My Macbook Pro is now running the latest release candidate for the next version of Parallels. It looks like it’s going to be the version that will move me away from BootCamp and onto Parallels full time. You can see the full release notes at the Parallels site but the two killer features for me are the ability to run Parallels using your BootCamp partition, and the new coherence mode.
The reason I haven’t been keen to move into Parallels full time is that for some tasks in Windows it just isn’t fast enough so the thought of runing two seperate installations of Windows, one as a virtual machine and the other in a standalone partition just put me off completely. But now I can do most of my tasks running Parallels in OS X and then, when necessary, switch over to BootCamp but still have all of the same files and settings without maintaining them all twice.
Coherence mode is the new ability to run Windows applications but outside of the Windows desktop, the benefit of this is that the distinction between OS X and Windows has become very blurred allowing you to pretty seamlessly work in different applications on different operating systems and not really notice the difference.
Even though the version I’m running is only a release candidate it feels pretty much there, the upgrade was painless and I’ve yet to see any bugs at all. When VMWare finally bring out there virtualisation tool for OS X it’s going to have to do something really special to catch up.
