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Codeweavers to Support Mac OS X on Intel
An anonymous reader submits "It's official. CodeWeavers is planning to support Mac OS X on Intel chips. Many say this could stifle Windows to OS X ports of apps, but nonetheless this may make it a lot easier for people to switch to OS X from Windows."
...to hear this one of these days. When I had lunch with Steven Edwards of Codeweavers a couple weeks back, he mentioned how this idea was being thrown around. I wish them the best of luck and hope this helps them get some more capital and market share. I only hope that it does not come at the expense of native ports.
Yes, you are confused.
Codeweavers is the commercial company behind much of the work on Wine, which is a Windows compatability layer that allows (some) Windows applications to run under *nix operating systems without Windows being installed.
Which, had you read the linked story, you would have learned.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Codeweavers isnt an IDE, its a Wine based win32 port with a lot of polish and extra bits such as Crossover Plugin. This would allow running of most major software packages for Windows under OSX for Intel, which would open up a lot of software for OSX. I dont see how it would stiffle development on OSX tho, it hasnt had that effect on Linux at all.
This is not a company making a GUI on top of Wine. This is a company that hired the most active WINE developers and told them to focus on getting programing like Microsoft Office and iTunes working in Wine. They provide support for anyone who wants to use Wine but needs help. This includes those looking for an easy port to of their Windows Application to Linux, and those who just want to see more applications work on Linux that are now Windows only.
True it only works with certain programs. However there are more are more all the time.
Were you thinking of Codewarrior maybe?
It's not just an MS-Office compatibility layer, it lets you run any Windows app you want (well, most, with varying degrees of success), just like regular WINE does - only it adds a nice GUI frontend so people aren't unnerved by the 'complexities' of stock WINE.
Please don't be confused by the name and think CrossOver Office is just an MS-Office thing - try some of your other Windows apps that *DONT* have an OS X equivalent and see how you get on.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
A lot of people are bemoaning the fact that with apps being able to run natively in Windows mode on the Macintels that nobody will bother porting their apps over to OSX. Although there will be some lazy/cheap idiot developers out there who will take this approach native OSX apps will get the buzz and the recommendations and ultimately the sales.
Actually, straight port from Windows to System 7/Mac OS 8/9 was tried (via some cross-platform frameworks), the ports looked like Windows apps and behaved oddly. No one cared for them.
Most Mac users like their apps to be Mac-like and behave in a fashion consistent with the Mac user interface guidelines. Straight ports won't cut it. So I don't think a flood of oddly behaving apps (by Mac OS X standards) will have any effects on the Mac software developers.
If I had to choose between Office and Appleworks? That'd be a toughie, since Appleworks is a piece of crap. Even then, I'd probably have to run into something I just couldn't do in Appleworks before I'd shell out the money for an emulated Office. Any less of a difference in quality, I'd take the native app in a second.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
The CodeWeavers corporation makes propriatery DLLs that are compatible with propriatery that come with Microsoft Windows but contain no windows code.
The wine groups themselves haven't reimplemented every DLL that comes with any particular copy of windows. Some of the more interesting ones that they have done have the same interface as Microsoft's but a different implementation. For example, GDI32.dll, in Wine it needs to convert GDI calls to Xlib calls, but in Windows they interact with the video driver directly.
For other DLLs there are no system specific functionality, for example comdlg32.dll likely calls GDI32.dll for all the low level drawing commands. For these system independent DLLs, if the wine projects don't have one available, you can grab one out of windows, if you have, um, access access to a copy of windows.
The Crossover Office package contains all of the DLLs needed to run Microsoft Office applications without having to pull any files over from your WINNT directory. There used to be another package called Crossover Plugin that allowed you to run common web browser plugins like Shockwave. Since I don't see it on their site note, I assume all of hte Crossover Plugins stuff got moved over to Crossover Office.
Well maybe the application is good enough, but if it runs, it cannot possibly run good enough.
I might run well enough, though.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Further, we work hard to make sure that the applications we support do not need any DLLs from Windows. There are certain applications, like IE, which require you to have a licensed product from Microsoft, but that is the reality of their license, and not a technical limitation of CrossOver and Wine.
Finally, yes, the Plugin functionality did get merged into the Office product about a year back.
Cheers,
Jeremy