Launch Vmware fusion apps from Quicksilver
I switched to a Mac late last year (traded a Powerbook for a Compaq Presario) and immediately started being jealous of all the owners of newer Macs with their intel chips. Specifially, I wanted VMware fusion so that I could run those select few windows apps I have yet to find reasonable mac substitutes for.
So when I bought a new MacBook Pro recently, I made sure I got a copy of Fusion at the same time. It works as advertised and has been very useful.
Unfortunately, I decided to use my Boot Camp partition as my Windows VM, which was a bad choice as far as convenience is concerned. It is not possible to “suspend” the VM, so starting up Fusion to quickly run Solitaire is not all that simple… It has to wait for Windows to boot.
Today I decided to start a new virtual machine, and it has made a great difference. After suspending the machine before closing Fusion, starting Solitaire from its dock icon takes less than 10 seconds. That’s not much more than a native app.
OK, here’s to the point of this post… I don’t use the dock much. According to all the help docs I could find, when a windows app is running in Unity mode, its icon shows up on the dock. Ctrl-click and then choose “keep in dock” and you have your shortcut. That’s great if you use the dock. I don’t as a rule. I use Quicksilver normally and sometimes just Finder.
So here is my solution:
1. Have a look in the Finder for your VM. Normally it will be in ~/Documents/Virtual Machines. Ctrl-Click and “show package contents”.
2. See there… a folder called Applications! As far as I can see, that contains links for all the programs you have previously run in Unity mode.
3. Go to Quicksilver preferences. Under catalogue, add your VM directory. In my case it was “~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm”.
4. Wait for a rescan and away you go. (If an app isn’t in the catalogue, run it at least once manually: either from the VMware dock icon or menu bar).
6. Alternatively, you could just find the shortcut in the directory above and create an alias somewhere useful (eg Desktop).
I am looking forward to having much more convenient access to all my (fortunately few) indispensible Windows apps. (there’s a topic for another post)
Excellent instructions, just what I was looking for to launch that one (or two) indispensible windows app with QS. Thanks.
Thanks for stopping by Noah. One day I’ll get around to writing up my list of indispensable windows apps.
In the article a huge thank you all for the cause, a lot of people are using
Hey Shayne, me again. I’ve just replaced a hard disk and updated my OS and *not* installed QuickSilver. So far I’ve been happy using Spotlight to launch apps, which was the only thing I used QuickSilver for.
I’m about to google it, but thought I’d ask here first if you’d heard if one can access virtual machine apps via Spotlight?
cheers
I’ve been thinking of doing the spotlight thing too, but haven’t got around to it.
So I haven’t had to worry about doing anything about launching vm-machine apps either. To be honest, a year on from this post, I’m not using my virtual machines much any more.
I would try creating an alias for the app you needed and perhaps putting them in a particular directory somewhere handy and launch from there… I might play with that later today.
Just tweeted by @pvponline: No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater than a clean install of OSX on a brand new hard drive.