The 3.0 release seems to be a fiasco. Memory usage gone nuts, having to reinstall guest OS to get new disk format advantages, slow graphics, sluggish performance, upgrading too expensive and not working for many, many people and lots of small bugs. That said, I believe they have done some great things for the UI that I hope Parallels is watching closely: 1. The menubar custom Windows menu is outstanding - the "Always On Application menu". I've wanted this in a Unity/Coherence view forever. They've done a pretty good job. That said they don't allow shortcuts or browsing for specific EXEs, Folders, Files. You have to use their browser which only allows EXEs and seems to pull their names from the EXE header info. But they let you access all the things you'd want: Run, Control Panel, Options for the menu, Shutdown... Very well done but needs a bit more polish. Sure hope something is like that on deck for 5.0 2. Hiding windows. If you run in Unity - you never have to see Windows at all. If you run an app from their menu it loads Windows in the background and a nice dialog is displayed that has a button that lets you see Windows loading if you want, but you don't see anything by default. This is the real integration experience IMHO. Parallels 4 still shows the bios, OS loading screen, Taskbar on the desktop for a few seconds - then you are ready to go. Again, please consider. When setting up users who you don't want to explain what is happening - this is much nicer. 3. Expose support in Snow Leopard is slick I won't go into all the problems I've encountered as I believe they will be addressed. IMHO Parallels has a great opp with the launch of Fusion 3.0. Fusion has the features and improvements I believe most want. And I'm not saying I only want the UI improvements, much of what is supposed to be in Fusion is crtical - 64bit, shader model 3, "Greatly" improved memory usage (which is claimed all over on the Fusion site), faster disk and graphics performance. I won't repeat: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10957 It might be nice to have a list of things 5.0 does that Fusion 3 doesn't. Like auto-compacting (sounds great)... As an owner of both products - I'm back to Fusion 4. But the race is afoot unlike ever since the Fusion 1.0 release.
I never liked the Windows task bar on the screen when using Coherence mode. I do hope they do something to address that eyesore.
