives the user a fully functional PC version of an .exe such as Internet Explorer, running as a windowed application, like any other program in OSX. Parallels recently released a beta of their emulation app with coherence mode enabled, so I jumped at the chance to slap it on my Intel Mac, a little machine I like to call “The Iron Giant“.
I’m really happy to say that coherence mode lives up to the expectation, and perhaps the best part about it is that it really doesn’t feel special at all. Boot up your virtual machine, open IE, and switch into coherence: after that you can drag and resize IE, open multiple windows, even minimize to a version of the Windows start bar that lives inside of OSX. The last hurdle I have to jump will be setting up a second virtual machine and seeing if coherence mode will let me run an IE6 and IE7 window simultaneously. Now THAT would truly be remarkable.
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You know what else works really well?
Just using a Windows PC in the first place.
Don’t make me hit you foolio.
With a bus.
Just doing my thing. Why would you want to run IE6 or IE7 anyway?
Regretfully there are still those un-enlightened wastrels that rely on Internet Explorer for their every-day browsing needs. More regretfully yet is that they make up more than 80% of total web users.
The pain.
Did I mention what a wonderful innovation the tabbed browsing is on IE7 yet?
Dan Says:
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:06 am
You know what else works really well?
Just using a Windows PC in the first place.
Awesome Dan!! I’m big on the innovation here Ryan, yet there is something very funny about all of the Mac users being happy about being able to run Windows on their machines!!
I haven’t actually tried it out since it was fairly new, I have a copy of Parallels remaining uninstalled on my Macbook until I get a copy of XP from my employer. So Coherence Mode is not something I’ve had the opportunity to use, but it sounds pretty nifty. Crossover for Mac (a commercial implementation of WINE) did a nice job of this, but Parallels def looks slicker.
I’m just curious… does anyone ever try to run mac OS on a windows machine?
Do you even have a pc anymore?
I remember the one you had in college used to cry because you never played with it.
see
http://lifesupport.crashpod.net/viewtopic.php?t=1362
I think that the Paralells team has been working on getting OSX to run on their PC virtualization software, but that Apple’s terms of use are more strict that MS.
And yes I do indeed have a PC still, though like its ancestor, it’s sitting in the corner, crying from neglect.