Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0

Parallels recently released version 3.0 of their Parallels Desktop for Mac software.  While the integration between Mac OS X and Windows in the previous Parallels release were good this release makes it even more seamless. Parallels is definitely still my favorite piece of Mac software at the moment.

Some of the more useful functions included in this release listed below.

• Parallels Explorer - No longer do you need to boot up the guest OS to access it's file system. Using Parallels Explorer you can browse your virtual disks from within OS X without a running virtual machine. Very useful if you need some files from the guest OS in a hurry.
• Windows Vista Bootcamp support - Previously Parallels didn't support booting a Vista partition but support for this much requested feature has been added in this release. I'm happy with Vista running on a virtual disk so I probably won't be using this feature until the time comes for a Vista reinstall. But this can be very handy if you need to boot Vista natively without the virtualization layer from time to time.
• 3D Graphics Support - Run native PC games and graphics applications on Mac at close to native speeds. Support for Direct X 8.1 and OpenGL.
• Snapshots - A feature that existed on other VM platforms for a while. Allows you to save a snapshot of your machine state allowing you to revert back to a previous state. Very useful for testing alpha or beta software.
• SmartSelect - Allows you to easily open Mac documents in Windows applications and vice versa. So now you don't only need to select which program opens specific file types but you can also specify which OS. i.e. Instead of installing Adobe Reader for opening PDFs you can just associate those files with Preview on Mac so you don't need to install packages that perform the same function on both host and guest OS. Below is a sample of using SmartSelect to open an .aspx file in either Visual Studio or TextMate.

For a full list of the new features and to download the upgrade see the Parallels site here.