VMWare Fusion: Unity
Parallels' killer feature is Coherence, a display mode that lets Windows apps and Mac apps seem to co-mingle with one another. VMWare, the market leader in virtualization, had a solid Mac offer (in beta) called Fusion but it lacked a similar feature. It looks like VMWare has figured out that people are crazy about Coherence, and so Unity is coming to a Fusion install near you.
As you can see in this video, Unity is pretty cool. It seems to have a little more polish than Parallels' implementation (the drop shadows are a nice touch) but I'll reserve judgement until I can use it myself.The desktop virtualization market really is heating up!
[via VMTN Blog]
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Parallels' killer feature is Coherence, a display mode that lets Windows apps and Mac apps seem to co-mingle with one another. VMWare,...
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Anyone know what the name of that last song was at the end of the video?
June 07 2007 at 6:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyMark,
Windows XP doesn't really offer a real-time solution to getting the contents of windows that are covered by other windows. Since XP doesn't have a compositing window manager, it's not surprising that overlapping windows from a single VM weren't demoed in this video.
#11: Ahhhh...I usually only have one app open (Outlook), so I didn't notice. It always seemed to be working perfectly with Expose...
June 07 2007 at 11:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyMark: There is support in the XP graphics driver 2d acceleration api for all windows to have independent framebuffers. The primary reason is to allow for hardware redrawing when you move windows around, but the case you mention is easily achievable if they implement this feature in their graphics driver. Of course in Vista all windows are rendered to a texture anyway, so the problem is nonexistent in vista.
*just to clarify: I mean overlapping XP windows in the VM.
June 07 2007 at 6:32 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAnyone else notice thy conveniently avoided expose use with overlapping windows? Even going so far as to open another VM? I have a sneaking suspicion it reacts just like exposing a seamlessRDP session in that overlapping windows will draw over each other when you use expose. I look forward to any clarification on this, maybe another video. If it doesn't have some special way to handle this issue I'd be really disappointed.
June 07 2007 at 6:31 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyFor some reason i dont expect much from leopard. This is amazing that companies like VMWare are paying attention to the mac world.
The thing is, I bet Leopard will have something very similar, but better, built-in.
June 07 2007 at 12:33 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyParallels is up against a Goliath (ugh, bible crap). They way they *might* be able to compete is to go for the budget market. Offer nearly the same features for much less.
Of course, VMWare is huge, and might be able to squeeze even that.
And, there's a limit to all of this b/c I'm running Windows in VirtualBox and it works just dandy, and it's FREE.
I've been using VMware ESX/GSX/Server/Workstation for a long while now and nothing surprises me anymore.
I mean nothing bad towards the Parallels guys, they've got a bang up product, but VMware is simply the most squared away company when it comes to virtualization.
BTW, you ain't seen nothin' yet.....
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