With Apple's WWDC07 starting next week and Parallels announcing the release of its Desktop 3.0 for Mac, is it any wonder that VMware has announced a fourth Beta of its VMware Fusion for Mac product? Beta 4 of VMware Fusion for Mac includes the following new features and improvements: Unity - The seamless way to run Windows applications: Run Windows XP applications alongside your favorite Mac applications and swi With Apple’s WWDC07 starting next week and Parallels announcing the release of its Desktop 3.0 for Mac, is it any wonder that VMware has announced a fourth Beta of its VMware Fusion for Mac product? Beta 4 of VMware Fusion for Mac includes the following new features and improvements:Unity – The seamless way to run Windows applications: Run Windows XP applications alongside your favorite Mac applications and switch between any open application with command-tab or Exposé. Leave the Windows desktop and Start menu behind and use the VMware Fusion Launch palette to quickly find and launch your Windows applications. Save your favorite Windows applications to the Mac OS X Dock. Even use familiar Mac keyboard shortcuts to seamlessly copy and paste between Windows and Mac applications. Boot Camp improvements – You no longer have to choose between Windows or Mac – run Windows XP with Mac OS X off your existing Boot Camp partition. Beta 4 adds experimental support for Microsoft Vista, greatly improves Boot Camp partition detection, and when you are running the Boot Camp partition in a virtual machine, VMware Fusion automatically updates the Boot Camp partition to use drivers that are optimized for your virtual machine. Improved performance – Virtual machines boot faster and applications launch faster from virtual hard disks. Interactive performance is improved over previous Betas and VMware Fusion now uses Apple’s multi-threaded OpenGL engine for improved performance. Improved user experience – The toolbar is greatly enhanced and is now completely customizable. To make the display less cluttered and easier to use, the virtual hardware buttons have been moved from the toolbar to the status bar. The virtual machine hardware editor is now sheet attached to the virtual machine you are editing. VMware has a lot of things going for it since they are the current market leader, have been around longer and offer an entire library of virtual appliances ready for download. Unfortunately, the product is still in Beta and it looks like the release date is still scheduled for sometime this summer. Add to that the non-stop rumors about Apple announcing its own virtualization software inside Mac OS X Leopard and you have to wonder what else VMware will respond with to help grow its Mac virtualization marketshare. Stay tuned. Software Development