Apple Boot Camp

My company (Teamprise) develop a plugin for Eclipse to talk to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). We also have a stand-alone client and a command line client – all of which run on Windows, Mac and Unix. As well as helping to develop and test the product I often go out and demo it to people as it is one of those things that has got to be seen to be believed. It would be really nice to demo all three operating systems from the one machine. While I am still holding out for some virtualization support Apple have just announced a public beta of Boot Camp, their boot manager making it very easy to dual boot XP on a MacIntel machine.

While this is great tactic to encourage switchers from MS platforms into the Mac world, it will also be a boon for multi-platform development shops like my own.

I also find it very interesting that the page announcing this also talks about OS X 10.5 (Leopard) which is rumoured to have virtualization support built in to the operating system meaning you could dual run Mac OS X and Windows XP app without re-booting. Now that I would love to see – either through the operating system direct or via VMWare.