VMware released Fusion 4.1 this week and here is a summary of the key features and improvements in VMware Fusion 4.1

Smart Full Screen

Here is how full screen works with VMware Fusion 4.1

• The standard Lion full screen button is now used in virtual machine windows.
• Like other full screen Lion applications, a VMware Fusion virtual machine will move to a new full screen space when using a single display.
• If you are using multiple displays, VMware Fusion will intelligently decide whether to use a full screen space or not. If the virtual machine is configured to use all displays in full screen, it will move to a full screen space. If not, full screen will take the whole display in the current space. This allows working in Mac applications on one display while the virtual machine can make full use of the other.
• The full menu bar is now accessible from full screen mode in both Snow Leopard and Lion. We added a short delay in showing the menu which allows users to access the top of the virtual machine screen, particularly useful when running Mac OS X Lion or Ubuntu in a virtual machine.
• When working with multiple displays some users might prefer the optional full screen minibar. It provides quick access to common actions without leaving full screen mode. It takes minimal space on the screen and can even auto-hide.

Automatically powering on favorite virtual machines

Virtual machines can now be powered on automatically when VMware Fusion starts. This can be set for each virtual machine under Settings > General.

Speed Enhacements

A few of the improvements are:

Greatly improved graphics performance for Internet Explorer 9 with hardware accelerated graphics are up to 6x faster than VMware Fusion 4.

• Improved rendering correctness in Solidworks 2012.
• Improved graphics performance when using Mac OS X 10.7.2.
• Improved animations for full screen mode, unity mode, library and snapshots.
• Improved startup time with Windows 7 virtual machines.