Start Menu design question

[wingdo]

Which would you prefer, Parallels working perfectly but without Coherence or continuing to work very imperfectly with it?

Wow I thought I made my preference known. If Parallels were to disable or remove Coherence, I would remove it from my system and use Fusion exclusively. I am not going back to the VPC way of doing things.

I think Parallels needs to hire more resources and get this product fixed.

Let me ask you this. If Parallels could make PD work perfectly (including driver support and everything you want) but you were required to run it in 640x480 @256 colors, without the ability to share any folders or resources ...... would you use it?

I fully agree PD needs major work. So does Fusion. Actually Fusion is much buggier for me.

 

[srl]

brkirch, jasonw,

You can disable it by Swap CMD/CTRL keys option in menu Preferences->Keyboard->Remapping keys. But you will trigger Start Menu by pressing Ctrl then. Will it work for you?

Or you need an option for complete disabling Windows key (which is mapped to Cmd)? In this case you will loose many opportunities provided by Windows developers...

I really would prefer if NEITHER ctrl nor cmd brought up the windows key.. (I can use the old fashioned way, ctrl-escape, if i really need it..) On beta 5060 and using Coherence much more in my daily work, the start menu is always popping up - or worse, it'll accept some other key I had (I use ctrl-keys a lot..). Please, please give an option to disable all remapping to windows key. I'd like to keep ZXCVW…*if possible, those are nice. But I am willing to forgo those if it means having the start menu not come up in my face. I'm a mac user, I'm only tolerating windows as a guest. Guests shouldn't be in your face when youare talking to them : )

 

[jasonw]

I really would prefer if NEITHER ctrl nor cmd brought up the windows key.. (I can use the old fashioned way, ctrl-escape, if i really need it..) On beta 5060 and using Coherence much more in my daily work, the start menu is always popping up - or worse, it'll accept some other key I had (I use ctrl-keys a lot..).

I have the exact same problem many times a day and it's quite annoying.

As the "click on dock icon to show start menu" feature is implemented by simulating a left windows key press I cannot use the registry hack or a WH_KEYBOARD_LL hook to filter out windows key taps. As annoying as the start menu popping up all the time is, I'd be far more annoyed at not having access to the start menu from the dock.

Can the Parallels team please do something about this? The simplest thing I can think of is to update the dock icon feature to send a Ctrl-Esc instead. We can then use the registry hack to disable the Windows key if desired. A better solution would be to have a preference to stop a Cmd tap from being translated into a a Windows key tap at the host level.

 

[JTLaud]

I have my dock on the lower left side, so clicking on the Dock icon to bring up the Start menu isn't too big of a mouse jump to the start menu itself. But if I were to have my Dock on the right side of the screen and clicked on the dock icon to bring up the Start menu, then I would have to move the mouse all the way over to the left side of the screen where the Start menu is located. Why would I bother? I'd just click on the actual Start menu and save myself the headache.

So I don't use the Dock icon at all to get to the Start menu. But I believe things should work consistently. Whatever you make the function of the dock icon, it should work the same way regardless if Parallels is active or not. Even better, give people the ability to customize the functions for both when it's active and not active. The best thing is to provide customization ability so users have the control since everyone works differently.

BTW, I LOVE coherence mode.

Speaking of customization and key commands, is there way to customize how [CTRL]+[Q] behaves? I used this command all the time in Windows to close an application. But when I use it through Parallels, it completely shuts down the Parallels Desktop. This happens in Coherence mode. I don't want to try it in other mode since restarting a suspended Parallels OS sometimes crashes it.

 

[jasonw]

Speaking of customization and key commands, is there way to customize how [CTRL]+[Q] behaves? I used this command all the time in Windows to close an application. But when I use it through Parallels, it completely shuts down the Parallels Desktop.

Having Cmd-Q, Cmd-W and Cmd-` work more like they do with native apps would be great.

 

[LEn Banks]

I LOVE Coherence Mode and in general have not had problems with PD. The new updates are really nice. Regarding the Start Menu though, It is sometimes taking me 5-6 clicks on the dock icon. So that feature, however you ultimately design it, needs to be tweaked.

 

[stapnomo]

I'm not getting the Windows start Menu, I'm getting the Parallels menu
New
Open
Preferences
View ---> start menu, etc
Applications
Send keys

IN Parallels 2.5 the start menu option was at least more accessible (you didn't need to drill down thru the view menu)

either way what you're describing sounds nice. I'm running Build 5160 and not getting that though.