Friday, August 31, 2012

Parallels 8 Forces Mountain Lion and Windows 8 to Play Nice

Parallels for Mac Version 8

Parallels lets you run Windows on your Mac. The trick is you can run both OSes simultaneously, with your Windows apps showing up just like Mac apps would. Version 8 supports Mountain Lion features, such as dictation and notifications, for Windows apps.

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You may know that you can boot Windows on your Mac machine by virtue of the two operating systems sharing the same processing technology. What you may not know is you can actually run both at the same time through emulator software like Parallels.

The app has been around since 2006 (ever since Apple switched to Intel chips), and has been steadily improving ever since. If your business has the all-too-common headache of supporting both Windows machines and Macs, desktop simulators like Parallels and VMware Fusion can help get all your computers running the same apps.

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Parallels just revealed Version 8 of its Mac desktop software. It aims to fully merge the two latest iterations of Mac and Windows, those being Mountain Lion and Windows 8. Parallels can already run Windows "invisibly," letting you open your Windows apps without needing to switch to fully immerse yourself in the Windows environment. Now, the software takes that experience to the next level.

With Version 8, you'll be able to add your Windows apps to the Mac Launchpad. It also integrates your Windows notifications into the Mac OS notification center. Mountain Lion dictation is supported in Windows apps. And if you ever encountered a web page that doesn't render well in Safari, you can open it in Internet Explorer with one click.

SEE ALSO: Mountain Lion Vs. Windows 8: Which One Is Better?

Possibly best of all is how Parallels brings Mountain Lion gestures to Windows. With two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, three-finger dragging and swiping between full-screen apps, Parallels may make some of your Windows apps more convenient to use than they would be on a pure Windows machine.

If you shelled out the cash for one of those fancy retina MacBook Pros, you'll love the full retina support for Windows apps, which Parallels promises will bring "crisper fonts, photos, images and animations." It's also continued to optimize the software, claiming the performance is 25% to 30% faster.

In a hands-on demo with Mashable Parallels reps showed a MacBook Pro effortlessly, toggling between Mac and Windows apps at full retina resolution. The Windows app icons were in the launcher, and they behaved just like Mac apps when using OS functions like Expos?. If we didn't know Parallels was running, we would have assumed they were Mac apps (until we made them active and saw all the Windows fonts, of course).

Parallels for Mac Version 8 will be on store shelves Sept. 4 for $79.99, though current customers can get it before then.

What do you think of Parallels? Great tool, or is it slowly becoming obsolete in the age of the cloud? Sound off in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/parallels-8-forces-mountain-lion-windows-8-play-030154486.html

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