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."

Comments

I'm somewhat confused

[xenocide2]

How does the existance of another IDE stifle people from porting Windows apps to OSX? If anything, it should encourage more OSX software than less...

Re:I'm somewhat confused

[amichalo]

It appears the natural progression for a swoftware company would be:

(1) Allow windows app to run via emulation to gain new market at zero cost
(2) Evaluate cost of porting to new platform
(3) Port if the market for a ported app exists

This is why Mac's only get the best selling games ported over.

Re:I'm somewhat confused

[Richard_at_work]

I hear sarcasm. The problem is that none of those companies have based their lack of a Linux product on the existance of Wine and Wine hasnt decreased the number of companies or individuals producing portable products for both platforms. Name me one project that has said 'We will continue developing our windows version, because Linux has Wine we can discontinue the Linux version'.

half life 2 on a mac

[OmniVector]

the day i launch half life 2 on my mac, i'll weep a tear of joy. but to anyone in the know, this news is entirely obvious (and expected). codeweaver and transgaming will instantly have double the market. and not only is this new market bigger than linux, it's more standardized. no need to support 5 distros, 5 package formats, 10 different library versions of dependencies and no need to statically link things. they even can pick a single gui frontend (cocoa) and not worry about the huge amount of complaints. (omg you didn't use qt! you didn't use gtk!).

Re:half life 2 on a mac

[iPod is UNIX]

I learned early on never to take advice from an Apple user, they just make arguments for Apples current product line adjusting them as Apple changes directions. I'm going to present some of the most mindbaffling arguments from the Apple community that you may check with other sources and find out they are pretty much right on.

Apple products and Apple users arguments:

• The Newton, try to convince the Apple user this never was a very good PDA and by todays standard is totaly "out there", 8" x 5" x 1" inches and about a pound without batteries, for reference a palm is about 5" x 3" x 0.3" and about 0.3 pounds. The newton is still by many Apple users the PDA to have. Now ask the same Apple user why the iPod is much better then a Creative Zen. The Zen is to heavy, by 0.1 pounds.
• The time around 2000 when Apple users where still making arguments for cooperative multitasking which to the rest of the industry was pathetic and laughable. Try finding a Mac user argumenting cooperative multitasking today.
• The early stages of OS X (which really where an open beta), slow kernel, slow UI and not even easy to use. To the Apple users was of course the best thing. In reality it was so bad Apple don't even offer security patches for those machines even though they are just a few years old.
• The G4 cube. A bastardised computer, impossible to use. You needed to stand up to load a cd in the tray (top loaded). You had to turn the computer upside down to connect peripherals (all connectors was at the bottom of the case?!?). It had heat troubles taking down most of them. Of course by the Apple user touted as a marvelous piece of equipment and even today by many Apple users seen as the height of Apple design and innovation.
• The Mac Mini, we haven't seen the last of this yet I'm afraid. Of course by the Mac users seen as the future of Macs. Reality: Apple are in 2005 selling computers with 1.25ghz CPU and 4200RPM drive for $499, this excludes keyboard mouse and monitor and includes not even enough RAM to run the included operating system. If you could buy a similar spec PC (which you can't because there are no that slow) you would get at least keyboard, mouse and monitor. It will probably not take long before a hoard of not very happy Mac mini users put these to rest when they find out you can't even run todays software reasonably on a new computer, and tommorows will be next to impossible. The argument from the Mac crowd is that if you buy a Mac mini to play games you are stupid. Is there any other software for the Mac mini I must be stupid to try running?
• Unix, first let me explain that OS X is not a certified Unix. Unix is a trademark hold by Open Group and Apple is using the trademark without permission. Certified Unixes includes Solaris, True 64 HP-UX and other Big leage names. To an Apple user Unix has always been something weird and strange and generaly bad, the usual "not invented by Apple syndrome". Now the Apple user tells you he has a Unix too and Unix by now is the greatest thing thing sliced bread. A real life story was the Apple user who told me "All modern science is based on Unix", that tells you how much the typical Mac user knows what is under the hood of their computer. They tell you Apple is the largest supplier of Unix world wide. Of course OS X doesn't even remotely classifies as Unix and recent test has shown it is at least 10 times slower then Solaris on simple database serving. This of course gives Unix a bad reputation so you can imagine Open Group being more than upset (they have of course sued Apple over infringement). Real Unixes also has 8-10 years of support contracts, Apple has already retired support for OS X 10.2 after just a few years from release making costly unneeded upgrades nessecary. In short, for Apple users Unix is a

Should help *bsd as well.

[bluGill]

Right now Wine support on *bsd is hit and miss. 90+% of the Wine developers only run Linux. They are not opposed to any other Unix, but they do nothing to help. Someone trying to get Wine running on *BSD will send a patch in, which will be accepted, but hours latter (sometimes before) some other patch is accepted in a different area that breaks Wine again.

Supporting OSX should clean a lot of this up. Just running on two platforms officially will force them to keep the code cleaner. This will make Wine useful to the other BSDs. Should also help Solaris support, which I understand works less often than *BSD.

Mac Users are not impressed by ports.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Many say this could stifle Windows to OS X ports of app"

I just downloaded NeoOffice/J for the Mac and man is it ugly.

Mac users won't tolerate bad ports of useful apps. They might tolerate using an occasional windows port, but the Mac software creators don't have anything to worry about.

Re:Good Apps

[Absentminded-Artist]

I respectfully disagree. How did you hear about Delicious Library? It created buzz. Even though there had been how many countless "categorize your comics/videos/games/books into a searchable database" apps out there Delicious Library still turned heads. Same with the other apps. Word of mouth and positive reviews push certain apps to the top. The only thing that I think gigabytes of dreck will do for the Mac software community is make it harder for the cream to rise to the top, but the cream will still rise.

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.

Although I am very excited about running my favorite PC fractal apps in Windows mode on Macintels (http://www.cootey.com/fractals/) I still look forward to the day that a Mac developer brings a fractal app to OS X that outperforms UltraFractal (and my UI favorite Fractal eXtreme) by taking advantage of Quartz Extreme, etc. (Yeah, I envision something called iFrac - Photoshop crossed with iMovie). If a better OS X fractal app appeared, I would switch to it even though I've been using the PC ones for years.

That's my optimistic outtake on it anyway. I think apps will be rewarded with positive press if they come out native and Mac users will push those apps over PC ones. But we'll still have access to the PC ones if they don't have correlations on the Mac side. I see it as win-win.

intel's compilers only out around january

[ignorant_newbie]

yeah, but icc is largely a drop-in for gcc. and it's fast. ( it's even faster than mvc/gcc on AMD hardware ). so what'll happen is that in january, people developing for mactel will suddenly get a speed boost if they compile with intel's compiler.

Re:stifle Windows to OS X ports ? Not many...

[squiggleslash]

Games will suffer. Usually (not always, but usually) game ports are done by a third party. The way it goes - XYZ Corp writes a good game for the Windows platform. A company like MacSoft then expresses an interest, pays for the rights to produce a Mac version, and then puts considerable R&D into porting the game. They then have a monopoly on sales of that game for the Macintosh platform.

This model doesn't work if someone can buy the Windows version of a game and play it on their Mac. Unless the games come out at the same time and are roughly the same price (forever, not just in the weeks following release) there'll always be an incentive for Mac users to buy a Windows version of a game even if performance isn't as well as it would be for a native port. Seriously, would you spend $40-50 on a game knowing it's already a Windows Budget title, obtainable for $10 or so? Not to mention the convenience of occasionally being able to pick up a game from *Mart, Best Buy, etc, rather than ordering everything from Amazon.

I can see Wine and Codeweaver's version of it becoming a major threat to companies like MacSoft. Whether, at the end of the day, the massively increased choices will counterbalance any lower quality inherent in running games under non-native emulated APIs, is still up for debate.

Good - for competition

[Dark Paladin]

I think this is a great thing. I know I have two major applications - Groove and Visio, both owned by Microsoft - that have no OS X support. Entourage supports Exchange, but not nearly as well as the original Windows MS Outlook.

This announcement means that Virtual PC has some real competition - rather than wasting my time booting up a virtual computer, I can just run the apps I need. Could this hurt OS X with Windows developers saying "Eh - just run Codeweaver and leave us alone?". Sure - but I think more people running OS X, even if they are running Wine-enabled applications, will still be better in the long run, since the "average user" won't understand why they're being told to spend another $50 to get a program to run on their Mac - they'll either go with a PC, or, if they've grown to love OS X, they'll tell the developer to convert.

We'll just have to see. Here's hoping Transgaming announces a similiar announcement, just for competitions sake. Like another poster, I'm also looking forward to Half Life 2 on my shiny Mactel box ;).