VMWare Fusion: nice. Now what?
February 25, 2008
Following my installation of Parallels on my MacBookPro, the nice people at VMWare asked if I’d like to give Fusion a shot. Fusion is another virtualization technology that allows me to run dual operating systems on my MacBookPro. The theory runs that I get the benefits of both operating systems and can seamlessly slide between the two.
Installation is straightforward - the usual Apple ‘click ‘n’ go’ approach I’ve come to enjoy and running XP is similarly easy. Fire up Fusion and XP is there. Fusion allows me to import my Parallels setting which saves a lot of messing around with re-downloading applications I’ve already got running in that environment. So far so good. But…
It opens up a whole new set of problems. Do I want to be in Windows most of the time when the applications I use are largely in the Internet cloud or do I stick with the native Mac operating system?
Right now my main reason for running Windows is so I can use LiveWriter. As of today I have two other reasons. First up is the new Internet Explorer 7 browser which emulates many of the best parts of Firefox but without the horrendous memory leaks that seem to plague Firefox. IE7 seems to run as fast as the new Webkit Safari browser and is more feature packed. Score two to Windows.
Today I also stumbled across Spacetime, courtesy of a couple of Tweets from Marilyn Pratt and Luis Suarez. Spacetime is a 3D search tool that allows me to quickly get past the cruff that Google search usually delivers on complex search terms. It is waaaaay cool and adds value to my research needs. But it’s only available on XP/Vista with a Mac version ‘coming soon.’ Isn’t it always the way? In one sense that doesn’t matter because I can still drag research material into a cloud service I’m currently testing but can’t name that helps me easily organize research material. BTW - when this goes public it’s going to be awesome.
Finally, I received an email from a company that has turned del.icio.us into a custom search engine called deli.Goo. According to ReadWriteWeb:
The way it works is by creating a Google Custom Search engine based on all of a user’s del.icio.us bookmarks, all of the bookmarks under a single tag, or all of the bookmarks under a single tag from a single user.
So now I have four killer reasons for sticking with Windows. Anyone involved in sales at Redmond reading this must be grinning from ear to ear. But even then it’s not quite that simple.
Windows doesn’t render its screens as well as Apple in the VMWare fusion environment. I’m sure I’d get used to it over time but right now it doesn’t ‘feel’ just right.
The jury’s out but in the end I’m going to vote with convenience. Whatever that ends up meaning.
UPDATE: Robert Scoble also thinks VMWAre Fusion rocks.
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