Parallels Team: Plz make a cube transition to Full Screen in shipping version!

As others have posted, by installing 3rd party apps like, eg, Virtue Desktops, you can get a cool transition from OSX to XP to amaze your friends.

Here's a shot made by a guy called mithras on another forum:



(Of course this doesn't bare too close an inspection, at least on a MacBook, until XP can run at LCD native res).

But, this is a standard type of transition that seems to be used by several apps (inc. of course OSX for fast user switching) so I *imagine* that it is something that Parallels could put in to the Workstation app directly. Which would be very cool, since then I wouldn't need to have fancy 3rd party apps running just to enable it.

Of course there are many more important things to sort out (inc. an alternative mapping for right click on laptops, plz but this would certainly be something cool. The effect on the people looking over my shoulder in the coffee room this morning left me in no doubt of that!

 

I'm the author of Virtue - if you guys at Parallels are interested in how this is done, drop me a line - I'll provide you with commented code.

 

Hey, I'm interested though I don't work at parallels. Can I see?

 

Hey Tony!

Virtue and PWS... Two apps that make my new MacBook pro a joy to own!

 

I am using virtue and an app called backdrop as a temporary solution, until full screen resolution is supported.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24004

 

Oxonian,

Thanks so much for the tip! And for pointing me towards Virtue. I don't know how I managed without that little app, now that I have it installed!

Tony Arnold, thanks for Virtue too

 

Virtue Desktops is open source, of course, so you can look anytime you want. I think what Tony is offering to the Parallels team is no-strings-attached code, without the GPL requirements.

 

Oh wow, that's pretty! I've got a buddy stopping by later tonight to see what all the fuss is about with this virtual machine thing I keep going on about. Now I've got a really nice way to knock his socks off!

Tony, Virtue is the first multi desktop app I've seen that actually works cleanly and in a way that I feel fits with OSX's intuitive flavor. Maybe apple will buy it from you for inclusion in leopard and you can retire. (grin)

Everybody should try this with parallels. Run virtue, set it for the cube rotation, put your parallels VM on the other desktop in full screen mode and switch. You will smile, I garuntee it!

 

Tony, a quick note. Do you know that the website virtuedesktops.info is down? And I could not update my copy of Virtue directly either when I launch it as the connection failed.

Fantastic piece of software, if I may say so.

 

Can we get a word from a Parallels guy to see if this could be done?

 

Yes, it could be done. Actually, this effect is already implemented (thanks to Tony Arnold for the implementation hints). You will get this in the next public version.

 

It's posts like these that make me love parallels. So many developers would not answered a question like that.

 

Only Microsoft's forum supporting VirtualPC was better.

Just kidding

 

Seriously, I really like you guys. I've been using the betas since the day beta1 was released. I finally decided to pre-order even though I was hesitant at first. Initially I wanted to hold out to see what MS and VMWare would put out but the more I thought about it, I like supporting a smaller company that is so responsive to its customers.

 

I cant see what the big guys can do that would be significantly better then this. Faster? I doubt it, at least not in a perceivable way.

 

Well, I don't mean to take the thread too far offtopic but VPC has basic support for undoing changes to the virtual hard drive. From what I understand VMWare has very extensive support for this.

Also, my company has VPC disk images of our current standardized WinXP desktop images and it might be nice to be able to use these on my MacBook for work at home occasionally.

 

kevco, you're right that there are many features one could wish for.

But this thread is about the cube transtition and I'd like to add my voice to the chorus of people saying

WOOT! OUTSTANDING, PARALLELS, QUITE OUTSTANDING!

You just got my preorder. And I never, ever, preorder software ;-)

Maximum kudos to Tony Arnold also, for helping make it happen.

 

The way vmware saves a deltas is cool although I have never had a need for it. It's so easy to save these images that there are many ways to accomplish the same thing. I will say that I suspect saving that vmware session is faster because it only records the deltas for the session so you can get in and out of the program quicker. Cool stuff but nothing that would make me jump ship.

 

Kickass guys, you know just how to tickle us Mac users' funnybones.

 

Please look at a post I made about a cool idea I found to so soemthing similar:

http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=4332#post4332