Apple Briefs

VMWare has apparently put the finishing touches on Fusion 2.0, releasing it yesterday on their website. I have been using the beta since soon after it was released and have been quite pleased with both the new features and its performance. VMWare Fusion continues to outperform Parallels Desktop on my wife’s MacBook Pro. Parallels still has some features that I cannot find in Fusion. Chief among those is the ability to mount my Windows hard disk as an external disk in Mac OS X. I think Fusion might be able to do this, but I haven’t figured it out yet (if you know how, please let me know in a comment). I am not a big fan of integrating Mac and Windows (I don’t use Coherence, I just run it in a window). But this is one thing I miss from Parallels.

If you already use VMWare Fusion, you probably don’t need to be sold. Version 2.0 is a free upgrade for everyone. If you’re not already using VMWare Fusion, you can try it free for 30 days.

I feel obligated to say something about the Apple music event that took place yesterday. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has a good write-up of the event. I think he summed it up perfectly when he wrote:

A solid year’s worth of progress.

Nothing special was announced (unless you’re a BSG, Office, or Heroes addict), just solid progress.

One of the biggest surprises of the summer has to be Chrome, the open source web browser from Google. Chrome for Windows was released today, with versions for Mac and Linux coming later. Google put together a web comic describing their rationale behind Chrome and its major features (its also available as a Google Book).

The best way I can describe Chrome is to say that it’s designed for web applications, in contrast with other browsers which were designed primarily for web pages. Because of its architecture (described in quite a bit of detail in the comic), Chrome should be more stable and responsive when one tab or window gets a bit unruly.

I have downloaded and installed Chrome – a process which was surprisingly quick – but haven’t had a chance to put it through its paces. The few sites I did visit loaded quickly and everything seemed quite crisp. I look forward to the Mac version of Chrome.

PGP announced an upgrade to its encryption platform, which now includes whole disk encryption for Mac OS X. For anyone who works with confidential information, laptop security is an increasingly important issue. File Vault has been a decent solution, but not one that works well with backup applications like Time Machine. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but it sounds like PGP whole disk encryption should play much better with Time Machine.

A free trial of PGP Desktop is available. The FAQ indicates that any disks encrypted with whole disk encryption will decrypt at the end of the trial. But, as with anything that messes with your data, I recommend caution before running it on a primary work computer.

A major release of Adium, a free multi-service chat application, hit the intertubes yesterday. In addition to numerous (261!) bug fixes, Adium 1.3 also includes Facebook chat support, better MSN support, and a much-improved contact inspector.