Parallels at Macworld 2009

Macworld has arrived!

For those attending the Macworld expo, look for the Parallels team set up at booth 2138 in the main expo hall. This is right next to the big spinny Roxio thingy.

The Parallels booth will hold running demonstrations of our products for the duration of Macworld, including experimental support for Windows 7 in a VM and Snow Leopard as host on Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac. It's the perfect opportunity for people to see our software, ask questions and give feedback on their experience. 

For anyone interested in using Macs in the enterprise, Jason Krilich will be presenting on the use of desktop and server virtualization as part of the IT infrastructure. In addition, there will be a few quest speakers who will be talking about their experiences specifically with this technology. Check this out on Friday, Jan 9 at 1pm (MacIT Conference Track IT861). 

For those who brought their Macbooks, we're giving out 25 iTunes gift cards every day of the show to people who come to the booth and pose for a photo with their Parallels' desktop. Make sure to stop by and say hello to the folks in red shirts, we'll be waiting!

Enough about Macworld for the time being. In other news, Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac build 3810 is here and it updates quite a few things. The new build is available for free download either through our website or via the AutoUpdate under the Parallels Help menu when you start the program.

The full notes for this update are HERE.

As you can see, it's not all bug fixes and performance tweaks. The 3810 build introduces some new features, including the ability to drag and drop files onto the Mac OS X dock from your Windows desktop in order to open them in a Mac application; as well as the ability to silently start Windows in Coherence mode when opening Windows apps from your OS X desktop via SmartSelect. 

Both of these features aim towards the same goal: seamless integration between your native and guest operating systems. The more we can get OS X and Windows to co-operate, the better, and ideally a user should be able to treat the two as a single entity. If any readers have suggestions on how we can better accomplish this, go to our Facebook page and help us brainstorm.

To top off this build update, Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac now has better DirectX 9 support. This mostly consists of refining the video drivers Windows uses inside the VM. Since I'm a big gaming geek, I took the liberty of trying out the new improvements myself. Previous to this build update, my Engineer in Valve's Team Fortress 2 could run, jump, shoot and build to his heart's content; but he was unable to smile due to a compatibility issue with Valve's facial animation 3. Poor, poor Engineer. Ah, but now look at him after the update:

Laughing, talking, cheering... as happy as can be! Of course standing around laughing in the wide open means I was blown up by rocket fire about 3 seconds after this picture was taken. It was worth it, I tell you!

Comments

[vestel]

Thank you for infos.

Best Regards.

[Joe Barnhart]

Hope you remember those of us who bought Parallels for guest OS support OTHER than Windoze. We could use a little love from the support team on OS/2, FreeBSD, and other guest OSes. I'd like to see more functionality on other guests before more eye-candy for Windoze.

[Leto_Parallels]

Good point, there's been a lot of buzz lately around the Windows 7 beta. That, plus the video drivers update for Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac automatically make me think of 3D gaming, which is a ball usually in Microsoft's court.
I didn't mean to neglect our additional guest OSes out there. There are bug fixes and added features which benefit multiple systems using build 3810, including the performance updates. If anyone out there has feedback on the new build running BSD Unix or Linux distros, feel free to post here or even e-mail me directly (Leto@Parallels.com) and I'll spread the word to the QA departments.

[SBL clipping path services]

Quite interesting and informative post. Thanks.