vmwarez.com: VMware Fusion 1.1 Now Available!

Monday, November 12, 2007

Here's what’s new in 1.1 includes more than 25 enhancements and updates, including:

Robust support for Mac OS X Leopard (VMware actually pushed their launch a smidge to ensure that they could bang on VMware Fusion under Leopard good and hard to get the kinks out…and there were a couple, to be sure. But Mac users expect it to “just work” so it was a must-have.)

Upgraded experimental 3D support (video below) (they’re up to DirectX 9.0 without pixel shaders), and the VMware Fusion community does a pretty good job of indicating what games work with what caveats, here.

Improvements to Unity (video below), or the ability to run Windows apps in single windows, floating above the Mac desktop. Big movements there are that Unity now works with Vista 32 and 64 bit virtual machines, and Windows XP 64 bit virtual machines. They’ve also exposed the option to show the Windows Task Bar in Unity mode—you could do this before, but you had to edit the VMX file by hand. Now there’s a UI knob there to do it. (Switchers who are new to the Mac OS X interface often like to use the Windows Start Menu to navigate their Windows apps… VMware listened and fixed it)

English, French, German, and Japanese localization in a single download, for all our non-English speaking users.

And, of course, everyone’s favorite, you can now sync your iPhone w/ Outlook in Windows virtual machines (think about that for a sec: synching an iPhone, into a Windows VM, because of outlook….sounds kinda weird at first blush)

And another biggie: they’ve also released a beta version of VMware Importer for importing Parallels virtual machines to run under VMware Fusion. So all that work that people have put into building up their perfect XP virtual machine running under Parallels won’t have to be redone as they migrate to VMware Fusion. Free download, natch.

Improvements to Unity: