29 December 2006
Parallels: The Best Application, Ever?
I’ve been on the Mac bandwagon for nearly three years now. I’ve been on Intel Macs since they became commercially available in early 2006. I’m a software developer: not for Mac applications, but for general web applications. OSX doesn’t technically give me any advantages, but in real life, OSX just lets me work better than Windows ever did.
That’s not to say OSX is perfect, or Windows is poor. Offhand, I can think of many applications which are better on Windows than their Mac counterpart: Macromedia DreamWeaver, Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. But one of Intel Mac’s many perks is the ability to run Windows natively. Gone are the VirtualPC days of yesterday, Apple Bootcamp has given us the ability to run Windows XP better than many even mid-range real PC’s.
Not long after Apple released Bootcamp, a product called Parallels releases Desktop. Skin deep, Parallels was just a faster version of VirtualPC. For many months, I ignored it. The usability performance benefits from running applications under a real instance of Windows XP outweighed any convience benefit from running Windows under a virtual machine. But over the months the noise surrounding Parallels grew, eventually becoming a roar after Parallels updated Desktop to feature a “coherence mode.” So I caved.
Am I ever glad I did.
Parallels Desktop makes Mac hardware the only hardware you’ll ever need. You can run UNIX™ X11 applications natively. You can run beautiful Aqua apps like iTunes or TextMate natively. And with coherence mode, you can run Windows applications, natively. Try to imagine the implications of this: As a web developer, I have to test Safari on OSX, Firefox of Windows/OSX/Linux and Internet Explorer on Windows. And I can do it on the same computer, side by side, without rebooting or ugly container windows.
Also unlike any kind of virtual machine software, let’s say I want to drag the result of an Automator workflow into Windows. I can just do it. With a number of magical background processes, Parallels makes it appear on a fileshare and through it’s Parallels Tools for Windows, then receives it, removes it and the file is suddenly available to Windows applications.
You may have also noticed in the screen shot that there are Windows application in my OSX Dock. Parallels does that, too. Active applications are applications, it doesn’t matter which OS they are. Virtual PC won’t do that. Bootcamp can’t.
But until Photoshop CS3, Office 2008 and Dreamweaver 9 are released, the most incredibly thing about Parallels is how it runs the Windows versions of these applications FASTER than the PowerPC version. Parallels integrates these applications about as well with OSX as anyone could hope and does it more quickly than OSX can run older versions.
Coherence mode is what people really hoped for but doubted would happen when OSX for Intel was announced. And with a certain amount of elegance, prestige and touch of magic, Parallels has made it happen.
Parallels is not perfect. It drastically slows down OSX applications while it runs. It does not yet run accelerated graphics, however my old copy of Flight Simulator 98 runs about as well as it did in 1998 (which is much better than most virtual machines can do). And it’s gotten expensive — already $80. But for any web developer or user who still clings to that Windows-only application, Parallels can work wonders.
Parallels offers the second best Windows install I’ve ever used. Bootcamp makes setting up your Windows environment easy by just filling out your registration information before the install and offering a single driver package afterwards. Parallels is a slight bit more involved but still much easier than installing Windows on your own. And once installed, the only configuration I had to do to Windows was roll back the interface to classic. Parallels does a fair job with the rounded windows but I found too many glitches too quickly to put up with it. Classic Windows uses plain-old rectangular windows and so with no complex shapes to crop, just looks better. Once that’s taken care of, installing applications works just like it always has. Then add the application to the dock, flip on Coherence mode and forget you’re even running Parallels. Only slightly more obviously than Rosetta, Parallels fades from your brain to do its simple, mundane task: making your life less complicated.
Nice screen shot, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who spells receives wrong :).