Parallels is operating at light speed in anticipation of the fast approaching Macworld 2007 Conference and Expo taking place in San Francisco. Only two weeks ago, the company announced Beta 2 of a new and improved version of its Desktop for Mac product. The company added such notable features as: USB 2.0 Support - Works with critical USB 2.0 devices like external hard drive, printers, and scanners at full native Parallels is operating at light speed in anticipation of the fast approaching Macworld 2007 Conference and Expo taking place in San Francisco. Only two weeks ago, the company announced Beta 2 of a new and improved version of its Desktop for Mac product. The company added such notable features as: USB 2.0 Support – Works with critical USB 2.0 devices like external hard drive, printers, and scanners at full native speeds. Full-feature virtual CD/DVD drive – Burn CDs and DVDs directly in virtual machines, and play any copy-protected CD or DVD just like you would on a real PC. Improved Coherence mode – The feature that lets you run Windows applications without seeing Windows becomes even more usable: Place Windows applications on your Mac desktop or in your application dock and just click to launch them directly from OS X. Use COMMAND+TAB to cycle through Windows and Mac applications simultaneously, and “hide and show” Windows applications just like you would with Mac applications Use Coherence in both Windows XP and Windows Vista Better support for using Boot Camp partitions in Parallels Desktop. Full support for both FAT32 and NTFS partitions Easy offline configuration; simply tell Parallels Desktop that you want to create a virtual machine from a Boot Camp partition and click “start”. No complicated set up required. No need to re-activate Windows each time you switch between Boot Camp and Parallels. Activate Windows only once and work in both environments. Use Parallels Transporter to make VMware Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC images work Parallels Desktop – Use Parallels Transporter, a free tool that helps users move an entire real PC to a virtual machine, to make an existing VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machine compatible with Parallels Desktop for Mac. Whether you’re moving a real PC or a VMware or Microsoft virtual machine to Parallels Desktop, you won’t lose a single byte of data or re-installing a single application. Beta 3 improves on the Beta 2 release by polishing up several features. You should notice that Coherence is much smoother, and that all windows, even ones with rounded corners or those with unusual shapes like Windows Media Player now display correctly. USB support also improved as it added support for a broader range of devices including things such as Garmin GPS units. You can participate in the beta program by downloading the beta, here. Software Development