Best educational apps for the mac?

[sparkyscott21]

Great idea, I'm glad I thought of this. :)


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[sparkyscott21]

I think I would go business on this one, though it fits all 3.

VMWare finally integrates Fusion with other VMWare enterprise products and functionality.

VMWare announced the newest version of VMWare Fusion, its Mac virtualization product, this week. In doing so it also launched its first business or enterprise version of the popular tool for running Windows and other operating systems on Mac workstations. Dubbed Fusion Professional, the new solution has a range of features that are likely to appeal to IT professionals in both business and education.

Fusion Professional incorporates all the features of new Fusion 5 release as well as several management features designed to help ensure a functional and secure Windows experience for users in business environments. Those features include the following:

IT can now create restricted virtual machines where users can run Windows and installed applications, but cannot change any virtual machine settings.

Hard drive images used as startup drives can be encrypted for additional security.

Policies can limit or disable access to USB devices in Windows.

Organizations can customize the VMWare Fusion help files to provide company-specific information.

A new network editor allows IT to add and remove virtual networks and create custom virtual networking configurations – a feature that is particularly well suited to virtual machines used for demonstrations as well as software testing.

Licensing has been optimized for enterprise environments. Fusion Professional licenses can be used with Fusion on a Mac or with VMWare Player running on Windows or Linux PCs.

VMWare includes tools to prep for mass deployment using Apple or third-party deployment tools.

It’s worth noting that virtual machines can be managed and updated using standard enterprise technologies including Active Directory. From an IT perspective, such virtual machines are managed as if they were standalone PCs.

Fusion Professional also offer volume licensing and volume discounts. A three-year support and maintenance update package is available as well.

8-24-12

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[sparkyscott21]

Restarting virtual machines is much faster in Fusion 5.

Fusion 5, the latest Windows virtualization tool from VMware, comes less than a year after version 4 and as such has only received a light brush of new headline features. Support for Retina displays and USB 3.0 in Windows 8 is included, as well as optimization for the latest Macs, battery life improvements for those using a MacBook, and other minor enhancements. The Pro version of Fusion has been updated to keep the IT administrators happy as well.

Installing a copy of Windows is simple enough, though not as elegant or user-friendly as with the more expensive Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac. Windows 7 took about 30 minutes to install from a DVD.

We like the slickness of Fusion — it feels Mac-like and looks good. Some of the icons are a touch generic, and first-time users might find it initially hard to remember what each one is for.

Our tests focused mainly on Windows 7, although we did try both Windows Vista and a pre-release version of Windows 8. Here’s where Fusion really impresses as at times you can completely forget that you’re using a Mac, with software running as quickly as you’d expect it to on a PC. Resuming a paused virtual machine is speedier than in previous versions too.

Even so, running a virtual machine occasionally brought our Mac Pro to a stuttering halt — it simply stalled and all we could do was wait for the quad-core 2.8GHz processors and 8GB RAM to catch up. However, the majority of the time Windows did feel like a native OS, and quickly switching between it and OS X was a breeze.

The bottom line. Fusion 5 is great; it’s cheaper than Parallels and ran just as fluently during our testing. Fusion 5 has more favorable licensing terms and overall tips the scales as a better first-time purchase. There’s nothing here to really sway an existing Parallels user away, but we’d say that Fusion does have the edge.

12-4-12

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