Booting Windows in Parallels via Quicksilver

Being the crack web developer I am, I regularly have to test in IE6 or IE7. To do this I use Parallels Desktop which runs a virtual machine on my Mac. Since you can’t reliably have both IE6 and IE7 running on one windows installation I have two, one for each. This is a pretty standard set-up for a Web Developer in the UK office at Yahoo.

However, since running another machine on your machine eats I whole load of resources I try not to keep Windows running for too long. Parallels is pretty good at helping you quickly start the OS you want from a menu, but I’m far too lazy for that. So, inspired by an article on The Unofficial Apple Weblog I made a quick solution to use Quicksilver.

This stuff is hardly tricky, it’s just knowing what you can do with Quicksilver if you configure it right.

Let’s start with Parallels itself. The actual files we need are in your Home directory Library in a folder called Parallels. In this folder are a number of sub-folders which contain each virtual machine.

The .pvs file in each folder is the virtual machine configuration file. For my winXP IE6 and winXP IE7 folders both of mine were originally called winxp.pvs. I changed this to be something more distinctive, ie6.pvs and ie7.pvs respectively. You may need to start Parallels and open the virtual machines again by hand after renaming them.

Quicksilver has a nice way to easily access anything you want. Go to the catalogue and pane in the Quicksilver preferences (cmd+; with the Quicksilver pane open).Hit the + at the bottom of the pane to add a new item. Choose the option for File and Folder scanner.

This should give you a new row in the custom catalogue. Select that row and press the i to get the information sidebar to appear. In source options under the path section choose select and navigate to the Parallels folder in the Library in your Home directory. Open that.

Next select it to include folder contents. If you hit rescan (the looped arrow) you should now get some items listed.

Depends how you want to use your Parallels launcher will define how you set up the next options. In each VM folder in Parallels there are a number of things. The .pvs files we renamed earlier will start Parallels with a particular VM. However, there is also a Windows Applications folder which will start coherence application (if you have it turned on). This means you can browser test really easily and start the browser you want to test with ease.

If you only want to start VMs then set the Depth to 2 and enter .pvs into types. Rescanning your catalogue should change the number of items in it (shown by the number in blue). If you also want to include coherence applications set the depth to 3 and add .app to types.

You can see what things Quicksilver will search from by selecting contents which will show you the listed items for this part of the catalogue. Simply launching any of these from Quicksilver will either open the VM or Coherence application in Parallels.

Technorati Tags:
Quicksilver, Mac, Productivity, osx, parallels, coherence, virtualmachine, tuaw, gradedbrowsersupport