The theories as to the reason why are, generally speaking: f*ck Adobe, preserve performance on the iPhone and iPad, and/or make multiprocessing efficient on these devices. With regard to that last, the theory goes that the OS figures out how the app works and hooks into the app and the app framework, but if there’s a compatibility layer in between, that becomes very difficult and inefficient. Actually, purely technically, without any fanboyisms, it does make sense to me.

In that case, and reading the 3.3.1 literally, nothing stops me, or Adobe, from implementing a translation from our own specific languages using a precompiler, as long as you end up compiling actual Objective-C code using XCode into the app. That’s what I would do, and I find it a better solution, anyway.

But the anti-Adobe conspiration theorists may claim Apple doesn’t want you to do this, either. I don’t know if they do, but let’s assume.

Now it gets interesting. There is no way that Apple can detect from the runtime code, or even the source code, that the code has been produced by a precompiler, if that precompiler does a decent job. If they want to stop that from happening, they’ll have to monitor the user’s machine for precompilers and editing tools, like World of Warcraft is monitoring for bots. What a fascinating circus that would be.

If you’ve seen “Minority Report”, the movie, you must remember the interface Tom Cruise uses to access files. He pulls on gloves, then works the displays as if he touches a virtual surface in space. There are a number of projects doing gloves like this, such as the AcceleGlove by AnthroTronix.

It’s obvious, to me at least, that you can’t usefully move just any graphical interface to a virtual surface like in “Minority Report”. There are UI elements that work and others that don’t work. Obviously, you can’t use a mouse, there’s nowhere to let it rest, there’s just air. You can’t use a pen. The only thing you can use is your fingers. In other words, it’s a multi-touch interface, albeit virtually and in the middle of the air.

Could you imagine if you developed a useful virtual surface like this and you wanted to use the same user interface on a hard, real surface device. How would that look? Surprise, surprise, it would look exactly like the iPad. Not like Windows for Tablets, not like any other smartphone UI I’ve ever seen, but exactly like the iPhone and iPad UI.

I don’t think this is accidental. I think this is the fundamental reason that the iPhone and iPad have never had, and never will have, a pen or other pointing device. As long as they are entirely useable using only one or more fingers, the UI translates seamlessly to a virtual surface in the air.

There are signs one can do using a glove and a virtual surface that aren’t useable on a real surface with multi-touch. Example: making the “ok” sign using your thumb and index finger could work with a glove, but not with an iPad. On the other hand, it seems such signs are rarely used even in science fiction movies, and I think there’s a fundamental reason why not, simply because they are less suitable for an intuitive command interface. This leads to the rule that one should probably not introduce any visual signs in virtual surfaces that cannot be translated to gestures using a hardware device surface.

For medicine, all this is great news. This means that if you develop a medical records interface, or the interface to any other medical system, on an iPad, it will automatically be just right for a virtual interface, such as those we will need in operating theatres and bedside.

That makes the iPad user interface the lowest common denominator. If you develop for this UI, your medical app is future proof. MS Windows based medical apps, on the other hand, are living on borrowed time.

First of all, subversion server is already a part of the OSX Snow Leopard distribution, so there is no need to go get it anywhere. Mine seems to be version 1.6.5, according to svnadmin. Out of the box, however, apache is not enabled to connect to subversion, so that needs to be fixed.

We’ll start by editing the httpd.conf for apache to load the SVN module. You’ll find the file at:

/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Uncomment the line:

#LoadModule dav_svn_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav_svn.so

Somewhere close to the end of the file, add the following line:

Include "/private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-svn.conf"

Now we need to create that httpd-svn.conf file. If you don’t have the “extra” dir, make it, then open the empty file and add in:

<Location /svn>
  DAV svn
  SVNParentPath /usr/local/svn
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "Subversion Repository"
  AuthUserFile /private/etc/apache2/extra/svn-auth-file
  Require valid-user
</Location>

Save and exit. Then create the password file and add the first password by:

sudo htpasswd -c svn-auth-file username

…where “username” is your username, of course. You’ll be prompted for the desired password. You can add more passwords with the same command, while dropping the -c switch.

Time to create svn folders and repository. Create /usr/local/svn. Then create your first repository by:

svnadmin create firstrep

Since apache is going to access this, the owner should be apache. Do that:

sudo chown -R www firstrep

Through Server Admin, stop and restart Web service. Check if no errors appear. Then use your fav SVN client to check if things work. Normally, you’d be able to adress your subversion repository using:

http://yourserver/svn/firstrep

Finally, don’t forget to use your SVN client to create two folders in the repository, namely “trunk” and “tags”. Your project should end up under “trunk”.

Once up and running, this repository works perfectly with Panic’s Coda, which is totally able to completely source code control an entire website. If you don’t know Coda, it’s a website editor of the text editor kind, not much fancy graphic tools, but it does help with stylesheets and stuff. It’s for the hands-on developer, you could say.

The way you manage a site in Coda is that you have a local copy of your site, typically a load of PHP files, which are version controlled against the subversion repository, then you upload the files to the production server. Coda keeps track of both the repository server and the production server for each site. The one feature that is missing is a simple way of having staged servers, that is uploading to a test server, and only once in a while copy it all up to the production server. But that can be considered a bit outside of the primary task of the Coda editor, of course.

You could say that if your site isn’t mission critical, but more of the 200 visitors a month kind, you can work directly against the production server, especially since rolling back and undoing changes is pretty slick using the Coda/subversion combo. But it does require good discipline, good nerves, and a site you don’t really, truly need for your livelihood. You can break it pretty bad and jumble up your versions, I expect. Plus, don’t forget, the database structure and contents aren’t any part of your version control if you don’t take special steps to accomplish that.

Coda doesn’t let you access all the functionality of subversion. As far as I can determine, it doesn’t have provisions for tag and branch, for instance. But it does have comparisons, rollbacks and most of the rest. The easiest way to do tagging would be through the command line. Or possibly by using a GUI SVN client, there are several for OSX. I’m just in the process of testing the SynchroSVN client. Looks pretty capable, but not all that cheap.

I’ll probably brag about this system some more once I get to know it better. But meanwhile, it’s the nicest computer purchasing experience I’ve ever had. Except for the Mac Pro. And the MacBook. And the iMac, of course. And the iPhone. And Apple TV.

Now watch the png file sizes when I look at it using Finder:

Oops… WTF was that??! A display bug! Let’s try again after juggling the column widths so the selection bar straightens itself out again:

Just to be sure, I opened up the info panel on the first file:

Yes, truly, here it says 109,207 bytes while ls -al says 15,843 bytes for the same file. And yes, I’ve checked and double checked and triple checked, I do indeed look at the same file. Doing a spotlight search also only returns one image. Uploading the image to a webserver and checking through Transmit shows the 15k size. Here it is, the file, from a webserver: http://vard-it.com/images/20091019/interaktioner1.png, so you can check for yourself.

So why is Finder reporting a size value seven times larger?

Update a little later: yes, I used the ls -al@ to find the resource fork and that is what is making the difference. Maybe Finder should have the option of showing that separately at least in the inspector? Maybe I should read the man pages before posting? Maybe I should wonder what exactly are in those resources? Maybe I should just shut up and crawl under a rock?

Yet another update: I used 0xED to look into the file and the fork. The fork is full of Adobe info, since I used Photoshop CS4 to convert from a BMP to PNG. And, obviously, when uploading the image using Transmit, that fork is stripped off. Well, now I know that Photoshop saves a load of info in a resource fork, possibly including  info I don’t want them to save. Can’t see any obvious way of excluding that in the Photoshop save dialog box. So take care when passing on images to others that you strip off the resource fork first. Somehow.

Update about “Somehow”, this is how to do it: create an empty file, copy it over the resource fork, then delete the empty file. Like so, in terminal:

As practically anyone realizes, this is super weird and means I can’t recover the sales tax when I enter this document into my accounting. So I wrote to iTunes support and asked for a correct invoice. The ensuing conversation follows (I took out the name of the iTunes representative).

Hi,

I got this invoice through email but there is no mention of VAT.
Since the invoice is Swedish, there ought to be VAT (MOMS) and IT
MUST BE SPECIFIED! I can’t use this invoice in my accounting like
this. I’m buying on a company account, which is clear from my
account info.

What do I do now?

Thx
– Martin

Reply 1:

Dear Martin,

I understand you are concerned as to why your email receipt for an
iTunes Store purchase does not summarize the amount of tax you paid
on the purchase.  You require this information due to purchasing
this music on a company account.

I am sorry that the receipt is not completely to your requirements,
however The iTunes Store sells only to customers as end-users for
personal, noncommercial use in their respective countries of
residence.   The amount you see on your receipt is a total
(including tax) with this purpose in mind.

For more information, you can review the iTunes Store Terms and
Conditions:

http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/ww

I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you Martin.

Regards,

D
iTunes Store Customer Support

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ww/

My response:

D….,

Ok, so you officially claim that iTunes Store products are NOT for
commercial use??! THAT is an interesting observation, if I’ve ever
seen one. Especially since I’m developing commercial applications for
the iTunes store! Oh, boy, is this going to be an interesting article…

But may I also point you to the Swedish law, if that is of any
consequence to you?

http://www.skatteverket.se/skatter/mervardesskattmoms/sarskilt/faktureringsregler.4.18e1b10334ebe8bc80001420.html#Vadskaframgaavenfaktura

The above is a page on the Swedish tax department page that says in
detail what MUST be part of a receipt, and VAT/MOMS is one of those
REQUIRED details.

So, please, D….., don’t brush me off. Take this higher, pronto. I
want a better answer than what you just provided me with. I’m
certainly not going to settle for that.

Regards,

– Martin

His response:

Martin,

D….., here again from iTunes.   Thank you for writing back to me.   Although I do understand your concern here, I want you to know that before I responded to you I spoke to my supervisors and again this morning with regards to your issue.

Again the response is the same.  Purchases from the iTunes Store are for non commercial purposes only (as referenced in the usage section of the terms of sale).  Although I do realize you may be working on projects for Apple, this does not change the fact that the items sold on the iTunes Store can only be used for personal reasons.

I wish that I could help you further here Martin, but keep in mind that Apple does not own the content that we distribute.   We are selling on behalf of our content providers, and the specific terms of your agreement with Apple when purchasing from the iTunes Store is that the content may not be used for commercial purposes (even if you are working on projects for us).  Thus, any attempts to claim your purchases for tax reasons would be in violation of the terms of sale.

Again Martin, please accept my apologies.

Regards,

D……
iTunes Store Customer Support

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ww/

My response today:

D…..,

Yes, but you’re avoiding my two main arguments. One is that I’m developing business applications, while you’re telling me that you don’t sell applications for business use. So I can’t sell my applications on the app store. Right? It’s only for games, right? How come you seem to approve applications that are clearly intended to help with accounting, time management, or even professional health care apps, like what your own VP Forrestal bragged about during a keynote? These applications are clearly against your own policy and should never be approved for distribution.

So, tell me again, why should I bother developing professional applications? Just to have them refused on policy grounds, because they’re not games?

Secondly, Swedish law requires you to specify sales tax, REGARDLESS of if you sell to a business or a private person. You didn’t answer this one either.

Regards,

– Martin

Yes, I did check the Apple iTunes store policy on the Swedish site, and sure enough, it says they only sell for “end-user” consumption and not for business purposes. This seems to preclude most of the things one would use the iPhone application platform for. Very, very strange. It seems as if D…. is thinking I’m buying music on a company account, which would be weird, I admit, but that’s not what I’m doing. I’m buying business apps on a company account, but the iTunes policy makes no allowance for anything but music and games, it seems.

Update: I very quickly got this response from D…:

Hey Martin,

D….., here again from iTunes.   You make some good arguments here Martin, but I really am sorry that as a 1st level representative there is little myself, or my supervisors can to to alter the way the receipts are sent out, or make any adjustments to our terms of sale to suit individual needs.

Please know that I do understand how this may feel frustrating to you.   I have felt the same way before in similar circumstances.  I have found in situations like this that voicing your opinion is a good way to get the “ball rolling”.

Please note that Apple does take the feedback from our customers very seriously.  This is the reason for our feedback page – to create a forum where our users can vent, praise or share whatever feelings they have to allow us to meet your needs, and grow as a company.

I would encourage you to share this link with all of your friends and family who wish to see the changes you require, and have them all submit the same request.

Here is that link for you.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

I know it can seem like a straight feedback link will yield no results so I will also invite you to check out the following link. This is a letter from Apple’s CEO addressing customers who purchased an iPhone very early on at $599, then the price was reduced to $399 shortly after.   Mr. Jobs heard our customers and Apple responded accordingly.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

I hope that you will consider sharing your thoughts on the feedback page.

Regards,

D…..
iTunes Store Customer Support

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ww/

Now, that’s a great idea! I’ll do that. I hope others will as well. This is what I sent in through the feedback page:

Hi,

After purchasing a professional app from the app store (OmniFocus) I received a receipt without Swedish VAT specified. When I complained to the iTunes support, I was told that the iTunes store, by policy, only sells non-business applications for non-business purposes to private persons, and does not allow any professional use. Which explains why receipts don’t specify VAT so they can’t easily be used for accounting purposes. I checked you policies and sure enough, you don’t allow business apps.

Now, this is clearly absurd. Many people like me buy apps for business purposes from the iTunes app store and many organizations like mine do or plan to develop business applications for the iPhone.

In other words, your policy and sales both effectively stop us from both buying and selling business related software for the iPhone. This can’t possibly be your intention, or is it? Especially since Scott Forrestal demoed a number of clearly business oriented apps in his keynotes. This makes no sense!

You’ll find the details on my blog, with a copy of the email exchange I had with your support:

http://ursecta.com/wp/2009/08/anything-but-games-are-illegal/

Regards,

– Martin

PS: this feedback form requires me to check all the things I use iTunes for, but nowhere do you mention anything related to the app store. Don’t you even know it exists?

Update: The Register picked up the story, as did an Italian site and a few others. If you want the story in Italian: setteB.IT

.NET development is single platform. Admittedly the largest platform, but a platform that is increasingly having to share the market with other platforms. And already, according to some, there’s more sales potential for small developers in the OSX market than in the Windows market, due to a number of factors like customers that are more willing to buy and to pay for software, less competition in each market segment, etc.

.NET development is also entirely dependent on Microsoft’s development tools and those are increasingly expensive. For reasonable development, you need an IDE, a good compiler, version control, bug handler, coverage analysis, profiling, and a few more. We used to have most of that in the regular Visual Studio, but recently MS has removed all the goodies and plugged them into the Team system only, which carries an obscene pricetag (in Sweden around USD 13,000 + VAT for the first year…). This means that a regular one-man development shop can barely afford the crippled Visual Studio Professional at USD 1,500 for the first year. Sadly, there aren’t even any decent and affordable third party products to complement the VS Pro so it becomes a “real” development suite. And with every version of Visual Studio this only gets worse. More and more features are added to the Team suite and removed from the Pro. This is not the way to breed a happy following.

Meanwhile, OSX comes with XCode, which is almost as good as Visual Studio Pro, and is free. Objective-C is also a much more modern language with more depth than any .NET language, even though it is actually older. But, sadly, it’s not cross platform either and I don’t see how you can get the Windows fanboys of the Scandiavian healthcare scene to even consider another platform. Same probably goes for most other industries.

I’m no fan of Java, but on the other hand I’ve never worked much with it so that opinion doesn’t count. Eclipse, the IDE often used for Java development, is cross platform, very capable, and open for other languages such as Python, Flex, and many more. Yes, I know, in theory so is Visual Studio, but how many real languages do you have there? You’ve got one: Basic, masquerading as C#, J#, and, um, Basic.

Using Eclipse on any platform, you’ve got a real good chance of covering the line of tools you need, profilers, coverage, version control, without much pain and without breaking the bank. And you can write crossplatform integrated larger systems.

So, I guess it’s time to bite the bullet. I really like XCode and OSX, I really know C# and .NET, but I really only believe in Java, Flex, Python, Perl, C++ under Eclipse for enterprise development in vertical markets. And in XCode under OSX for regular shrinkwrapped desktop apps.

Not even Silverlight is very attractive and that is largely due to the marketing and pricing of the tools for it. A small developer organisation can’t afford it. Flex and AIR looks like serious contenders, though.

Windows Vista is kinda pretty, even though I don’t see any aqua or aero effects, or whatever they’re called. (Here’s a full size view on how it looks while it is huffing and puffing its way through the initial 49 updates of the OS.)

But, even the Mac Pro I’m running now, with its 8 Gb of RAM is starting to page out when I’m running Vista. Admittedly, I’m running a few more things at the same time…

… as you can see. Two XPs (1 Gb, resp 768 Mb) are running, Photoshop, Transit, the Fusion with Vista (1 Gb), Skype, Safari, OmniFocus, Mail, NeoOffice Writer, iTunes, Preview, Transit, and Activity monitor. As you can see on the activity pie chart, there’s just a gig of blue and nothing green to be seen. I guess the next move will be to fill’er up to 16 Gb of RAM, and if that’s not enough, I have to go to 32 Gb, which this machine is supposed to handle. I’m sooo spoiled…

Just like on OSX, I just now created a separate admin account and changed my regular account from admin status to “standard”. I’m very curious to see if it’s workable. While running as admin, I got a deluge of “Please approve this action” dialog boxes. Let’s see what happens if I’m not an admin and I try to install Open Office.

First, it blocked the download, warned me about the dangers of the internet, but it’s easy enough to approve it and proceed. Then it warned me about the installation program being unsigned, fair enough. Then it asked me for an admin logon to install the program (perfect!). And then the installation threw up an error box:

Did a quick Google and didn’t find anything about this error (“Wrapper.CreateFile failed with error 123″). Interestingly, after clicking “OK”, the installation proceeded, where I would have expected it to abort, rewarding me with:

And, hey, it seems to work! Ok, so far so good under a limited user account. That is definitely good news.

Next little test, let’s open Task Manager:

No problem, up it comes. Fine. Now let’s click “Resource Monitor”, which I know only admins can use:

Darn it, I’m bloody impressed! Instead of having to do that cumbersome “RunAs…” stuff, Vista does exactly what OSX does, asks for admin credentials (it even put in the right admin user name, which I rubbed out with a bit of yellow mud just above the password prompt). And up comes the resource monitor.

Phew, never thought I’d have to say I like this very limited first look at Vista after what I’ve heard about it. I think I’ll keep exploring it.

Now, let’s look at what Vista sees as the underlying machine, that is what Fusion pretends to be:

It sees a dual 64 bit processor and 1 Gb of RAM. Nice. If you look at the very bottom you see a new MS policy of automatically activating the OS, instead of letting the user do it. Normally I wouldn’t care, but if you’re running MSDN copies, you should be aware of this, since you often don’t want to waste activations on every installation you do. Vista isn’t going to wait for you to approve if I interpret that statement correctly. (I’ll wait and see if it goes ahead without asking or not after another three days, will keep you updated about it.)

So, what about the “Windows Experience Index”? It says “1.0″ here, can’t be lower than that. Hm. Better check out the details:

Ah, now I see, the overall rating is equal to the lowest rating, which I got for gaming graphics. I have enabled “3D graphics” but I get no aero. I think Fusion doesn’t support Aero yet, but I couldn’t find anything on the web to confirm that, so I may be wrong. Apart from that, I find the above scores pretty impressive. Vista, at first blush, seems useable on this machine, not too sluggish, but then nothing is sluggish on this setup, really.

So what I’m comparing here is Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac and VMware Fusion 1.1.1. My comparison isn’t in any way exhaustive, just a first impression after a few days of use and for a fairly limited application, namely software development and backups and stuff.

The machine I’m running these guys on is my brand new Mac Pro with dual quadcore Xeons at 2.8 GHz and 8 Gb of RAM. On this machine it’s hard to have any software perform poorly, so I wouldn’t be able to detect much in the way of inefficiencies, if there are any. Nice for me, but it hobbles my advice somewhat. For details on the machine, see my earlier entries on “Mac XP”.

I’m running an old Win 2000, and two instances of Windows XP under Parallels. One XP is equipped with MS SQL Server developer’s edition and Visual Studio 2005, while the other one harbours Visual Studio 2008. They have 1 Gb resp. 768 Mb of RAM allocated in Parallels. The Win 2000 has just 512 Mb, but I don’t use that one much.

For this comparison, I created a third Win XP and gave it 512 Mb of RAM. I plan on using this VM as a “utility VM”, containing stuff like backup software. The first thing I installed in it was Retrospect 7.5 for Windows that came bundled with my Netgear ReadyNAS+ (5 clients included) and then I purchased and added a further 5 client licenses. So it can now backup 10 clients, mixed Mac OSX and Win clients.

It turns out that Fusion is a pretty good choice for this “utility” VM, since it allows me to allocate 2 virtual CPUs. Retrospect does exploit multiple CPUs if you have them, so this allows Retrospect to use two of the eight cores I have in the machine. Parallels would limit Retrospect to just one core.

Running Retrospect in one of the other XP VMs would make that VM go very slowly. All it’s activities would be limited to one core on the Mac and I would have a nasty time of working in Visual Studio in the same VM at the same time. Having Retrospect run on two cores in its own VM allows me to work in the other VMs without noticing any slowdown at all. It’s great! In all fairness, running Retrospect in a Parallels VM would have had the exact same result, except Retrospect would have run slightly slower.

I’m usually writing quite a bit of multithreaded code, making it practically necessary to run on a multiprocessor to avoid subtle bugs. That would seem to mandate Fusion. But I don’t know how fully it emulates two CPUs. Does it interrupt right in the middle of memory accesses like a true multiprocessor machine would do, or is it more civilized than that? The lack of documentation about this is a problem, just like for hyperthreaded CPUs. In both these cases, it’s very unclear how close they mimic a true multiprocessor machine.

As far as simply running most software, I think both these products do a grand job. I’ve not encountered any problems with either, but remember I’ve done much more on Parallels than on Fusion. The network setups are also practically identical with choices for host sharing, bridged, and host only. The intricate and flexible network configurations we see in VMware’s Windows product aren’t found in Fusion (yet). What’s also lacking is a decent snapshot management in Fusion. You can take snapshots and revert, but there’s no management of multiple snapshots like in the Windows product or in Parallels.

Miserable keyboard handling

Now for my real beef with both of these products: the keyboard. Obviously, most keystrokes should be passed on to the virtual machine, some should be converted, and some intercepted and sent to the host OS. Both these products have made a mess of this even though it ought to be simple to get right.

In Parallels, the command and control keys swap nicely on the left side of the keyboard while remaining unswapped on the right side. Kinda confusing, but I don’t mind getting used to it. But function keys is a real problem. Sometimes I succeed in getting them through to the VM using different combinations of command and control or something, then I can’t remember exactly what I did. It also varies according exactly which function keys we’re talking about. The function keys that have predefined uses for dashboard, exposé, and similar, behave differently from other function keys. Parallels does have a menu where one can select magic key combinations to send to the VM, but it would have been great to have these keystrokes pass right through under their own steam, so to speak. Having to select function keys from a menu is good for once or twice, but get’s old real quick. This is how it looks under the “Actions” menu in Parallels:

Under VMware, there’s a setting in the “Preferences”, which means that it is the same for all VMs under VMware:

As you can see, there’s a single checkbox “Enable Mac OS keyboard shortcuts” and it works admirably. A little too admirably, in fact. Once you deselect it, all keystrokes go to the VM, including command-tab. Now there’s no point in passing command-tab to the VM since Windows doesn’t know what a command key is. But it makes sure I can’t easily switch between apps on the Mac. This is ridiculous, since Windows reacts to alt-tab, so they could just as well left command-tab for OSX. The new Mac keyboards also have a special “Fn” key where the useless “Help” key used to be. That ought to be exploited by Parallels and Fusion somehow, but isn’t.

I don’t know which of the systems, Parallels or VMware, got the key settings most wrong; it’s a close call. To me it’s obvious they really could spend a little effort in getting this right, since it’s the one thing that makes working with VMs hard; everything else is almost perfect. Having options allowing all keystrokes to pass to the VM except command-tab and possibly control-space (which I use for QuickSilver), would be absolutely great. Allow the user to freely define another couple of magic combinations that should not pass to the VM, and you’re set.

Converting: defeated by Mickeysoft

Both products are able to convert a VM from the other product to its own system. Both of them take forever to do it, but seem to do a good job of it, ultimately. But Windows isn’t happy about it, since it sees the conversion as a move to another machine and then insists on needing a new activation. Just to be a real PITA, Windows only gives you three days to reactivate, if it was already activated. Considering that you get 60 days to activate (for the MSDN version of XP), you are actually severely punished for having activated your XP in the first place before the conversion. How very nice of MS. Actually, WGA being what it is, it’s not a good idea to convert Windows installations from Parallels to VMware or vice versa at all. Actually, if you can avoid activating at all, that’s even better, but it limits you to 60 days per setup.

Dock difference

Parallels shows an actual live image of the VMs screen in the dock and in the task switcher, so even though a VM is hidden behind a stack of other apps, I can keep an eye on the dock icon and see if some compile has finished or a dialog box is waiting for input:

Fusion, on the other hand, just shows a Fusion logo, missing an opportunity to display something useful:

Conclusion

My current conclusion is that both products are great and work just fine. Both need serious work in the keyboard handling. Fusion has dual CPUs, a major advantage, especially on a multicore machine. Parallels has better snapshot handling and really useful dock icons.

Now, this stuff is done right all the way.

First, having a limited user account on a Mac is not a problem for anything, which is a major first step. Then I set up her account to have “parental controls”, which is just a checkbox to click. Then I used system preferences on *my* Mac Pro, went to Parental controls, saw her machine with her account listed and logged in twice, once as admin on my machine, once as admin on hers.

After that, I can select, one by one, the apps she can use. For Safari, I can enter the websites she can access (I can approve new sites on the fly on her machine using my password, for that once or permanently). For iChat I can set which users she can chat with, except I simply disabled it for now. For Mail, I can set which email addresses she can write to and receive from.

Interestingly, if she receives mail from an unapproved mail address, it’s redirected to my account and my Mac Mail shows me the email and asks me if this source is allowed to write to her. If I approve, inside Mac Mail, the address is added to her list of approved emails and she gets the mail in the next round. Same thing if she writes a mail to an unapproved address, she gets a popup saying it’s not approved and gives her the choice of asking for permission. If she does, I get the mail and again get the chance to approve it or decline.

I can also set how many hours per day she can use the machine. (Buggy, see update below.) One setting for weekdays, another for weekends, and there is even a setting for excluded hours, for instance after bedtime.

Lastly, a very complete logging. Every app she used, number of times and for how long, plus date and time. Every website visited, including the URL parameters, so I can, from my own machine, see exactly *which* videos she watched on YouTube, for instance.

Not everything is as totally controlled, for instance Skype is an allow/decline kind of thing. I can’t lock down who she adds, but I sure can check visually every now and then. If I’d excluded Skype and only allowed iChat, I would have had total control, but I can’t expect everyone to go get a Mac. Not just quite yet, anyway.

There’s just one thing missing and that is that I don’t get copies of all her email. But OTOH, that would be too intrusive, I think, especially since she can’t receive or send to anyone I haven’t already approved.

I’m amazed at how simple and well done this is in Leopard. Not really a surprise, but still. To me it’s worth giving her the iMac, just for this one thing.

Update on Feb 13, 2008: the time limits on use seem to only work intermittently and are thus unreliable. Depending on use they may not kick in. To my daughter’s delight, she seems able to keep watching YouTube videos forever, regardless of settings.