Making Parallels a just a smidge more Mac-like

God, do I love Parallels; I've immediately pre-ordered. So, take these as mere improvement suggestions, not criticisms. I also realize that there is a truckload of work going into the back-end, so these spit-and-polish items are not high-priority.

1) Help opens into Safari. Help should open within the Help.app as Mac users would expect. Help.app displays HTML, so this should be trivial.

2) Modal dialogs. Modal-style dialogs on the Mac should typically open as a pop-down sheet (one of the cool features that differentiates the Mac!). Examples of modal dialogs in Parallels include: a) Saving or reloading the suspend RAM contents. b) asking if Parallels should be 'suspended' or 'powered down'.

3) Button bar. It would be cool and visibly appealing if you grouped the buttons in the buttonbar by their general functionality. For example, the Stop, Pause, Start, and Reset buttons in one grouping, and the screen modes in another. In the simplest way, a box around each grouping would work. More appealing would be like how Apple grouped their buttons in the Mail.app. Of course, the problem with that method would be that it would make it visibly awkward depending on the button bar orientation (unless you restricted it to the right or left. The top consumes too much screen real-estate).

4) it would be nice if the status indicators could be merged with the buttonbar, so there wouldnt be a need to for two distinct toolbars (the status indicator bar along the bottom and the control bar along the side).
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Thoughts? Comments?

Thanks again for an excellent product!

-Rick

 

I absolutely agree with #2. That would be a huge improvement. Thanks.

 

If we're picking nits: in the preferences dialog, user interface tab, the labels within the Toolbar placement and Animation mode selectors are mis-aligned. Same thing on the Hot Keys tab.

It's a nit, it's a nit, but it detracts from the spit-n-polish.

 

These are the sad moments I feel the limitations of my poor English
H-E-L-P

 

Small things make all the difference.

 

native UI vs. lowest common denominator UI

Yeah, it definitely doesn't look or feel very mac native. And there's always lots of cool stuff that Parallels could do if they wanted to start hacking. The good news is that by keeping it simple and not getting too crazy with weaving wacky Windows UI into their original app, they were able to port the VM to the Mac very quickly.

It would be interesting to know what cross-platform UI wrapper library Parallels is using, or if they have written their own:

http://www.parallels.com/files/upload/mac_screenshot_1.gif
http://www.parallels.com/files/upload/main.gif

Ironically, it's precisely lack of viable emulation which is why developers can't pick their favorite platform and maximize upon it. Instead they're stuck using lowest-common-denominator API wrappers in developing their products. Things like wxWidgets are gargantuan efforts in this regard...yet I'm not sure if wxWidgets makes modal dialogs attach to the main frame window in OS/X or not.

http://wxwidgets.org/screensh.htm

In any case, until the emulation is airtight, I don't care how ugly the buttons and status icons are--so long as I can turn them off. (I did)