Parallels blows my mind

If you’re not a Mac user or a bit of a geek, you probably won’t care about this post. You can amuse yourself elsewhere, perhaps by reading my comments about VH1’s new reality series, I Love New York. If you are a Mac user or a geek, then stick around.

I got a MacBook about four months ago and I loved it right away. For one, it looks cool and the glossy screen produces some really beautiful images. It’s also thin and portable and the battery lasts a lot longer than my other laptops. My very first computer was a Mac (a Performa 575 way back in 1993) and I’ve liked their operating systems ever since. While there was a long period in middle school and high school when I had PCs, I switched back to Mac in college and got an iBook. It was a great computer, incredibly light and portable, so I took to to class with me and used it constantly. It was also affordable thanks to Apple’s educational discount. The only problem with my little iBook was that there were some programs I just couldn’t run on the Mac OS. Our school would give us software for classes, have us access and download things online, or use files and applications that were for Windows only and either involved a zillion steps and extra money to run on a Mac, or were just plain out of bounds to Mac users.

When I heard that the new Mac laptops with Intel chips were going to be able to run Windows, I was intrigued. Macs have been running Windows for years through the use of programs like VirtualPC, but all the reports were saying that with the new Intel Macs, you could run Windows without some of the limits of those programs. I started hearing a lot about Parallels Desktop, an application that let Mac users run both the Mac OS and Windows at the same time and switch back and forth between the two. I was way psyched. The program I use to edit Trashwire.com is only available for Windows, so anything that let me run that from my new MacBook was right up my alley.

I got Parallels and installed it and Windows XP. From the second I accessed Windows and saw that familiar Start Menu at the bottom of the screen, I was excited. I played around with Parallels and switched between the windowed mode and the full-screen mode, which makes your Mac desktop look like any PC desktop. It was super cool. My PC programs all worked with ease and I could share files between my Mac and Windows through shared folders.

I was convinced that Parallels was already one of the coolest things I’d ever seen when I picked up a copy of Macworld and saw that there was a new improvement in the works for the already amazing software. With the new beta, you can now run Windows in Coherence Mode. In this mode, you don’t even have to switch back and forth between the two operatins systems, it puts open Windows applications and folders right in with your Mac applications and folders. This means that I can have an open window with my sitebuilder application right next to my open Mac web browser and I can even drag and drop things between them. This is awesome because it eliminates the need for shared folders. I can just open the folder I want in Windows and drop something right in from my Mac. No more moving the file to a shared folder, switching to Windows, moving the file from the shared folder and then using it. I takes way less time and creates way less clutter.

The whole thing is amazing to me and I’m convinced the people who make Parallels must be aliens or people from the future or something. Why hasn’t anyone made things this easy before? There was an episode of South Park where Randy was tring to explain the Wal-Mart business model to Stan and he said, “It’s simple economics, son. I don’t understand it at all…but…God I love it!” That’s the way I feel about Parallels. I have no idea how it works, but damn am I happy that it does work. If I had to pick my favorite technological breakthrough of 2006, I’d pick Parallels Desktop for giving me the ability to have the computer I really want and not panic about limited applications for its operating system. I hate to sound like a Mac whore, but now that there’s Parallels, why would anyone ever want to buy a PC again?