While I don’t yet own an Intel-based Mac, I do keep an eye on software specifically designed for them, and am quite pleased to see that there’s continual progress with the available virtual machine software. Parallels now has some competition with the release of beta versions of VMware, which dominates the virtualization software market in the Windows world. Competition between the top VM makers is a great thing for Mac users, as they’ll continually be raising the bar, bringing new features and lower prices.

Parallels just made a major leap in their latest release, adding a new feature which utilizes your Boot Camp partition within a virtual machine. Doing this eliminates the need to maintain two installations of Windows, as well as activating XP twice with the same key. How it works is still a bit of a mystery to me, as the updated software must note the current hardware configuration of your Mac and emulate it in the virtual machine, as Windows can be picky about re-activation when devices change significantly. Unless the developers at Parallels have figured out some clever way to handle XP’s continual hardware detection, I can’t see how it would work any other way.

Technical implementation aside, being able to keep only one copy of Windows on your Mac is great, allowing you to run it in a VM when you need to accomplish a small task, and to boot it fully to play games or run more demanding software. Macworld has more details on this update, and Dan at MacUser posted his experiences with it (and some of the required utilities).

I decided to create an Icons category here at Command-Tab because I occasionally find myself making Mac OS X icons for various purposes, and thought others would be interested in using them and learning from the accompanying Photoshop files.

This first icon is one I made quite some time ago, during a game icon creation frenzy in the MacNN forums. I’ve since redone some of the graphics, cleaned it up a bit, and brought out the colors. You can download the zipped file pack, which includes a paste-able icon, a Mac OS X .icns file, a PNG image, and — most importantly — the source Photoshop .psd file.

This icon and any that follow are free for any personal use. If you intend to publish them in a collection or on the web, all I ask is that you give credit where it is due. Enjoy! I’ll have more to come in the near future.