Parallels, a global leader in cross-platform solutions and creator of software for running Windows applications on a Mac, recently launched Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac, which provides macOS High Sierra readiness and support for upcoming Windows 10 features.

Bringing together the best of both worlds, Parallels Desktop 13 makes it simple for MacBook Pro users to add Windows applications to the Touch Bar, and use Touch Bar within Windows applications. It is also the first solution to bring the upcoming Windows 10 People Bar feature to the Mac — including integration with the Mac Dock and Spotlight. The new version also features up-to 100 percent performance improvements for completing certain tasks.

“This year, for the first time ever, we are bringing the two hottest features from Mac and Windows into one place via Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac,” said Jack Zubarev, Parallels president. “This new release delivers our best-ever Windows on Mac performance, plus innovative and useful new features and tools to help users get more done quickly and efficiently.”

With a single mouse click, the Parallels Installation Assistant will automatically install Windows 10 into a virtual machine (VM), which can be purchased at a later date without losing data or installed applications, making getting started in Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac simpler than ever. It also enables users to purchase and automatically install Windows 10 from Microsoft, add an existing copy of Windows, and simply move their PC to their Mac. From the beginning, users can choose to make Windows look like a PC (Full Screen) or make Windows invisible (Coherence mode), while launching Windows apps from the Mac Dock, Launch Pad or Windows Start Menu, enabling users to tailor the experience to their liking.

Parallels Desktop 13 provides Mac Touch Bar integration for Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as browsers including Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. Additionally, when you are using the Windows Start Menu or Desktop, Parallels Desktop 13 features Taskbar pinned elements, along with Cortana, Task View and settings in the Touch Bar. Thousands of other Windows applications that run in Parallels Desktop can quickly be customised with popular Touch Bar actions, if the default set of functional keys is not enough.

Not only can Parallels Desktop enhance existing Mac features, but it also can build on Windows tools as well. Parallels Desktop 13 integrates People Bar (from Windows 10 Insider Preview build 16232), a forthcoming Windows 10 feature that lets users pin contacts to the Taskbar. Although Windows limits People Bar contacts to three, the Mac Dock doesn’t limit favourite contacts and enables their photos to be larger for easy viewing.

New Parallels Desktop 13 innovations include Picture-in-Picture (PiP) View, a feature which creates windows of other active VMs, which are always visible on top, even when a Mac app is in Full Screen mode. Now, it is easy to monitor and work in multiple operating systems (OS) and their applications simultaneously on one screen, or watch a video while switching between macOS Spaces and applications. PiP View joins popular Parallels Desktop customisation settings such as Coherence (Windows is invisible while using Windows apps on a Mac), Full Screen mode, and Window mode (Windows in a window in macOS).

New Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition features coming this Fall include the customer-inspired Single Application mode, which lets IT admins deliver, lock and secure an invisible Windows VM with selected applications to a user’s Mac Dock — making it easy for them to discover and use the Windows apps just like Mac apps.

The latest version of Parallel Desktop provides a number of visual and display improvements for improved transitions and better scaling resolution.  Owners of hi-res Retina displays will enjoy greatly improved sharpness of text and graphics in scaled mode.

Launched now, Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition and Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition are available for subscribers and upgraders from Parallels Desktop 11 and 12, as well as new customers, online HERE and at local retail and online stores worldwide. Free 14-day full-featured trials of Parallels Desktop are also available for download.

Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition and Business Edition include a complimentary concurrent subscription to both Parallels Toolbox for Mac and Parallels Toolbox for Windows, as well as Parallels Access.

The post Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac Launches – Bringing Windows Apps to the Touch Bar appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Use Siri on the Mac, Access Your Desktop from Anywhere, Copy and Paste Between Devices & Rediscover Favourite Memories in Photos

Apple recently previewed macOS Sierra, a major update with new features that make the Mac smarter and more helpful than ever. Siri is now on the Mac with brand-new capabilities to help with the things users do every day on their desktop. With Siri, users can look up information, find documents, pin or drag and drop search results, and even adjust system preferences. Seamless integration with iCloud makes everything from your Desktop and Documents folder available on your iPhone and iPad so you always have access to the files you need. Universal Clipboard allows you to copy content, including text, images, photos and video from one Apple device and paste it in another. Apple Pay comes to the Mac in Sierra so it is even easier to shop securely and privately online. And Photos now helps you rediscover your meaningful memories, organise your library and perfect shots like a pro.

“macOS Sierra is a major update that makes your Mac smarter and more helpful than ever with improvements to the apps you know and love and great new features throughout,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “With macOS Sierra, you can get information, find files and multitask using Siri, access your Desktop and Documents from anywhere, copy and paste between Macs and iOS devices, and rediscover precious memories in Photos.”

Siri on the Mac is now just one click away. The familiar features of Siri are now on the Mac with brand-new capabilities specifically designed for the desktop. Easily accessible from the Dock, menu bar or keyboard, Siri lets you use your voice to search for information, find files and send messages. For example you can ask Siri to locate a specific document you worked on last night, add a meeting to your calendar or start a FaceTime call. With Siri on the Mac, you can also drag and drop items from Siri search results into your documents or emails, pin Siri search results in Notification Centre to keep an eye on information like sports scores or stock prices, and even adjust system preferences, set reminders and search your Photos library. With its debut on Mac, Siri is now on all four Apple software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — and handles two billion requests per week across 36 countries.

With macOS Sierra you can automatically have all the files on your Desktop and in your Documents folder on any Mac, iOS device or even PC. You simply save your files on your Desktop or within your Documents folder as you usually do and you will have them everywhere you need them. You can access your files on your iPhone and iPad in the iCloud Drive app and on iCloud.com or the iCloud for Windows app. And when you log into a second Mac, your files are automatically on the Desktop and in the Documents folder, exactly where you saved them.

Continuity across your Apple devices also gets better in macOS Sierra. With Universal Clipboard, the contents of your clipboard are available across all your Apple devices via iCloud. You can easily copy and paste text, images, photos and video between your Mac and your iPhone and iPad.

To help you navigate your Desktop with more efficiency, macOS Sierra takes the popular Tabs feature from Safari® and makes it available across Mac apps that support multiple windows, including Maps, Mail, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and TextEdit, and even third-party apps. With Tabs you can browse multiple locations in Maps without losing your place, copy and paste between Pages documents in full screen, or quickly jump between multiple email drafts in Mail.

You can now keep an eye on one thing while working on another. macOS Sierra lets you float video from Safari or iTunes in a window over your desktop as you work, and even resize, drag and pin video to any corner of your screen. The video stays put when you switch spaces, so you’ll never miss a thing.

Users love to shop online using their Macs and with macOS the shopping experience in Safari is now even better. Apple Pay on the web makes it easy to make secure and private purchases when shopping on participating websites. You no longer need to share credit or debit card numbers with an online merchant and actual card numbers are not stored on your device, nor on Apple servers. Just look for the Apple Pay button at checkout on many of your favourite shopping sites and complete your purchase with Touch ID on your iPhone or by using your Apple Watch®. Strong encryption protects all communication between your devices and Apple Pay servers, and Apple Pay does not track your purchases.

The new Memories feature in Photos helps you rediscover favourite and forgotten moments deep in your Photos library by automatically creating curated collections of occasions like a first birthday party, wedding or family vacation. With new advanced computer vision, Photos now understands the people, places and things inside your images using on-device facial, object and scene recognition and location information to group images into albums. The People feature automatically groups your photos into Albums based on who is in them. Places now displays your photos on a world map so you can see where they were taken. And, perfecting your photos like a pro is now even easier with the new Brilliance tool, which pulls in highlights and adds contrast to enhance details throughout your images.

Additional macOS Features

• Auto Unlock lets you simply walk up to your Mac while wearing your authenticated Apple Watch and be automatically logged into your desktop.
• Optimised Storage frees up space when your Mac starts getting full by storing infrequently used items in iCloud and reminding you to delete used app installers, and even clearing out duplicate downloads, caches, logs and more.
• Messages makes conversations more interesting, now allowing you to preview web links and watch video clips within the app, post reactions like a heart, thumbs up and more directly onto a message bubble with Tapback, and use bigger emoji for more message impact.
• Apple Music in iTunes makes it even easier to discover new music and browse exclusives and new releases.

Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of Apple hardware, software and services. iMessage and FaceTime use end-to-end encryption to protect your data by making it unreadable by Apple and others. Services like Siri and Maps send data to Apple’s servers, but this data is not used to build user profiles, and Photos uses on-device intelligence to organise your images using facial, object and scene recognition.

Starting with macOS Sierra, Apple is using technology called Differential Privacy to help discover the usage patterns of a large number of users without compromising individual privacy. In macOS Sierra, this technology will help improve autocorrect suggestions and lookup hints in Notes.

The developer preview of macOS Sierra is available to Apple Developer Program members at developer.apple.com starting today. Mac users can sign up for the macOS Sierra Beta Program today and download the software starting in July 2016 at beta.apple.com. The final version will be available for free from the Mac App Store this fall.

The post Sierra Makes Your Mac Even Smarter appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Shiftlings is a puzzle play platformer with vividly detailed and coloured cartoon style graphics and with the two Shiftling characters are conjoined by a tube that you will need to pass gas from one Shiftling to the other to inflate them (yep, the entire gameplay needs you to fart, alot).

The premise of the game is simple.

Get through obstacle and hazard laden Levels to a station situated at the end.

Initially you are ushered into the game, and for the most part from then on it is an easy play, but you will need to stop, think and try again at times.

The platformer Levels are wrought with all types of hazards, from the actual Level’s themselves having extremely tight spaces, through to further into play; laser beams, cannons and more. Each Level is also narrated by the show’s presenter, although it sounded canned and repetitive.

There are over 50 Levels to conquer and you can repeat play to get goodies hidden within certain Levels that you may have missed or not known how to get before.

Shiftlings is absolutely a co-op. Changing the gas from one character to the other is simple at the press of a controlpad button. You will generally control one Shiftling at a time and constantly be switching between the two. However should the need arise you can control both simultaneously.

Shiftlings is an excellent and addictive to play game. I found it to be a refreshing break from some of the more mainstream titles.

Yet I can also see that it may not be everyone. Most of Shiftlings‘ longevity in play is reliant on the players skill. You also need to have a high patience ratio when playing.

If you are really good at platformer puzzles, you are most likely to breeze through the game.

Shiftlings has released on PS4, Xbox One and PC, but I am at a loss as to why it has not released on Vita and even smartphones, as it is the ideal pick up and play.

Simplistic but complicated, frustrating but hilarious. Shiftlings takes retro gameplay to next generation and it had me reminiscing back to games that I used to enjoy and play over and over and over in the ’90s on my 16 BIT Sega Megadrive.

Save the Galaxy one fart at a time with Shiftlings.

The post Shiftlings – Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.