Unity: Definitely Real!

Friday, June 8, 2007 in Macintosh, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

Just yesterday, I was asking if Unity—the Coherence-killing feature that was soon to be added to VMware Fusion—was real or rumor.  (Of course, yesterday I was also getting updated by the Fusion developers that this is indeed not rumor and is definitely real.)  Now I’m here to tell you that I have experienced it with my own eyes.

VMware Fusion Beta 4 has been released (get it here), and with it comes Unity.  In a word: Wow!  It’s pretty disconcerting to see Windows applications (like a command prompt, Internet Explorer, or Visio) running side-by-side with Camino, Mail.app, and NetNewsWire.  Interleave windows?  Not a problem.  Drop shadows?  There.  Minimization effects?  Yep.  Aside from the window decorations, you would be hard-pressed to tell which applications were running natively in Mac OS X or in virtualization.

And that, my friends, is the heart of what I described ages ago (OK, perhaps it only seems like ages ago) as application agnosticism.  With virtualization technology and UI integration like this, who cares what OS an application is written for?  Of course, we still have a ways to go to fully realize application agnosticism, since Unity is only available for Mac OS X (not Linux or Windows), but this is a powerful step in the right direction.

My hat is off to the Fusion developers.  Well done!  A lot of people were predicting that Parallels had too much of a lead in Mac virtualization, but all of you have definitely proved them wrong.  Keep up the good work!

<aside>Boring technical question to any VMware developers, Fusion team members, etc:  Is Unity debuting on OS X because of some advantage within Mac OS X itself, or simply because of the timing and the competition?  I am a Mac fan, after all, and was curious if my favorite OS had a leg up on the competitors that made it easier to create Unity.</aside>

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  1. HPReg’s avatar

    HPReg on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 3:28 am

    Scott, I’m glad you like Unity. We have plenty of ideas we would like to try to make it even better. But pre-IPO rules prevent me from even hinting at forward looking statements…

    Now to your question: “Is Unity debuting on OS X because of some advantage within Mac OS X itself, or simply because of the timing and the competition?”.

    We thought of the Unity concept circa 2000, but at that time we were much more focused on the developer’s market, not the consumer’s market. And we didn’t realize how much value this would bring to customers. So while it might disappoint you, the truth is that Unity was driven by market forces, not technical reasons.

    But here is something to make you happy: the Apple platform makes it easy to enable 3D in VMware Fusion, because of the limited range graphic adapters. It tremendously reduces the development time (less workarounds to implement), and the QA time.

  2. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 7:09 am

    Regis,

    Thanks for the response. I understand the restrictions you are under and being unable to speak about future plans or thoughts, so no worries there.

    And thanks for the honest answer to my question–I’d rather have the truth than anything else.

    Keep up the good work!