I am an avid Mac user as I believe they are the best platform for developing and designing on. However there has always been one main problem, that of how to test your sites in Windows environment without switching to a Windows machine. Well I think I have the answer – meet Parallels desktop for Mac.
It is very important to test sites in a Windows environment as the majority of the visitors to a site will be using Windows. For example looking at the statistics for this site 68% of visitors were from Windows machines and the statistics for Equal Design show that 61% of visitors are from a Windows environment. However please don’t confuse what I am saying here about what I wrote the other day about not developing for Internet Explorer 6. I am talking here about making sure sites look fine on more modern browsers such as IE7 and IE8 (even though I hate them just as much!).
But testing sites in a Windows environment when using a Mac to develop sites is often difficult. I have been pointed to a number of tools on the web, however all of which never seem to quite do the required job. It was about 6 months ago that I learned about ‘Virtualising’ machines, which is what Parallels desktop does. It creates a Virtual Machine on your Mac with the operating system you choose. Off course in order to install an operating system you still need to valid discs and product codes. You can also have as many virtual machines as you like. For this reason I have installed 2 instances of Windows XP. One with IE7 and one with IE8 so that I can test sites in both version to make sure they display correctly.
It has lots of really cool features, perhaps one of the best being the ‘coherence’ mode. What this does is, instead of running the virtual machine inside its own window you can run the machine alongside all your other Mac applications which means that to someone looking at your computer they would never know that it is a virtual machine. Also you can drag and drop files between the Mac and Windows environments as well as being able to copy and paste between the two.
It really is excellent value at just under £50 and I would recommend any Mac user who also needs a Windows environment to take it for a test drive at least as you can trial it for 30 days without charge.
August 4, 2009
I have noticed how you say you have 2 installs of windows so you can use both ie 7 and ie 8. You can do this in just one install saving you space if you use ie collection. However, I recommend you don’t use ie 8 from it as I’m not sure how up to date it is. Hope this helps.
August 7, 2009
Looks like fun. Are you using XP or Vista? (as both platforms would be fine, lol) – and are you testing Opera / Firefox or do they both work fine on Mac enviroments?
What is the difference to dual booting than doing this? I guess there’s the less hassle of not having to do a complete reinstall and partition to dual boot – does this virtual machine just start from a program?
August 7, 2009
My mistake, I misunderstood (somehow!) – ignore my above comment, it is windows XP and you installed the windows installations. Huh, short term memory loss coming early? lol.