Paul Howard

parallels - unfair practices (update)

Posted by Paul Howard - 02/03/08 at 10:03:27 am

Well it’s been over a week and I have had no reply from the customer services people at Parallels.

The two questions I asked them were as follows:

When you add the standard product to your shopping cart it also lists “Extended Download for Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac [300134581] (12 months) “. This costs £3.94

Does this mean you have to pay extra for the ability to redownload the software after your first purchase? If so why does it only last a year? Surely once you have purchased the software and obtained a license key, you should be able to download it as many times as you like. I would assume you could just download the trial and activate it. So what is this charge for?

The second question was why they were charging VAT at 19% when we in the UK pay 17.5%? It’s possible that they are selling it from another EU country that has a higher rate of VAT and we are liable to pay it. If that is true there is no mention on their site of this and as they didn’t reply to my email it looks like I will never know.

I have been happy using the VMware products for years and it looks like I will be continuing to use them. Parallels works fine. I have no complaints about the actual product but I am not going to give money a company that doesn’t reply to a simple pre-sales email. Not exactly good marketing in my opinion.

** Updated **

I have just found this on the FAQ page:

What is Extended Download Service?
Signing up Extended Download Service means that after you purchase our product, we’ll keep a copy of your program for ONE FULL YEAR. If you need to reinstall your Parallels product, you will be able to download it again for free.

What?????  You limit people to one download?  So if their hard drive crashes and they didn’t back up the install file they have to pay for it again? Yeah - not gonna happen.

creating screencasts in linux

Posted by Paul Howard - 26/02/08 at 03:02:43 pm

Have you ever had to create a screencast while using Linux?

What I thought was going to be the nightmare task of finding usable software to do this actually turned out to be incredibly easy. After a few quick Googles I settled on recordMyDesktop which seemed very lightweight but quite powerful. It did, in fact, capture screencasts and save them in the ogg format. A quick pass through VLC to reencode them and I had them in a format usable for a standard Windows machine to play. This is a far as I could go though. There is no way of adding text or graphics to the screens that you have captured.

A bit more Googling brought me to Wink. Wink is dedicated Tutorial and Presentation creation software and does exactly what I needed. You choose which window or area of the screen to capture, and away you go. Once captured you are free to edit the screencast, add titles, pause the show to add back/next buttons, or just add titles to the whole screencast.

Output formats are flash (.swf) or standalone .exe for windows users. I think you can publish to other formats too but haven’t had time to look through all the options just yet.

Learning how to use it took less than twenty minutes and within an hour I had my first screencast all saved, edited and published to some users to test.

Overall a very impressive bit of free software.

parallels - unfair practices (possibly)

Posted by Paul Howard - 23/02/08 at 10:02:00 pm

I was looking at purchasing a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac today. I had used the 30 day test version and it appeared to fit my needs.

Before purchasing I emailed a couple of questions to their pre-sales team. If I am right, they have some very strange agreements for people to accept.

If I am wrong then all is fine. If not it’s VMware fusion for me.

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