Silvermac

If you are working in a program that takes lots of screen real estate, and the Dock gets in the way, you come to the point when you wish the dock wasn’t there.

Yes, you can go for Cmnd-Option-D to hide it, but maybe you still need it for some reason. So the other solution is to move it to the right or the left edge of your screen. To do this, you open the System preferences, go to Dock settings and select where you want to position it.

But there is a better way of doing this. As simple as it may be, a few OS X users might have not heard about it before.

Move your mouse pointer to the Dock divider, next to your trash can. Press Shift key on your keyboard, then click with your mouse on the divider and drag it to the right. Your Dock will nicely move to the right edge of the screen. Or left, if you prefer.

Ever wanted to run Internet Explorer on Mac OS X? Or maybe Microsoft Word, Excel, FrontPage? Guess what, you can now. Well, sort of.

The new Parallels desktop lets you use a tool called Coherence, it runs Windows in the background, but lets you use Windows applications in the foreground.

When you start Parallels and bot Windows, click on Coherence tool and it will neatly ‘integrate’ your Windows application into your OS X desktop. One thing that looks ugly is the Windows task bar, sitting just above the dock, but there’s a cure for this, too.

Jasenko suggested to tell Windows to auto hide the task bar, and move the OS X Dock to the right, this way everything looks better.

The best is, the Parallels Desktop lets you switch between two applications on two different operating systems, just like any two applications on one o/s.

But this is where things get really interesting. You can log into the OS X, open Parallels and then boot the Windows installation from another partition, the one you created with the BootCamp.

This makes running Windows and OS X at the same time one whole step closer, something I have predicted to be a ‘Big secret’ in my earlier article MacWorld San Francisco 2007 prediction.

I know, it’s only virtualisation, but think of it this way; BootCamp loads at the base of the boot process, defines partitions and decides what OS to load. Once OS X has loaded, an application within OS X (Parallels) boots another OS from another partition and lets its application run on host OS desktop.

Apple now has dual core processors in all their computers. All they need to do is; enable BootCamp to control processor, that is – let it assign one core to each operating system, then boot OS X and let it allocate memory and manage devices availability, then boot Windows.

I think we are close to switching between operating systems just like we are switching today between user accounts, or maybe even between applications.

[tags]OS X, BootCamp, Parallels, Windows, MacWorld, IE7 on Mac [/tags]