All of us who are into the Windows on OSX thing via bootcamp, parallels, VMWare, etc have been hearing of a mysterious ability to actually run windows applications right there on the OSX desktop. How would this be done - will Apple write some sort of API wrapper to run Windows Applications? Will bootcamp mysteriously merge with OSX? What does this all mean?

Well I have seen the future. And it is not quite what I was expecting.

I’ve been playing around with the latest beta version of Parallels, which is now available for download from the parallels forums. There’s a surprising amount of new feature for a minor version update, but one that I found strange and interesting is a feature called “Coherence Mode.” Coherence mode is supposed to allow you to run windows applications right on the OSX desktop.

As you can see from the screenshot, it really does visually look like you are running a windows application right there on the desktop. Since you can drag your mouse around and grab various windows in either Windows or OSX, it really does somewhat feel like the apps are running in OSX too… kinda! What Parallels seems to have done is basically to have windows running over the top of OSX, but visually hide the actual desktop. So, it is more or less just a visual trick. One wierd thing that you’ll notice from the screenshot is that the windows taskbar is floating just above the OSX dock. I’m sure Apple fanboys will struggle to keep their lunch down at the sight of it! Even I find it a ugly.

In addition to the Coherence Mode feature, Parallels now supports drag-n-drop between the two operating systems. This feature works really great. Though it is again some amount of visual trickery again, since files could be easily copied through the virtual shared directories. You can’t drag a file from a windows app to a mac app - now that would be cool! But, it’s seamless and this is a really nice feature.

All in all, I think they are on the right track. If they can get the drag-n-drop working a little better when in coherence mode, perhaps even dragging and dropping between applications, that would really make it feel like the windows app is truly running in OSX.

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