Since the release of Parallels 5 I have been a huge fan.  Previous to that, I really liked VMware Fusion as the product was much more mature and seemed more stable.  I really had no means to measure performance other than to gauge it by my perception over regular use. Earlier this week, VMware announced their VMware Fusion 3.1 beta, which I had to run out and try.  I like to keep tabs on both of these products and am always curious when either of them releases an update. That being said, I downloaded the beta ad built up a new Windows 7 virtual machine, installed the machine additions and played around a little bit. In the past I’ve done things like measure the boot time for the operating system on each product and in most cases Parallels topped Fusion.  Especially after Parallels released version 5, the gap between those…

I was working on a project for my father-in-law where he wanted to distribute his yearly catalog via CD instead of the traditional printed method. I wanted to design a CD image that would work on both Windows and Mac.  I was able to solve the PC side of it pretty quickly, but needed some guidance on creating a DMG on the Mac.  They can get pretty fancy. My wife designed the background art for the DMG when it is opened and with some guidance from a few different sites, I was on my way. Peter Ahe’s Blog was helpful in getting me going on the right direction and understanding what was required to get the disk image installer created. Some other good resources: How to Create a Hybrid CD on the Mac http://www.sonsothunder.com/devres/revolution/tips/disk006.htm How to Create a Custom DMG Installer http://www.ploem.be/blog/?page_id=26

It’s a bitter battle between the two – which provides the best feature set while maintaining optimal performance?  I’ve tried both, been back and forth, and can’t quite decide for myself.  Have you tried either or both?  Which do you prefer and why?

First and foremost, I am a Windows user. I have been forever. I was a “blue badge” so I was very much a “fanboy” of Microsoft from the platform to desktop apps to mobile devices and still pretty much am. I have also opened my eyes to other computing technologies like the Mac and iPhone. I used to try to make my Microsoft software work the way I wanted in every case. There really wasn’t any other solution. I have moved away from that thought process, and accepted that some other technologies do the job better. Take Windows Mobile for example. I owned no less than 10 devices in a matter of less than five years because I thought that the issue had to be the device, not the platform. Last year, I finally purchased an iPhone. I absolutely love this device and it will take me a long time…

I was looking for a creative way to be able to share my USB hard drive that I had formatted for the Mac with my PC. HFS Explorer, worked fine, but required me to extract files instead of being able to expose the volume as a drive letter. I decided I would search for something that would allow my Mac to not only read (which OS X does by default), but also write to an NTFS partition. I was going to reformat my USB hard drive as NTFS since I now primarily use it with my PCs. My search turned up an app called MacFUSE. MacFUSE, as the website indicated, “implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It provides multiple APIs, one of which is a superset of the FUSE (File-system in…