Mike D’s Blog

Any Windows 7 fans out there? Ready for Vista with a pretty wrapper? Well, if you want to try it out to see what all the fuss is about then there’s no better way than running it in a VM on your Mac with VMware Fusion.

Peter Kazanjy did a great job writing up a how-to that walks you through getting Windows 7 up and running. Just check out the beautiful screen shot below. So what are you waiting for? Go over to the Team Fusion blog and walk through getting Microsoft’s latest operating system release up and running. It will remind you why you love your Mac.

OK. I know I post a lot about how awesome VMware Fusion is, but here’s one more. Ars Technica is reporting on the latest NPD retail numbers. NPD is an organization that tracks unit shipments for software. They track the numbers as they go through distribution which means pretty much every retail location that you as an end user would purchase from is counted for since the retailer gets their software from distribution.

The new numbers show that VMware Fusion holds 59% as of October 2008 compared to Parallels at 39% in the same timeframe. What’s even more impressive is that VMware Fusion was released in August of 2007 so for the year (August 2007 to October 2008) VMware Fusion went from 0% marketshare to 59% marketshare and firmly unseated the incumbent (Parallels).

You can find more great news, details, and background on this great feat from John Troyer over at Planet v12n. Also make sure to read the comments in the Ars Technica post for some great feedback from users on why they use VMware Fusion.

Every once in a while I run across something so interesting that I just gotta have it. Introducing the Apple Wheel. I thought I was somewhat productive before but this thing looks like it will take me to the next level. I always hated keyboards anyways. Without further introduction check out this video from The Onion.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Heading out to MacWorld to see the last Apple presence? Make sure to stop by the VMware booth for some incredible demos and to meet the team behind the product.

Unfortunately I won’t be out there this time but the real gurus will be and they’ve got some great stuff planned. Here’s two events you’ll want to make it to:

• VMware Fusion presence at Macworld: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=43143232449
• VMware Fusion User Meetup at Thirsty Bear: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=43051293174

You can get all the info about where, when, etc from the VMware Team Fusion blog.

I was spending the day catching up on some reading while watching the University of South Carolina get trounced in football and came across a few reviews of VMware Fusion. I wasn’t surprised to see the great reviews since VMware Fusion rocks. I was a little taken by some of the comments in the reviews.

In the review from Ars Technica, hux posted this comment about Parallels:

…Parallels 4 makes me feel like I could be just a few mouse clicks away from it shitting the bed, and that’s just bad news.

Dave Girard (the Ars reviewer) wrote back with similar remarks:

…Well put – that’s exactly how I felt using it. The best part of finishing the review was not having to use it anymore…

That pretty much sums up every experience I’ve had with every version of Parallels. I’m sure Parallels will get the hang of writing good software that doesn’t kill a Mac one of these days.

For another look you can refer to this review from MacWorld where VMware Fusion got 4.5 Mice to Parallels 3.5 Mice. The same reviewer (Rob Griffiths) did an excellent write-up on choosing the best Mac virtualization platform. He goes through a lot when comparing VMware Fusion, Parallels, and VirtualBox. In the end VMware Fusion wins.

If you’re interested in the best Mac virtualization platform around then use the link to the right to get it for a great discount.

UPDATE (1-4-2009): The VMware Fusion marketing team just passed on this nice little one pager for those keeping score of VMware Fusion’s great reviews. Enjoy!

Well, my last tip on putting your Mac to sleep faster was such a huge hit as you can see below that I thought I’d post another Mac tip up here. Don’t worry virtualization people, I’ll get back to that in a minute.

I stumbled across this tip when I hit the wrong key one day. If you’re typing along and you hit the “esc” key in the middle of a word then a list of possible words pops up. Use the arrow keys to get to the one you want and hit tab and the word completes. This works in any normally behaving Mac app. I say normally behaving because Microsoft Office doesn’t support this for some reason. Leave it to Redmond to screw that up.

What’s even neater is that it works with any word that it sees in the current document or page as well as dictionary words. This comes in real handy if you’re coding and need to complete some long entry. It also comes in handy for all the times you need to type in Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Enjoy the tip!

OK. Not exactly related to virtualization but I thought I’d share this anyways. I am always on the move and I’m usually bringing my Mac with me. One of my favorite things about the Mac is that I can really just close the lid and walk to a meeting and open the lid and it’s ready to work instantly. That’s just incredible to me. Sure, a PC can sleep and even hibernate but neither makes the thing come alive quickly. The one painful thing for me has been waiting for my Mac to sleep. I run a lot of stuff all the time. Right now I have 21 different apps open plus a VM running in VMware Fusion. That means that when my Mac goes to sleep I have to wait for it to write most of the 4 GB of RAM to disk. A fellow engineer just showed me a faster way to make the Mac sleep – adjust the hibernatemode variable.

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The Fusion team has done it again! There’s a great new paper available on how to mass deploy VMware Fusion. You can grab a copy of the paper here.

I’ve actually run across this question a lot. I was recently at very large customer and they got in a new VP for one of their lines of business. The VP liked the Mac – mostly because of the “coolness” factor. IT (who runs pretty much all Windows machines) didn’t want to support the Mac because they don’t have the knowledge or skills and their software won’t run natively on the machine. The VP insisted that his department (235 people) run Macs exclusively – and no, this wasn’t a publishing or graphics department. IT turned to VMware for help. Sure we could help but how in the world do you mass deploy and then manage VMware Fusion for all of these users. That’s where the new paper comes in. For people that aren’t familiar with the Mac or aren’t familiar with how to control Mac apps in a large environment this is going to be your bible. Read it and learn it.

If you have any other things you’d like to see from the Fusion team I find it best to just shoot them a short tweet on Twitter (vmwarefusion).