Were the stars aligned over Redmond or over Cupertino today? I’m not really sure. Three different products that allow you to run Windows on your Intel powered Mac were updated with new versions and features simultaneously today.

Apple’s Boot Camp 1.3 Beta came out, and added support for the MacBook Pro’s backlit keyboards, improved graphics drivers, improved installation, and some other minor fixes. I haven’t installed it yet, but will probably do so later this evening.

Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0, which was announced a few days ago was also released. It adds SmartSelect, allowing you to choose which Mac or Windows program opens certain file formats on either platform, Snapshots, which allows you to save a set state of your virtual machine to revert to if needed, and my favorite feature, 3D support. The 3D support adds limited DirectX and OpenGL support to Windows applications running in Parallels. I tried it, and a few of my games refused to work on it, but one did, and it ran surprisingly well, almost at 95% the speed of when it’s running in Windows directly.

And finally, VMWare Fusion Beta 4 also made it out today. I haven’t used VMWare Fusion yet, but it appears that Unity (similar to Parallels Coherence) is new, along with improved Boot Camp partition support.

Coincidence? Probably. The timing is right with WWDC very soon, so lots of developers are trying to get things out the door to show it off during WWDC.

Is this a good thing? A resounding yes! Any products that allow more people to use their legacy Windows products while still using a Mac means more possible customers for Apple, and fewer dual computer setups. And frankly, I personally find it great. I can use Mac OS X for 95% of my work, run Windows in a window using Parallels for a few things I want to test or run in Windows, or boot directly to Windows using Boot Camp to play some games. Overall, I’ve cut the number of computers I need in half thanks to Boot Camp and Parallels.