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Alas poor Parallels, I knew it well? August 7, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, virtualization , add a comment

Small software vendors have a history of getting shafted at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference; remember the kerfuffle over Konfabulator when Apple announced Dashboard in Tiger? In the end I guess it worked out okay for those guys as they flipped to Yahoo. On the eve of WWDC 2006 it looks like the 600lb gorilla of virtualization is releasing a beta of VMware Workstation for Mac. Which perhaps puts Parallels Desktop Mac in a somewhat precarious position if a version of the free VMware Player for Mac is shortly behind. I sincerely hope not, as Parallels’ product is damn impressive; I have been using it for a few weeks since getting a MacBook and would be pretty lost without it at this point. Parallels does have the advantage of being priced more aggressively: $79USD to the $189USD that VMware’s Mac product would be priced at if Windows and Linux pricing is any guide. The feature set of VMware Workstation is definitely more higher-end but it will be interesting to watch how pricing of both of these products on both PC and Mac platforms may change over the coming months. About the only thing that I wish Parallels supported was the ability to open VMware virtual machine images, simply because there are just so many of them out there.

Incidentally Codeweaver’s Crossover Office for Mac is also scheduled to go into beta this month, possibly an announcement to coincide with the WWDC will be made in the next few days. I would be impressed to see them add the betas of Office 2007 to their list of supported applications but I am probably dreaming.

FlyPod June 21, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, gadgets , 2 comments

Apple needs to keep innovating in order to stay a step ahead of Microsoft’s rumoured iPod killer. Since iPod integration with your car is now passe, the next industry Apple should be trying to suck up to, errr, I mean partner with is the airlines. I want my seat to have a universal iPod dock dammit! And the ability to display video (for 5G and unreleased-video-ipod owners) on the seatback display would be fantastic for long-haul flights. So who’s going to provide it first? Groovy, funky Virgin Atlantic? Emirates? C’mon, someone get onto this quick!

Take a ride on a Locomotive for the simplest Ruby-on-Rails-on-Mac experience May 15, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, development , 2 comments

If you are a Mac developer hankering for some Rails fun and games, and haven’t checked out Locomotive yet, go now! It has just been updated to version 2.0 and it is without a doubt the simplest and most complete way to do Rails development on a Mac. It includes a helpful GUI for creating new Rails apps, starting and stopping them. It also has a number of useful modules compiled in; most notably ImageMagick and its Ruby binding RMagick. By themselves these things are a real beeyotch to get built but no problem whatsoever with Locomotive. One handy new feature in the latest version is the inclusion of a command-line tool for interacting with Rails applications.

Now if only Steve Jobs would hurry up and introduce the MacBook I might have a slightly faster development environment than this Mac mini that’s just SO ‘05!