Coherence mode: background guest OS windows

[frostfyre@frostfyre.com]

Hi guys,

Awesome product!! I've been quite active with the betas and am very impressed with the current RC. That said, here's a wishlist item besides 3D acceleration, or better, soft direct X.

When in coherence mode, if I switch to another application in the host OS, the guest OS's windowing system still has a foreground window, complete with a blinking cursor in the active text field. This often leads to me typing something into an OS X application, while staring at the guest application.

It would be a nice touch for the guest OS to have all of its windows "backgrounded" when switching appliactions away to the host OS, such that the user can never mistake the "true" foreground window.

Anyway - it would be nice, but it's far from critical. Thanks again for such a stellar product.

 

[catwink20]

Hi guys,

Awesome product!! I've been quite active with the betas and am very impressed with the current RC. That said, here's a wishlist item besides 3D acceleration, or better, soft direct X.

When in coherence mode, if I switch to another application in the host OS, the guest OS's windowing system still has a foreground window, complete with a blinking cursor in the active text field. This often leads to me typing something into an OS X application, while staring at the guest application.

It would be a nice touch for the guest OS to have all of its windows "backgrounded" when switching appliactions away to the host OS, such that the user can never mistake the "true" foreground window.

Anyway - it would be nice, but it's far from critical. Thanks again for such a stellar product.

I'm not sure what you mean, I'm not experiencing any problems with coherence of this manner. You can usually tell which OS you are in by the menu bar. Myself I leave the windows bar visable so I can click on it to go back to the windows OS. Am I missing something you're doing differently.

 

[frostfyre@frostfyre.com]

this screenshot should help

Note that if the foreground safari window did not overlap the background internet explorer window, both could be percieve at a glance as being in the foreground. the blinking insert cursor in the explorer window calls attention to itself.

While it's true, you can see at the top which app is truly in the foreground, the GUI cue is the one I tend to rely upon. It's far from a deal breaker, as I love the software, but it would put that extra bit of polish on if the windows window appeared to be "backgrounded" like it's other windows (the exchange windows, for example)

I tend to get distracted by visitors and IM's when working, and I'll use the GUI to help me figure out what I was last "really" doing.

 

[catwink20]

WoW! One other thing I do in coherence is if I want the Windows window, I right click on the task bar at the bottom and choose Show the Desktop, this hides all Mac OS windows temporairly. Note: All it does is show the desktop. I'm am not experienceing this problem no matter how many programs open in either OS. My only suggestion at this point is try reloading parallels tools, this seems to fix most problems between OS's.

 

[Leauki]

It would be a nice touch for the guest OS to have all of its windows "backgrounded" when switching appliactions away to the host OS, such that the user can never mistake the "true" foreground window.

I guess what would be needed would be a program without windows running in the Windows VM which represents Mac programs. When the user switches away from Parallels, that program must automatically become the Windows foreground program.