For Christmas last year I got a Garmin Nuvi 360 GPS, which has been kickass btw. Since I’m a Mac user, I always had to boot Parallels to install the latest firmwares using the windows software. Well as of today, I no longer have to as Garmin has released a Mac version of their WebUpdater and also their POI Loader. Both programs are universal binary but are still in beta. I just got done loading the latest firmware without a problem tho and the webupdater should work for any of Garmin’s GPS products.

Tuesday night I finally had some free time and decided to install Vista Ultimate on my Macbook. My Parallels install of XP MCE 2005 is getting full and I needed to reinstall anyways. Well would you know my luck, less that 12 hours after I installed Vista, Apple releases a Vista compatible version of Boot Camp. Thank god its just an updated driver CD and I don’t have to repartition and reinstall.

I just wish Parallel’s supported Vista on a Boot Camp partition so I didn’t have to reboot but the only two things i really need Windows for is to watch Netflix streaming movies and Comic Collector Live. Its only a matter of time for Parallels supports it and I can wait.

Parallels Desktop for Mac was updated today to RC build 2.2.1884 and adds Mac Pro support, Leopard compatibly and Windows Vista support as a Guest OS. A full list of all the updates can be found here. I’ll be installing Vista RC1 tonight to check out how well its supported.

[Download here]

Over at the Parallels blog, the guys touch on some post-WWDC news, notable on VMWare entering the market while Microsoft bows out. A few interesting bits come up for whats planned in upcoming versions of Parallels this year:

• A groundbreaking new user interface that will make running Windows on a Mac easier and more productive than ever before
• Never before seen security and management tools
• Capability to burn CDs and DVDs inside virtual machines
• Fast 3D graphics support via support for OpenGL and DirectX. You’ll be able to run games at full speed without leaving your OS X desktop!
• An ACPI BIOS that provides the ability to run Microsoft Windows Vista

Wow. Parallels isn’t pulling any punches here. New “groundbreaking” interface? Burn CDs inside a VM? FULL SPEED GAMING?! This stuff is HUGE for the Mac community. I know I said I would probably switch to VMWare in an earlier post, but I think the guys at Parallels now have a devoted customer in me.

In the mist of all the Boot Camp 1.1 news, Parallels released an updated beta (build 1862.2) that fixes the “Unable to allocate virtual machine memory” problem with some Window XP VMs.

Download here