Unity: Vmware's answer to Coherence

I have also seen the video and I have to say I'm pretty impressed.
However, the Parallels Desktop team managed to surprise me positively in the past, so that I hope to see some nice features in 3.0.

Even if 3.0 does not consist of such features, I'm pretty sure we will see them coming with a patch release.

What I hope to see in Coherence 2.0 is a more smooth way of moving windows around the desktop, without the nasty windows wallpaper showing...

 

I also liked the soundtrack
There is no doubt you will see more and more features.

 

Actually it's pretty clear if you watch the whole video that minesweeper and WMP are running on the same VM, and at one point they do put them both into the background, and clicking on one does not bring the other into the foreground. Now .... is the video "altered"? That I have no clue of. I assume Beta 4 will be released at WWDC, so that will be the true test.

I'm very glad VMware came to this party, I still think my $80 in Parallels was money well spent. The next few months will be most interesting.

 

Slick

Yeah, it looks to me like no tricks are being pulled, and they are actually putting each Windows window into the Mac Window Manager and by doing that they gain a BUNCH of functionality (layering, drop shadows, exposé, minimization to the Dock). I would imagine once they place each window in the Mac Window manager, all the other functionality comes for free....
Having sprung the $40 last week for the upgrade, I sure do hope this is something Parallels will be adding to 3.0, since for me this has been the one single largest missing feature from coherence (exposé and individual window layering to me are one and the same feature).

Thank you for all the awesome work you do Parallels team, now get cracking on adding that feature

 

Actually, at 1:32 the VM with all the Office applications in it has 2 overlapping windows. Ah, competition. Gotta love it.

 

Personally I enjoed this video very much. It seems Parallels going in the right direction if such great company as VMware start to follow us and implement our ideas at such pace.

From what I saw in this video the technology behind Unity is exactly the same which Parallels uses in Coherence. They just stepped a bit farther in visual side of it - showing Windows applications in separate Mac windows (and consequently support Expose, drop shadows, zero dragging artifacts and so on). All other stuff is shipped with Parallels 2.5 long ago - Windows applications in Dock, Application menu, Windows Start menu, search Windows application (in Parallels you can use Spotlight!) and so on.

Visual improvements (such as Expose) is in our pipeline long ago, but we decided to introduce deeper internal integration first in Parallels 3.0 - things such

* Full symmetric shared folders - share Windows files to Mac and Mac files to Windows
* Full symmetric shared applications - run Windows applications from Mac and Mac applications from Windows
* Full symmetric shared documents - open documents in Mac with Windows applications and open documents in Windows with Mac applications
* Shared web applications - set the same default browser, mail and ftp client for both Mac and Windows
* True drag and drop - ability to drag and drop files on appropriate applications without actual transfer from one location to another

and more. At the same time Windows running in virtual machine and securily isolated from Mac OS X. You are able to set full isolation using security slider in VM configuration at cost of loosing some integration. But even with all integration allowed level of Windows isolation from Mac is very high.

With all this stuff in Coherence 2.0 you can work with both Mac OS X and Windows truely seamlessly. I do it myslelf on daily basis and I can't imagine how to work without it now.

And with the next step we will come with visual aspects you saw in this video - Exspose and such.

 

And you saw the same artifacts as in Parallels 2.5 - first came topmost window border and show background of underlying window If they try Expose at that moment they will got one of the Windows overlapped with other. It is not that big problem though - we discussed many times internally how to workaround this. But VMware seems not implemented such workaround yet.

 

If I understood you correctly, you are saying that the features above are all part of Coherence 2.0 and there will be no visual improvements. Is that correct?

 

Correct. Visual improvements are also in roadmap, but will be included into free updates to 3.0 later.

 

Great, thanks for the info. I'm looking forward to 3.0 a lot, the feature list is really impressive.

 

other than Coherence...

So, to hijack this thread just a wee moment, there are some other features Parallels HAD previously said were being worked on, and which are featured in the VMware beta, but are nowhere to be seen on 3.0:

64-bit Support (still no 64-bit guest OS can be installed in Parallels 3.0
and
Multiple CPU support (still can't assign multiple CPU to a VM).

Is that also something still in the pipeline - as part of the 3.0 project?

Thanks,
Dan

 

Parallels has responded elsewhere in the forum that these are on the agenda for a 3.x (future) release. Sorry I don't know in which thread it was posted.

Edit: I should have clarified (or quoted) that I'm referring to the 64-bit support etc. queried above, NOT the features in Unity. I don't believe any statement has been made about that as yet.

 

Yes - these features are also in work. And they are targeting one of the 3.x free update later this year as well.

 

Twynne, Andrew,
great - and thanks for the reply.

I was under the impression they were under develipment for 3.0 (GA), but as long as they are forthcoming for the 3.x build, that's fine of course

Thanks,
Dan

 

I tried this out, and it only happens when you first start unity. If you bring each app into the foreground at least once, the problem doesn't occur anymore. But hey, its beta software, its labeled as beta software, and it costs what beta software should really cost...

 

Well folks, one thing is that at least Coherence works in Vista, as opposed to Unity.

+1 for Parallels! now chop chop on the Aero support

 

Except of course it doesn't work with the latest revision of Bootcamp, which really is updated drivers.

 

Now we're also making some nice video.
But our soundtrack is not that nice
Check out our Blog:
http://parallelsvirtualization.blogspot.com/2007/06/demo-videos.html

 

For good music i will turn on MTV...

The information video's from Parallels looks good..

Chak

 

Available as of last night: Fusion Beta 4 ... now with Unity