If you guessed that there are Windows apps running on my MacBook Pro's desktop, you'd be right! Of course, if you are a true Mac devotee, there's nothing "right" about that at all! In fact, it's all wrong!!
Seriously though, VMware Fusion's Unity mode (like Parallels Coherence mode) is a really nice piece of work. If you ever wanted to run Mac and Windows applications side by side on the same desktop, this is the program for you! I have Fusion running on my MacBook Pro using an XP Professional virtual guest OS and Unity is very sweet. There is a bit of a visual hiccup for the first couple of seconds while you switch from Single Window or Full Screen mode to Unity mode (look under Fusion's "View" menu to switch):
The Mac and Windows desktops then cohere together for a couple of seconds, but after that, Windows apps run right along side the native Mac applications. It was very cool to see and hear a video running in Windows Media Player on the Mac desktop. Now that's quite a feat of engineering! Thanks VMware! This will help ease the transition from PC to Mac for a lot of people. I will mention it to the powers that be at work.
A couple notes:
1) to have access to Unity mode, make sure you have the latest and greatest version of VMware Fusion Beta found here:
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/fusion.html
2) to enable the feature, make sure you have the latest version of VMware Tools installed in your guest operating system
3) if you are using XP Service Pack 2, a nice performance boost for the display is to utilize DirectX 8.1 acceleration features. So go to the Display menu under your XP virtual machines' Settings:
Cool!
No comments:
Post a Comment