"Start Menu" in the dock?

I love coherence mode in Parallels. I like it so much I purchased the product during the December promotion. Having Windows apps minimize to the Dock is a very nice feature.

The one thing I find myself wishing for is having the Windows "Start Menu" in the Dock the way Connectix did with VPC. It would be a real nice feature to not have to ever go into windowed mode to get to some seldom used app. I know I can "leave in dock" a windows program .... but that is not quite the same as having the start menu be available at any given time. Any chance we will see something like this in the future?

 

wingdo,

Yes - we considering such possibility for the future. Even now you can right click (or Ctrl + click) on Parallels Dock icon and use contextual menu "Start Menu".

 

Well .... yes and no.

The "start menu" in the Parallels application basically makes the Windows Start Menu available when it is hidden (as in coherence mode). It is helpful but ........ the reason I like the Connetcix VPC way of doing it VPC did NOT need to be running for the start menu to function. It was just a constantly updated copy of the real Windows Start Menu in a Dock icon. If I needed to launch Visio I'd click on the docked Start Menu go to programs -> Office -> Visio and VPC would start up, and Visio would launch. A very handy feature if you do not want to leave Parallels running all the time.

Thanks for thinking about implementing it.

 

How is that menu item in the dock supposed to work? I can click, but nothing happens here (running RC1 with XP SP2 and Parallels Tools installed). Should the blue XP start menu popup?

Schimmi

 

I see the start menu item in the Parallels dock icon, but it would be great to have this exposed in the main Parallels menu so you can assign a qucik key to it in OS X's keyboard preferences. That way instead of digging for the dock icon when you need the start menu you could just hit a quick key combo.

 

wingdo, I can see why you might want a handy way to activate the start menu when it's hidden by coherence. But why would you want to pollute the dock with a poorly designed, nested-to-the-nth windows menu, even when the VM isn't running? If you want to start visio at whim, drag it to dock.

 

I'd like to have the Start menu there as there are about 15 proprietary applications I run for work plus Visio and Project. I'd rather deal with one menu system (which only gets cluttered if you let it) than dragging a large number of Windows applications to my dock.

 

Start menu in Dock sollution!!!

Here is what I did to create a Windows Start menu in my Dock.

Open Applescript editor and paste in the following code:

Code:

tell application "System Events"
	activate application "Parallels Desktop"
	key down command
	key up command
end tell

Then save as Application Bundle, and uncheck all options. Give it a nice icon, and drag it to your Dock.

 

Ok, re the "star menu" in the Mac dock... If I right click on the parallels icon in the dock, I can see "Applications" and "Start Menu" amongst the other stuff. Applications, I have added a few apps to that. Start Menu has no second level menu, it just sits there, looks pretty, and, does nothing. Clicking on it does nothing. Whether in coherence or not. Is it supposed to do anything?

 

That will certainly open up a start menu, but it actually requires Parallels to start up and then launch the real windows start menu. I'm not sure if you ever used VPC, but the docked "Start Menu" was actually a Mac application which mimicked the current setup of the actual windows start menu. You'd click the dock item and instantly you have a working start menu in your dock (the start menu actually pops up from the dock) and once you choose what program you wanted to run ..... then VPC would start up and load the application.

I am not at all complaining about the functionality of Parallels, they already have my $$, it was just a nice piece of eye candy and a feature a lot of VPC people myself included liked.