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Upcoming announcement regarding VMware and Mac OS X Intel? January 6, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, software, virtualization , 1 comment so far

UPDATE 1: I have summarized some of the latest information and rumours about Windows and OS X x86 virtualization over here.

UPDATE 2: Looks like Parallels might beat VMware to virtualizating XP under OS X.

Over at the excellent virtualization.info Alessandro Perilli writes about his wish list for the next versions of VMware’s workstation and server products. One of his bullet points is “MacOS x86 guest support”. I made the following comment:

Re: MacOS x86 guest support, as much as I (and many other people) would like to see this, I consider it highly unlikely. After all, consider that Apple is still a hardware company, in addition to being an OS and software vendor. Virtualization technology attempts to turn hardware into a commodity (from a business perspective anyway). For VMware to support OS X x86 on Workstation would also require them to implement support for the Trusted Platform Module that Apple/Intel are implementing to prevent OS X x86 from running on any other x86 hardware platform other than Apple’s. Unless Apple is willing to co-operate with VMware on implementing a TPM in software, VMware would have to reverse engineer it, and expose themselves to litigation under the DMCA (I think, IANAL).

Now a version of VMware Workstation and Player that supports OS X x86 as a HOST operating system I think we might possibly see! Given the UNIX underpinnings of OS X, the porting effort from the UNIX versions of OS X might not be so hard?

Alessandro then mentions that we should look to January 9th for an interesting and unexpected announcement regarding VMware and OS X virtualization!

I have been extremely excited about VMware for a long time and intended to write more about the topic shortly (if you haven’t downloaded the free VMware Player, go now!). This rumour is a reason to be doubly excited.

All mice must die! January 3, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, software , 1 comment so far

Rui has a nice summary of how to configure Quicksilver to access the current application’s menu items. The upshot; all menu items can be easily navigated via the keyboard, generally in fewer keystrokes than the standard Ctrl-F2 keyboard shortcut.

In my book, any tool that lessens reliance on the mouse is a Good Thing. I just wish there was a way to pop-up the context menu in OS X… maybe there is but I have yet to find it.

Frankly, I think Quicksilver is one of the killer apps for OS X. I am deeply disappointed that there isn’t a decent equivalent for Windows. Candy Labs have a product AppRocket that implements a little of Quicksilver’s functionality for Windows, but not enough I am afraid.

All I need now is a decent way to navigate around a web page’s links without touching the keyboard; hmmm, maybe I need an eye tracker?!

‘Hey, look Ma, we’re doing Web 2.0!’ December 9, 2005

Posted by James Webster in : web, software , add a comment

Whilst discussing ‘Web 2.0′ over a beer with the ‘Extreme Dream Team’, I made the (unfashionably late) observation that ‘mashup’ is just Web 2.0 slang for what we used to call ‘integration’, back when B2B was cool. Therefore our current project, an enterprise integration system, could be described in an infinitely hipper fashion as a “Web 2.0 enterprise ’shmup”!