There is kind of a catch-22 here… You can’t do honest web development on Windows without hearing it from the Mac fanboys (I might even label myself a bit of a mac fanboy), but you also cannot forget that despite the fact your uber cool with your Powerbook_Firefox_Firebug_fu the majority of the world still visits your sites with IE on Windows.
IE: Blue, Firefox: Green, Safari: Orange
Above is the browser brake down for Lypp in March. Firefox is higher then you would see on other sites because we target Powerbook_Firefox_Firebug_fu developers with our Lypp API and Rails Plugin.
Virtual Machines are nothing new, I honestly think I have tried the majority of them at some point. Parallels itself I have been using for several months to mimic and experiment with Linux deployment environments.
So what makes me want to blog about it?
Besides the obvious IE browser testing, I have had to buckled down in Microsoft Outlook 2000 in preparation for the release of Lypp’s Outlook Plugin.
Take a look at the above screen-capture… Here are the highlights:
- Run Windows programs like native Mac applications
- Windows windows work with Apple Expose’ and transparent windows support
- Desktop and file sharing
- iSight Webcam Support! (I can use my webcam with MSN again!)
- Cut-and-paste and Drag-and-drop support between OSs
Making the switch from Linux to Mac I think I said the phrase “It just works!” ten times a day for the first month. Same goes here with Parallels and my experiences with other VMs. I have been able to squeeze features out of other VMs before but with Parallels “I just works!” and fits into my work flows seamlessly.
