Parallels: Windows on OS X

I’ve been busy as balls this year and haven’t blogged much, but this is well worth a mention.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of Parallels, the company that has produced virtualization software for OS X to run other Intel-based operating systems side-by-side with OS X at near-native speeds.

This is, in my opinion, the sexiest chunk of tech news to surface all year.

I’ve been using a Mac at work for a year now, and we have a handful of software apps that only run on Windows. This has meant that I’ve had to either (a) suffer the speed issues with Virtual PC, or (b) Remote Desktop to a PC to get things done and use network shares to share files back and forth with my Mac.

Now, I won’t knock VPC, because without it I would have spent the last year stuck using a sh*tty Dell laptop instead of my reliable, effortlessly usable PowerBook… but the speed issues really made using it less than pleasant. Being able to run my work software at near-native speed (especially PC-only, resource-hungry beasts like the IBM/Rational suite, Eclipse with ClearCase source control when developing, and the horrible JInitiator browser plug-in for our legacy Oracle apps) is going to absolutely save my life. I will finally be able to unplug that sh*tty Dell laptop from the network and send it back to the ninth circle of Hell from whence it was spawned.

As soon as Parallels Workstation for OS X goes gold, there’ll be a MacBookPro coming my way… awesome stuff! Parallels deserves every ounce of success that they have coming their way, and I wish them a whole lot more.