Parallels 3.0 goes live with DirectX, OpenGL, much more--flash review coming

Even if Apple had no news of its own to report from its Worldwide Developer Conference, it could count on Parallels to, once again, make Apple look brilliant.

I was literally writing up my experiences with the beta of Parallels Desktop 3.0 when my BlackBerry buzzed with e-mail from Parallels saying that the product has gone live. Parallels is going to try to hook me up so that I can do a review tonight that posts tomorrow.

The 3-D advantage isn't the whole story, but it is bigger news than it seems. 3-D was an advantage that was exclusively in VMWare's court. Note, too, that VMWare has notched up its Fusion beta, and will have news about its ship date on WWDC's opening day.

Even with Parallels' latest release, Fusion is still the only way to run 64-bit editions of Windows and other OSes on OS X.

The instant that I get the Parallels Desktop 3.0 code, you'll be first to know what's in it. For now, you can make do with these annotated excerpts from the press release:

The release is anchored by SmartSelect, a powerful new feature that lets users use any OS X or Windows application to open any file type, regardless of whether that file is on the Mac or Windows desktop. Users can select the right application to open a file each time via right click, or can set a default application association to ensure that a given class of file always opens in a specific application.

This is Parallels' workalike to the double-click integration that Codeweavers put in CrossOver Mac 6.0. It extends Tiger's "Open With" to include the file extension/application pairing configured in a Windows guest OS. In the beta, Parallels made Windows' settings supersede Tiger's, such that double-clicking on a .doc attachment in an e-mail fired up Parallels Desktop and Word Viewer rather than Office for Mac. It's all configurable.

SmartSelect is also automatically configured to mount and open Mac .dmg installer files in OS X, even if they were downloaded in Windows via Internet Explorer or Outlook, and to automatically open .exe files in Windows, even if they reside in Mac OS X.

Finally. A great wail will go up from the uninformed about security concerns related to this, but using a Parallels Desktop sandbox to execute a .EXE from within Safari's Downloads window is much safer than doing the same thing in native, non-isolated Windows. And mounting .dmg images as Windows lettered drives is a coup.

Snapshots instantly save the state of a virtual machine's memory, settings and hard disk, and revert back to that instant at any time. This gives users the freedom to make changes, try beta software, and explore the internet without the risk of corrupting their virtual machine. If a mishap occurs, the user can revert back to a VM snapshot with a single click, erasing all changes - including major system errors - that happened after the snapshot was taken.