I'm a little more behind the times these days than I tend to want to admit. Management work, flying all over the place, integrating two companies and the day job will do that to a technologist, let me tell ya. So, I was pretty amazed otday when I finally got to see some cool stuff I have been hearing about lately.

I have an older Mac Mini in the kitchen at home and that's the extent of my Mac world: Checking the day's weather, doing an occasional Google search, getting movie times - and applying seemingly weekly OSX and app updates.

Sidebar: I'm leaving my place of work after this week and moving on to new things, so I have been thinking about laptops (I have used a work laptop for pretty much everything up til now). I have been looking at Lenovo machines and some Dells as well, but someone mentioned running Windows apps on a Mac recently, and I started thinking about that this evening.

There's a cool app called Parallels that lets you run Windows apps on the Mac. People have told me it's really cool. But my friend of many years, Chris Pirillo, told me tonight to look hard at VMWare Fusion. Chris is a geek's geek and you might know him from his Lockergnome empire or from when he was on TechTV a while back (obligatory funny link here, heh). Anyhow - He cares desperately about usability and product quality. My area is more infrastructure, so we compliment each other. When he says look at Fusion, I listen. When I say look at RackSpace for hosted exchange, he listens.

Chris runs this great live video show online, and when I IMed him this evening to ask him what he thinks about running Windows apps on the Mac, he was pretty emphatic and told me to turn on the video feed:

Greg Hughes says: have you run windows on the macbookpro? with that program that lets you do that things where you can run windows apps in OSX and all that?
Greg Hughes says: i liked the idea of running a native windows app in OSX
Chris Pirillo says: Vmware.
Greg Hughes says: parallels?
Chris Pirillo says: Vmware fusion
Chris Pirillo says: Trust me, d00d.
Greg Hughes says: k
Chris Pirillo says: TRUST ME
Chris Pirillo says: Perf + seamless
Chris Pirillo says: Here.
Chris Pirillo says: watch
Greg Hughes says: k
Chris Pirillo says: No, i mean - watch the vid.
Greg Hughes says: one sec
Greg Hughes says: ok am watching...

Then he proceeded to show me via the live video feed (along with everyone else in his viewing and chatting audience) how incredibly slick VMWare Fusion is, and why I should look at it instead of Parallels. Both are cool apps, but the VMWare seems really cool for performance.

This stuff is really amazing, and this is a great example of something that's a lot easier to explain by showing it to you.

Chris has an archived video (see below) and a related blog post where he did a comparison of the two products (Parallels vs. VMWare Fusion). If you have not checked out Chris' video show, it's pretty slick, he does call-in's for tech support and all sorts of stuff -- and http://live.pirillo.com is the URL to watch.

I'm looking forward to playing around with this stuff. My inner geek is waking up and getting a bit excited. I need to find a Mac notebook to see how this stuff works, then write some more I think. Should be fun.

Here's Chris' archived video where he discusses the VMWare Fusion and Parallels software products: