OT: Parallels 4

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, J. Landman Gay wrote:

>> You know, you can buy a Windows box for not that much. That's what I did
>> after using Parallels for a while.
> 
> Yeah, I know... I did that for a few years. But I got spoiled, I really
> like having everything on a single monitor.

As an alternate point of view, I have a multiple monitor setup and recently
got back into using a small utility called Synergy.  It acts as a
software-based KVM switch, which allows you to use one keyboard/mouse on
multiple systems.  You set up one system to be a server, and assign clients
to it from other systems, the number of which, AFAIK, is unlimited.  I have
a desktop Mac system, a desktop Vista system, and a laptop XP system set up
around my desk, and I can simply drag the mouse from OSX to Vista to XP.
The mouse magically appears on the other systems where you would expect it
to be. I find this to be immensely valuable for cross-platform development.
Plus moving the mouse across 3 screens is very cool in a geeky sort of way.

Sadly, you cannot drag files from system to another (Synergy was last
supported in '06 I believe), but clipboard text can be transferred from one
system to another and files can be moved back and forth using standard
filesharing/dropbox.  Plus there's a 3rd party OSX GUI configurator that
sits in the System Preferences allows you to more easily configure the
server software (of course you could run the server from Windows as well).

If you want to take a look:
Synergy
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=59275&release_id=40663
7

Synergy Server GUI for OSX
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxsynergygui/

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design