VMWare released yesterday RC1 of Fusion (their virtualization app for MacIntel’s). I’ve installed it and it looks OK. One major feature is that they now have Unity support for Windows 2003 Server and Vista.
Other new stuff can be found in the release notes here.
Finally, Happy 4:th of july to you who celebrates that, the rest of us .. (well we can have a drink as well).
I don’t know if you remember (I’m probably showing my age) an old advert for one hamburger chain or another, where the catch-phrase was: “Where’s the Beef”.
Well, that’s how I feel after having briefly sifted through the reports from the Apple WWDC keynote earlier today. It very much looks that my predictions were right from my post a couple of days ago. The “top secret” features that were promised during last year’s keynote was just a cop-out, empty promises. I don’t think that anything that was presented today can be classified as a top secret feature; heck most of it was presented last year anyway.
Don’t get me wrong Leopard looks great, and I certainly want to get my hands on it, but top secret features; no effing way!
Next week one of the biggest events for Mac users comes around; the World Wide Developers Conference. As usual for the Mac World a lot of blogs, etc has started speculating what “his greatness” Jobs will reveal.
I guess one thing all agrees on is that it will be a lot of Leopard coverage. However, what it will entail is not that clear. Don’t forget that Steve Jobs at last years WWDC said that Leopard had certain top secrets features that he didn’t want to reveal at that time. Call me a cynical, but I don’t think we’ll see any new features that can be considered top secrets, and Jobs mentioning these “top secrets” was just a cop-out. My personal opinion is that Apple is moving away more and more from the core OS business, just look at the move earlier this year to drop Computers from the name, and that OS development won’t be that important anymore.
Anyway, I certainly hope I’m wrong and that Jobs pulls something really, really cool from his hat. But if he doesn’t, don’t forget I said so :-).
By the way, I really, really want one of the new MacBook Pro’s to replace my MacBook.
Yesterday I posted about a new feature - Unity - in VMWare’s virtualizaton product for Mac; Fusion, and how I wanted to get my “grubby” little hands on it ASAP. Well, lo and behold - VMWare must have heard me, because they released Beta 4 last night!
I have just installed it, I haven’t had time to do anything much apart from checking that my VM’s run in this release; they do. This is good as I am on my way to Boston to teach (writing this on a train, going down to London). It looks though that I won’t be able to use the Unity feature, as - at the moment - it is only available for XP VM’s and all my VM’s are either Win 2003 Server or LongHorn Server. I guess I better set up an XP VM just to check it out.
Back in December 2006 I posted how both Parallels and VMWare had released betas of their respective virtualization products for Mac OSX. At that time I used Parallels almost exclusively, and I’ve been doing that up until quite recently (actually until VMWare Fusion Beta 3). I have now switched (more or less wholesale) to VMWare Fusion. Some of the reasons for this:
One thing that Parallels has however, that VMWare doesn’t is what they call Coherence. It is the concept of being able to run Windows apps on the Mac desktop as if they are “native” Mac apps. I.e. you don’t run the app inside the VM window, but on the Mac desktop.
Well, VMWare doesn’t have it - yet. Yesterday they released a demo video on YouTube showing off what they call Unity, which is their implementation of the same concept. It is awesome. Have a look:
I so hope VMWare will release a new version with this feature ASAP!!
Last week saw early Christmas for us interested in Virtualization (especially for Mac’s on Intel). Both Parallels and VMWare released betas of their repective products for Mac’s.
I have used Parallels for a while, and their new beta looks very promising. I just installed the VMWare VM, but haven’t had chance to take it for a spin yet. What is interesting with the VMWare beta is support - on the guest - for multi cpu/core machines, as well as 64 bit guest support.
Other than that - Merry Christmas to you all!!!
In previous posts I have written how I have changed over from Windows to Mac OSX, and how I am running OSX as my main OS. I also wrote that I used Parallels as my virtualization environment, so I can run Windows in a Virtual Machine. That works extremely well and I’m doing all my teaching, playing with research of technologies from the VM. The VM is still a bit of an overkill if you just want to run a particular Windows application - say PowerPoint (it is still miles better than having a dual boot system using BootCamp and dual-booting into XP).
Anyway, I no longer have to spin up my VM if I just want to check a slide deck, open a Word document, run some Windows app. Two days ago CodeWeavers launched a beta of their CrossOver for Mac application. This is an application that allows you to run Windows applications from (what looks like) inside OSX. In reality you are running the Windows apps in a sub system using Wine.
I installed it yesterday and promptly installed Office 2003, and it works! I then tried to install other Windows apps - with various degrees of success. This is still a beta and it can only get better - I am really impressed, and if you are on OSX and want to run some Windows app, this is something you should take a look at.
No, I have not slipped back into bad old habits and stopped blogging. I’ve been out of the country and have not had access to the ‘Net except from my mobile. That’s how I saw that Joe in a comment to one of my posts, asked me if I knew any news readers for OSX. I thought that would be a good topic to blog about, not news readers per se, but what applications do I use on my MacBook coming from a Windows environment.
First of all, news readers; when I switched over I searched for a news reader for OSX. On the Windows platform I used XNews and I searched for one with the same capabilities. I found a couple, but all were fairly crappy, no, let’s re-phrase that and say they left room for improvement. So I ended up using the built-in news reader in Thunderbird. It’s not XNews by any means, but it works OK.
So what am I using:
After each re-pave I also install the latest release of Mono, beta release of X-Develop (a great development IDE) and Apple’s XCode. As can be seen from the above I use very few Apple “native” apps (actually only iCal), and I try and stick with open source applications as much as possible. That’s nothing religious however, I choose the apps that works for me.
So what do I miss from Windows? First and foremost (and probably the only big thing) is a desktop mapping application. I used MapPoint a lot for various reasons, and I haven’t found anything equivalent in the Mac world (I need offline capabilities). However, it is not a really big deal - I have it installed on a VM so i can pretty easy get to it if I need.
That’s me guys (and girls). For you that have made the switch (or are “native” Mac users) what are you using, what are you missing??
As a recent Mac convert, I try to follow what goes on in the Mac space through various blogs. The other day I came across this article talking about Apple and its place in the enterprise. The article set me off thinking (steady now, thinking is dangerous).
Anyway, the Apple World Wide Developer Conference took place in beginning of August and I tried to follow the keynote in “real time” by reading various blogs, and afterwards looking at the Quicktime video Apple supplied. The thinking that the article started me on was how different the keynote at WWDC was compared to a keynote at Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference). Listening to the WWDC keynote, IMHO, you wouldn’t know this was the major developer conference for Apple (once again comparing to a PDC). In my opinion, there was very little at the keynote that had anything to do with developers and development; Jobs spoke about iChat and new templates for Apple Mail for god sake. There was only a, very, brief mention about the new XCode version. I would assume that from a developers perspective that would be a very interesting topic. The few things, once again IMHO, that was development related were topics that are very “artsy fartsy” - Core Animation etc.
So where am I going with all this? Well, according to the article above an analyst says that Apple will never be anything else than a niche player in the OS market, especially in the enterprise space. The analyst may be right or wrong about that, and I have no opinion about that particular issue. However, if you want to be a player in the enterprise market, enterprise applications, “bread and butter” apps, should run on and be developed for your platform. I can not see that happening for OSX, a lot of the things you see being developed on and for OSX are more “creative” type of apps. Where are the “boring” database applications, the sales force automation applications, the … applications? Furthermore, where are all the developer forums, newsgroups, hard-core development blogs covering topics related to development on the OSX platform?
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a “creative” platform, but has Apple “painted” itself into a corner with its creativeness, you no longer develop “ordinary”, “boring” enterprise applications for OSX?!
Comments as always very welcome.
Back in May I posted on my old blog, of how I had decided to switch to Mac and OSX from Windows. The urge to switch was mostly due to dis-satisfaction with the state of affairs in the Vista beta (i.e. more or less unusable at that stage), and the urge to try something new.
Since then I have taken delivery of a MacBook and I have now used it as my main machine ever since. So what are my experiences:
So far it seems everything is just bliss, any negative things:
Anyway, I am a happy camper using OSX, I’m looking forward to the up-coming Leopard release to see what that brings to the table. I haven’t had any chance yet to do any dev-work on OSX, but I’ll try to play around with Objective-C and Mono as well.
