6 posts tagged “apple”
This week, I was invited by Amit Singh to present a Tech Talk at Google on VMware Fusion. I decided to do something a little different and dig down into how VMware's goals of bringing people the apps they need wherever they need them is actually really similar to Google's “everything's a web app” strategy.
I had a splendid lunch at one of my favorite Google cafés, American Table, and chatted with a few of their Mac developers. It's good to hear people sharing their stories from developing and shipping software for Mac; there's a sort of camaraderie, as if we've all lived through the same battles and lived to tell the tales from the trenches.
Google's crack video team swiftly produced and put up a YouTube video of my talk. Check it out!
I've just returned from an absolutely fantastic holiday in New Zealand. On the flight home, I actually sat next to a fellow with a VMworld 2006 bag and shirt—chatting with him, it turns out he's a huge VMware Fusion fan, and he's representing some of New Zealand's largest universities at VMworld 2007! What a small world. On top of that fortuitous event, I ran into something that put an even bigger ear-to-ear grin on my face this evening: I saw VMware Fusion for sale in an actual box I could hold in my two eager hands at the local electronics megastore!
Too awesome for words. Who would have thought that OS/2 and BeOS would be mentioned before the Mac, just 8 years ago? And now it's all come full circle; instead of Warp, the Media OS, and PowerPC, now it's Leopard, Digital Lifestyles, and quad-core Intel processors.VMWare, which shipped a test version of the product last week, expects it will eventually work with IBM Corp.'s OS/2 operating system, Solaris from Sun Microsystems and software from start-up Be Inc. (It won't support Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh system, unless Apple rewrites its software to run on Intel chips.)
"VMWare is quite remarkable," said Jean-Louis Gassee, Be's founder. "They are really clever guys."
We knew that Macs, cool as they are, still needed to run Windows apps. But who wants to reboot all the time? Instead, we embarked on a design course that took us from a simple technology demo at WWDC 2006 (exactly a year ago!) all the way to the streamlined, intuitive Fusion interface… and we had to break a lot of ground along the way.
What a long, strange trip it's been—and this is just the beginning for Fusion power on the Mac.
I'm sure everyone's been having as much fun as I have playing with VMware's new virtualization solution for Mac. On the Fusion discussion forums, folks have been busy sharing their successes and stories, along with great suggestions and comments—not to toot my own horn, but I'm jazzed that the Fusion beta forum is even more busy than the Workstation 6 forum!
I've been busy as a beaver since the holidays ended, working away on fixes and features for the next Fusion beta. I can't discuss future functionality on this blog, but we've heard all the requests and bug reports our faithful beta testers have been submitting, and we're working hard to get as many as we can into the next beta.
The Fusion team will be at Macworld Conference and Expo 2007 in San Francisco's Moscone Center next week from Tuesday through Friday (9 January 2007–12 January 2007). Come meet the developers and producers who helped make VMware for Mac real, and share your thoughts and suggestions directly with the team who can make them happen. I'll be staffing the booth Tuesday, so I'll be looking forward to meeting some of you! Come find us in booth S339—we might have some goodies for you!
Looking at the teaser image on Apple's site, there will be some pretty crazy announcements from Apple coming. I can't wait to see what's coming for Jobsmas 2007! My personal predictions for what Apple will announce next Tuesday at the keynote:
- Dual quad-core Mac Pros (this is pretty much a gimme)
- Cinema Displays with built-in iSight cameras
- The iTV (renamed)
- A revamped UI and Finder for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Tons of folks are talking about a possible Apple cell phone (not the iPhone), but I'm still a little dubious. I've seen the patents that others have, but having lots of friends who work in the telecommunications industry, I'm not sure North American customers are willing to pay at all for their cell phone hardware. (A friend of mine who worked Cingular retail for a year said 8 or 9 out of 10 customers would take the free phone, and most of the rest took the next cheapest one).
That being said, European and Asian customers definitely love paying for the latest and greatest in slim, powerful cellphone technology, so Apple might have a market there. I know I'm out of the ordinary (I love my Sony Ericsson K790a, which syncs up perfectly with my Mac and lets me get fast wireless access anywhere), but maybe people will see the value in syncing up their computer, their music, address book, and email on one svelte device.
Here's looking forward to convergence! (It's a lot like virtualization, when you think about it—all your computers on one piece of hardware, right?)
What an exhilarating day! I'm über-pleased that the public reception of VMware Fusion for Mac has been so positive. I'm still running on adrenaline here—between making the front page of digg.com, discussing with the illuminating readers of this blog, and answering the excellent feedback from the Fusion Discussion Forums, there's just so many folks who are as excited as I am about VMware virtualization coming to the Mac.
I just wanted to point out a few of the more common issues folks have run into, and do a quick link rundown.
- I can't use the mouse in my virtual machine!
- Folks have reported a conflict with certain Wacom tablets, as well as the Keyspan RF Front Row remote. Try disconnecting these before using a virtual machine. You'll know you're running into this issue if you see a message like "MKSHIDMOUSE: Failed to open mouse, result -536870206" in the vmware.log file in your virtual machine's directory (in ~/vmware/ by default).
- I can't find my serial number!
- You can get your serial number by going through the flow at http://www.vmware.com/fusionbeta again. Apologies—there's currently no email with your serial number.
- I get a gray screen telling me to restart my Mac!
- As this is a beta release for a new platform, there's still some debugging code to ensure all the logic in our new Mac drivers is in top shape. If you see a gray screen telling you to restart your Mac, this means our debugging code sensed something was out of order. After rebooting your Mac, please open the file /Library/Logs/panic.log and post the contents on this blog, send me a private message, or email fusion-feedback (at) vmware.com.
- Some folks are reporting a panic.log with a line like "vmmon: ASSERT bora/modules/vmmon/macos/pageHiddenMap.cpp:307" . So far, we've only seen this on a few machines, but please do report this if you run into it.
- If anything seems at all weird or unusual, please do file a support request. Our support team is top-notch.
- If I switch my virtual machine to Bridged mode, I can't access the virtual machine over the network from my host!
- This is a known issue, described in the VMware Fusion for Mac Release Notes. We're working on it and plan to have a fix ready for the next release. For now, you can use NAT mode and follow the Linux Workstation 5.5 NAT configuration instructions if you need a server in the virtual machine to be accessible from the outside. (Note that nat.conf is in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion on Mac OS hosts).
Thanks to the early adopters for sending in such valuable, detailed feedback! Keep it coming!
Here's a few early Mac news sites' links with thoughts on Fusion:
- TUAW chips in: Interesting thoughts.
- Ars Technica readers share their comments.
- Macworld gets in on the Fusion action.
- Words from the venerable MacNN.
- MacRumors readers sound off on Fusion.
Everyone's got a joy in life. Some folks build exquisite models of ships and shove 'em in a bottle. Others whip up imaginative, fresh cuisine and share it with the world. Me, I write code. My personal joie de vivre is forging that easy, effortless bond between people and the electronic stuff they use every day to make their lives go—computers, cars, cell phones, you name it.
Over the past year, I've been crafting VMware Fusion for Mac, a killer piece of software that lets Apple-heads do the unthinkable: run Windows, Linux, orany other operating system right alongside their Mac applications. This isn't your average Boot Camp, where youhave to restart your computer every time you need to switch between Windows and Mac OS. VMware is way cooler, and totally changes the way you use a computer.
Fusion lets you use your Mac for all the stuff it's great at (I couldn't live without my NetNewsWire, Adium, and WriteRoom), and—just when you need it—you can pop up Windows and get to that one darned app (or game) that still doesn't run on the Mac. Just like a laptop, you can put Windows to sleep when you don't want it chewing up memory, and you can instantly wake it up from inside your Mac when you just need access to a few apps.
You can drag and drop files to and from your Mac and Windows to transfer stuff back and forth, and plug high-speed USB gadgets into your Mac (even ones that don't work on the Mac!) and they'll show up right in Windows: no configuration needed. All this is built on the same rock-solid code that makes VMware's other killer products work so well, and you can take your virtual machines from Fusion and use them as-is on any of our other products.
There's a ton of great stuff built into Fusion, and I'm going to be using this blog to talk about what it was like to make it, and share thoughts about developing on the Mac. Some of this will be a little techy, but I also like to write about non-technical subjects, so (knock on aluminum) this'll be pretty entertaining for everyone.
Be seeing you!
