I’ve talked about Parallels Toolbox many times on the NosillaCast, but it was high time to do a full video tutorial on it for ScreenCastsOnline. If you haven’t heard of Parallels Toolbox before, it’s a suite of small utility apps that are all available from a single menu bar app. Most of the tools aren’t unique in the Mac world, but the magic is having them all bundled together into a single, consistent interface.
I like to think of Parallels Toolbox as buying one of those awesome Craftsman tool chests that comes filled with entire sets of high-quality wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, and more, rather than a hodgepodge of tools from all different sources.
The reason I said it was time to do a new tutorial for ScreenCastsOnline is that they keep adding more and more tools, and they have dramatically improved the user interface to make those tools more discoverable. I really enjoyed making this tutorial because it forced me to go through all 40 of the tools and understand each one. Not every one of them made the cut for the video, but I use so many of these tools day-to-day that it was a real joy to get to teach about Parallels Toolbox.
I even learned that Parallels Toolbox is available for Windows too.
ScreenCastsOnline is a subscription service, but if you’re not already a subscriber you can get a free seven-day trial and watch this tutorial on Parallels Toolbox and as much of the back catalog as you have time for in those seven days. I will give my usual disclaimer: it’s dangerous to do the free trial because you very well will get hooked!
I interrupted Bart briefly at the start of the presentation to inquire as to whether or not his initial vision has been accomplished, and if so, in what ways. Bart pretended to drift hunters be amused by me, but he was eager to get to the month’s news, since failing to do so would officially end his run of 100 consecutive news programs.