Filed under: Software
New Parallels beta on the street
Man, the development team at Parallels must have a secret stash of Jolt. While they're not quite finished with the two big-ticket features for the next release (USB 2 and 3D acceleration support) they have a laundry list of other items rolling out with the latest beta build:- Boot from BootCamp partition directly into Parallels Desktop for Mac (my personal favorite)
- Read/Write Boot Camp partition (if this supports NTFS, another big win)
- Parallels Transporter Beta - migrate a Windows PC image, VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC VM to Parallels
- Drag and drop files/folders between Windows and Mac OS X
- Graphics performance improvements
Update 5:20pm EST: The Parallels support forum post detailing all the changes & linking to the download is here.
Thanks Kender!
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Michael Nowlin said 3:25PM on 12-01-2006
For me the biggest new feature is coherence mode. It places the windows task bar at the bottom of the Mac OS desktop and runs windows program seamlessly in the Mac environment (meaning no windows desktop required).
Reply
Thayne Miller said 6:06PM on 12-01-2006
I am so excited about this release! Finally I can consolidate onto a single partition and get the best of boot camp AND parallels! Also, for those of you who haven't tried it yet, the "coherence mode" is simply amazing! Finally I can run windows apps in their own little window and not have a dedicate my whole screen to an ugly windows backdrop.
Thank you parallels!!!!
now does anyone know how to take a current parallels hard disk image and convert it to a boot camp partition?
Reply
Michael said 2:59PM on 12-01-2006
"Boot from BootCamp partition directly into Parallels Desktop for Mac (my personal favorite)"
Damn, that is awesome. My blackbook can't come fast enough.
Reply
ultim8Fury said 3:37PM on 12-01-2006
and the parallels site slows to a crawl. Looking forward to being able to run my BC partition in both full native and virtualised mode. It should prove very useful.
Reply
Navvy said 4:11PM on 12-01-2006
Finally Drag and Drop between Mac OS X and XP! w00t!
This is really amazing stuff. No wonder Microsoft dropped out. There's no way they could have competed with Parallels!
Reply
Kender said 4:06PM on 12-01-2006
I have to say, I really dig "Coherence" mode - while nothing spectacular, it's nice to just auto-hide the start bar in Windows, and for the one app I still use in Windows - leaves it floating on my Mac desktop like a real Mac App.
I'm in denial, yes I am.
I can't wait to get home and try to migrate my BootCamp partition on my iMac to Parallels!
Reply
moo083 said 3:17PM on 12-01-2006
I thought I would warn the public that the BootCamp feature is bugged currently. It will not work with Boot Camp partitions that are FAT32. Only NTFS works currently.
The good news is that this is a bug, and not a design decision, so it will be fixed. The team already knows about it thanks to me and a couple others in their forums. Hopefully this will get fixed soon. I also hope Apple enables NTFS write access in Leopard.
Reply
andrew harrison said 4:30PM on 12-01-2006
and i'm just about to leave the house to pick up my shiny new Macbook Pro C2D. Joyous.
Reply
ultim8Fury said 3:51PM on 12-01-2006
The only problem I have now is trying to figure out how to explain this to MS over the phone when I re-activate windows (again)
Reply
Matt said 3:59PM on 12-01-2006
I see that you need to install Parallels Tools for Boot Camp.exe in windows booting through boot camp in order to get Parallels to boot from your boot camp partition in OS X. Where can I get Parallels Tools for Boot Camp.exe? I don't see it on their site?
Reply
Matt said 6:45PM on 12-01-2006
I found the Parallels tools:
http://download.parallels.com/beta/Parallels-Tools-Bcp-1.0.3-Win.exe
Reply
kc! said 5:23PM on 12-01-2006
how did you find that beta? I can't find anywhere on the website that it is listed!?
Reply
Storv said 4:52PM on 12-01-2006
Awesome build - this app gets better and better.
Drag/drop, coherence mode - great stuff!
Good work, Parallels.
Reply
Joshua Ochs said 6:24PM on 12-01-2006
Still doesn't do ACPI (which causes a variety of driver problems on Windows, and shutdown ugliness on Linux), and the interface is still a bit of a kludge (nonstandard toolbars, can't edit properties while VM is running, multiple VM's launches multiple instances of parallels, etc). From a technical perspective, however, it's very well done.
I firmly expect the competition from VMWare to push both companies hard (and I expect given the low prices, a lot of people will buy both).
Reply
tony said 5:03PM on 12-01-2006
Here is the link to the forum with all of the details and links to the boot camp assistant and the transporter assistant
http://forums.parallels.com/thread5997.html
Reply
blah said 5:20PM on 12-01-2006
"...if this supports NTFS..."
If? IF? Um, isn't it your job to figure this stuff out for your readers? How hard could it have been? I mean, if you want to make money off the ad revenue you get from getting people to visit your site, you may want to actually pretend you care about what you're doing...
Reply
Reg said 5:52PM on 12-01-2006
Am I only in wishing 3D (or simply accelerated 2D graphics) would have taken priority over Boot Camp partitions?
For me, the whole beauty of a virtual disk environment is that when the Windows install becomes bogged down with entropy, as it INEVITABLY does every half year (or sooner, if you enter .dll hell), you can simply erase the disk and start over with a fresh copy that you backed up when making the initial install.
That's much harder with a physical disk partition (BartPE disk imaging notwithstanding) so it's unlikely I'll ever stop using virtual disk files.
Graphics acceleration on the other hand can't come soon enough.
Reply
iDarbert said 6:01PM on 12-01-2006
I'm already in Love with Coherence mode... this is a great update.
Reply
Mike Rose said 6:12PM on 12-01-2006
The link to the Parallels beta forum (where you can download all the goodies) is now in the post.
Re: Coherence mode -- I left this out of the list of updates, but judging by the comments here and at the Parallels forum, it's a big winner. I am interested to see how it compares on speed, compatibility and resource usage with CrossOver Office, since it looks like Parallels is simply making the Win desktop transparent to let you see your Mac apps (requiring the full memory/processor footprint of XP), while CrossOver is running just the minimal 'bottle' Win32 APIs to support the specific app you need.
Reply
Michael Rose said 6:16PM on 12-01-2006
#12 -- Blah, sorry to not nail that down. It wasn't immediately apparent from the forum thread what the volume format support was for Boot Camp in Parallels, and I was tight on time to get the post up (kindergarten lets out promptly :-).
As it happens, there is a bug in the current rev so that the Boot Camp feature ONLY works with NTFS, not FAT32 (as noted by other commentors).
Reply