I am fast falling in love with this system! One thing I'd like to suggest is that a future (final) version of Parallels try to remove the "Windows" from Windows emulation, instead aiming to break the application windows for Windows apps out of the virtual machine and into the Mac itself as an app that can be used alongside the other apps in use by the user, basically making Windows apps work like X11 or Classic apps, just another kind of normal app in the dock. Imagine if we could have, say, Photoshop be one "process" even though it were running in XP, but which showed up alongside the other apps in use by the Mac. True "virtualization" with even the Windows screen hidden. This should be one goal for the app, in my opinion.
It's a nice wish list item. I should imagine that this would be tricky to achieve using the VM approach because it literally does provide a machine level view of the system running the complete Windows software stack from OS to application enabling software to be run unmodified (with a handful of low level caveats in the kernel, but VT-x reduces this list still further.) The GUI DLLs could be replaced to interface with the Mac OS X GUI but then other than to limit how many libraries to rewrite, why bother running the XP kernel at all? It sounds like you require Wine (Google for "Darwine" for the Mac OS X specific port.) Sadly the last time I attempted to use Wine on Linux it appeared to be very much a work in progress but I have to admit that I did not not have the cycles to spare to spend on trying to get it to work with my Windows applications. Your mileage may vary.
I am going to open up a temptest in a tea pot . . . But I have good reason to believe that Apple is going to integrate this technology into Leopard, specificly, extend Rosetta to run Windows apps. They have been working on this for nearly five years now.
This would be cool. I'd like to see how they trade off efficiency of operation v. amount of non standard code required.
I wouldn't mind seeing this as an option, but I'd need to be able to turn it off. I need a virtual environment where no matter what stupid or malicious thing the guest does, it can't hurt the host. This is the whole point of "virtual machine". I can connect a VM to the Internet, and hackers have no access to the host, no matter what they do. I can test software, and even test viruses to see what they do (or try to do) without risk. Making the VM just a subsystem a la Rosetta, to run friendly apps serves a completely different purpose and is NOT the only reason I want a virtual machine.
OK, I don't want to get anyone in trouble here, but a few "what if's" What if Rosette was not a VM per se . . . What if Rosetta actually contained a full sub-set of XP API's allowing them to fully run XP executables without the OS itself . . . What if Microsoft objected to this . . . What if Apple told Microsoft to stick it where the sun didn't shine, that the XP API's were covered as a result of Microsoft settling with Apple on the Quicktime lawsuit in 1997, when Apple and XP agreed to cross license all technology for a period of five years . . . Asking these "what if's" will help people better understand Microsoft's being noncommittal to a Universal version of VPC, with Microsoft stating that they "disagree" with Apple on how VPC should be "implemented". Food for thought.
for a nice "preview" of this working, check out rdesktop and seamlessrdp. google it. it works great. weird eh?
