Last Friday, Apple Insider's Slash Lane wrote about a Beta release of the Parallels Desktop software for Mac that was distributed to the testers last week and has a completely redesigned interface, making it easier to use and a real pleasure for your eyes to view.

The Beta Built 3036 issued last week allows "a pre-installed APple Boot Camp partition with Windows XP to be used as a virtual disk drive", says Lane. This enhancement of the program allows you to avoid a system restart and boot the Windows XP OS straight from within Parallels Desktop.

If that seems a big step forward, then what about resizing the main Parallels Desktop window just like any other Mac application, followed by an auto-adjustment of the Windows interface screen resolution to match the window size?

Since this program behaves like a regular Mac application, then I see no problem in using it like one, and the "seamless drag-and-drop" of files and folders between Mac OS X and Windows is the feature we've been expecting for a while, and now has become reality. Even more, the "coherency" feature allows the display of Windows applications just like they were Mac ones, making these two operating systems work closer than ever before.

The graphics performance of this virtualization software has been improved up to 50% on various applications, said Parallels to the testers, and on the "wait" message that appears in most cases when connecting a USB device.

The networking capabilities have been improved too, with on-the-fly switching between network modes when the VM is running and up to five virtual network interfaces supported.

To conclude the story, Apple Insider says that the remaining features include "one-click virtual machine aliases, transparent mapping of command-AZXCV key combinations, shared folder configuration on-the-fly, drag-and-drop of CD/FDD images and folders, and some new eye-catching animations that coincide with Power On/Power Off/Suspend/Resume/Pause functions", and there's no doubt that this Parallels Inc. product is going to be an excellent product, since Apple is so pleased with this virtualization software that they don't feel the need to compete with them adding their own embedded virtualization to Mac OS X 10.5 next spring.