First I just love the new beta. My serial speakerphone modem is working well. The coherence mode makes a quite bit easier for me to switch between Mac and Windows applications faster. However I have a suggestion that will make coherence even better I believe. In my XP I have shortcuts on my desktop, that way I just code\type the first letter of the shortcut of the program that I want to run and then I do a return and that program runs. In the views-customized menu and when you're in coherence options, you should have another option Show Windows shortcuts on Mac OS X desktop That way if this option is checked, you could type the first letter of that shortcut program that you want to run and press return and that Windows program will run in the coherence mode. Simple as that.
I agree. Working in a PC business environment, we have some shourtcuts that we have to view the windows desktop for. Having the ability to add these to the mac desktop through coherence would help greatly help in our environment
What would be really nice in a future version would not only be having those shortcuts, but having more of an integrated desktop. I was so impressed with the addition of windows icons for running applications to my dashboard.. An integrated desktop with icons of both would be amazing. I also wonder if it would then be possible to add a start menu item into the dashboard for quick access to windows programs. I currently use both the start bar on the bottom and the dashboard on the right, and just hide the start bar.. Works amazingly well!!
Coherence is just smoke and mirrors eye candy. You really, really still have two computers, the host (OSX in this case) and guest (Windows). there are NOT one machine even though they are running on the same hardware. Think in terms of a KVM switch on steroids. You switch from one environment to the other. They are not, and never will be, integrated. Any appearance of integration is a very clever illusion. The Parallels team is to be congratulated on their cleverness, but it's still an illusion.
In Mac OS if you could associate .LNK files (Windows shortcuts) with the Parallels app, and then have Parallels tell Windows what to open (by passing along the target location in the LNK file)...then it should be fairly easy to have an integrated desktop. Doesn't seem too difficult of a feature to implement.
Not that I like the windows desktop... And not that I want this on mine, but... It would seem to be a simple feature to add. Whenever you run Parallels, it would just check the OSX desktop, see that it has matching aliases for anything on windows, and if any are missing, create one of the same type of icons that appears in the dock, but on the desktop itself. Could probably do it manually. Might be able to hack together a shell script of some sort to even automate it, use OSA to do all this when Parallels starts.
Well at least for me when I'm in coherence mode I can click on my Mac desktop then I'm instantly in my Mac side. When I click on the task bar then I instantly in the Windows side. To me that's more than smoke and mirrors. However I'm not a computer expert by any means. However I think that Parallels could take the coherence mode up to a notch. With an option in showing Windows shortcuts on the Mac OS X desktop. You can already run Windows programs in the coherence mode. It seems to me that Parallels has already solved the most complicated technology that the coherence mode must faced them.
