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Codeweavers Releases CrossOver For Intel Mac
dbialac writes, "Codeweavers, one of the major players in the Wine Project, have released their first beta of CrossOver for Mac. I've downloaded it and played around with it and though there are glitches, it does seem to run programs' standard features quite well."
The top 3 most-ranked apps on their compatibility list are Office 2003, iTunes, and... Lotus Notes 6.5.1+.
To whoever is tasked with trying to make Notes run... on Linux... on a Mac...
We feel for you man.
The one and only Windows program I use is City of Heroes/Villains. I've can get the updater running, which downloads the patches, but then it goes to "Loading", and while my fans go nuts, it never actually produces anything interesting. I've checked the forums, but I can't find anything which would help. Any Slashdotters attempting this?
I don't see the point. The Mac and PC demographics are fundamentally different, as are the applications they need to run. If you need to run Windows apps on a Mac, maybe you shouldn't have bought a Mac to begin with.
CrossOver Mac will be the very best way to run your Windows applications on your Intel based Mac. It will let you install and run Windows programs as though they were native, all without having to buy or run a copy of Windows itself.
In other news, the guys over at CherryOS have announced that they have a new product...
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Is it $$$ every six months? or do you only get updates for it for 6 months and then if you want more updates you have to pay?
Does it run OpenOffice?
For example, Photoshop for Windows will be much faster than the current version of Photoshop for MacOSX (PPC native), Mathematica 5.2 for windows will be much faster than Mathematica 5.2 for Mac OSX, etc.
This is hardly news. In 1998 on my 300MHZ Wallstreet Powerbook, MS Office for Windows was much faster under SoftWindows+Win 98, than the native MS Office for Mac. Exactly the same macros were running more than twice faster under SoftWindowsw than under MacOS.
Continues to fade away.
It won't be long before no one other than Apple and shareware are putting out native Mac apps.
Fire your Mac engineers and replace them with a README.TXT for Mac users directing them to run their app with BootCamp,Parallels, or Codeweavers. And pocket the savings.
I think the idea is that if they can get their product to behave with a few complex programs that do all sorts of weird things (especially Office 2003), then they can be sure that 99% of the other stuff will work fine.
When looking at the apps that are most used in Codeweavers and the ones with some problems.
Office 2003
Quicken
Photoshop
IE
All of these are available as Mac Native apps except IE 6. Now maybe thereis some small app I need to run, but why not just wait until the free version of Wine is ported to OS X?
This is a boost for gaming on OSX. This, and projects like darwine and evening the much hated transgaming are going to be a big boost for Apple. I downloaded the CrossOver Mac beta and was able to install and run Halflife1 (after digging out my original cd's!) with minimal hassle on my MacBook under OSX. I know it's an old game and I only have an intel integrated graphics card, but the framerate was high enough for me not to notice any lack of responsiveness or chugging. Considering it was running in Direct3D mode, I think this is a fantastic achievement. I'm going to install office today and see if its actually faster than Office:Mac which has to run through rosetta at the moment, making it a bit sluggish. Photoshop is also on my list to try.
I'm still using my 12" powerbook because of that dumb glossy finish on the macbook, (i like a small laptop.) But the entire Intel run windows blah blah on your mac is dumb. OPEN YOUR WORLD UP TO SECURITY VULNERABILITY'S!!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.... now if apple would have just gone ahead and ported every distro of linux / bsd to the mac, that would have made more sense. All the open source software you want is way better than running windows. Oh and Wine is a memory / cpu hog anyways, I used to run it under slackware 10..... blah. I just gave up everquesting lol.
It's very nicely put together. Some thoughts...
In truth my only regrets were some crashes in Office 2003. It seemed to be unstable in the same ways that the linux version was when I last used it a couple of years ago - i.e. you will have a great experience if you stick to Office 2000, but newer stuff might come unstuck. In the end then - I hope every Mac user goes out and buys this, because at the price it is offered it is a bargain... but CodeWeavers are going to need a lot of unit sales to increase their WINE contributions.
The next version of lotus notes is written using the eclipse platform (i.e. java) therefore will most likely just run on linux and mac.
CrossOver may not be an entirely new concept, but it looks like a decent enough compromise of Windows compatibility without having to deal with the hassles of a true Windows installation. The software works much like Apple's X11 implementation, constraining the Windows parts of the Windows applications running within it to each application's main window. This includes all menus and application-generated windows, keeping your Mac OS X environment completely uncluttered.
Aside from that, this also eliminates much of the unnecessary Windows hassles, such as activation and "phoning home"... and you even get to save money to boot.
Needless to say, intel-based Macintosh users may want to snatch this up before it goes the way of Connectix Virtual Game Station. I can't imagine Microsoft letting this get by them without a fight, when there are other options that will require users to actually own a copy of Windows.
8==8 Bones 8==8
..right here, and you don't need *shock* CrossOver Mac
http://www.neooffice.org/
Don't you just love convergence?
Darwine is never coming near my machine again. I set up a drive mapping on it. It took my instruction to mean - rename home home directory to something stupid. I had a very painful couple of hours before I worked out what had happened, thinking I had lost all of my current files.
...people who are mentally incompetent in using other operating systems. The only commands they know are:
;-)
chmod
chown
chgrp
ls -gal
ps -ef
yata, yata, yata.
Trying to get them to learn anything new is like getting Christians to vote democrat!
...about "The Native OS X App Market..." Even if a app is offered for free, but was ported from Win to Mac without making it "Mac-like", Mac loyalist will not use it. So good luck trying to convince them to boot Win to run it. OK, may be some recent switchers will use it, but if you've drunk the kool-aid long enough, Windows apps (even those running natively on OSX, but with a Windows after-taste) will not fly.
Any word on whether they will have functionality for typing in chinese? This would seem to be a function of the X11 system, not windows APIs or Mac system.
I've always liked Google's Picasa better than iPhoto, so I gave this a whirl with Picasa and it worked perfectly. I figured it would, since the Linux version of Picasa runs through Wine, and Codeweavers did a lot of the porting work for it. I just told it to scan my Y: (Y: is mapped to your home folder in Crossover Mac) and it found all of the photos in my iPhoto library and loaded them into Picasa.
Or else these programs are supported by Crossover Office for Linux perhaps (which shares its database with Crossover Mac)? Your theory is hogwash, considering most unsupported applications won't run, irregardless of size, whereas huge programs like Microsoft Office will run when specifically targetted by Codeweavers. A perfect example, pretty much every Office version is supported, but the Microsoft Works install program won't even finish.
Where the hell were you folks when it actually happened?
Considering that CrossOver is at best a less-than-reliable solution, I would have thought that a better solution would be to port PC apps to the Mac using WineLib. A bit like the easiest way to bring a Unix app to Windows is to compile it against the cygwin libs....
That way the bulk of the app works straight away (getting rid of the majority of porting work), and all that remains afterwards is correcting the nitty-gritty bugs that the WineLib doesn't handle quite correctly.
If more developers did this, we would very soon have a very complete WineLib, and the question of which platform you develop for would be null and void...
I once had a copy of "Lotus Notes for Dummies". It was a 500 page long book, and each page just had the word "DON'T!" in large print.
Looking at the codeweaver website and also the numbers of common applications that have some kind of problems...it would not be wise to get Crossover on my MAC !!!
Just like VMWARE for the Intel Mac, this is huge for allowing people to, well, cross over (good choice of name, Crossover) to the Mac. And in many situations (running specific windows applications), Crossover is a far better solution. *Way* less resource hungry (it allocates memory as required, it doesn't allocate a whole 512M [or whatever] VM to run a whole Windows operating system), *plus* it uses the native file system (without some fake shared directory thing, a la VMWARE - which is cool and useful, but not as slick nor as efficient as Crossover's view of the file system).
Once it leaves beta, this might just be what pushes me over the edge to get a Mac.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
irregardless of size
The word you're looking for is regardless.
I don't own a Mac, and even though I've played with one for a while, I am not very familiar with its internals.
Could you explain why a non-native binary will work faster than a native one?
The saddest poem
... I throw Mutorrent and Shareaza at them to see if they stick.
It may not be very scientific or fair to do this but those are the only Windows programs I actually miss.
Neither Wine or CrossOver can run these programs yet. So, Parallels still gets my vote thus far. It may be a kitchen sink approach but it actually works.
Surely there's a cross platform API that's better than the godawful bend-over-for-Microsoft Win32 API.
I've always written for the base UNIX API (which is available under Windows, and will be a native API in Vista if (as reported) Interix is included) with the GUI written using a scripting language and Tk. This produces apps that have a native user interface under UNIX, Windows, Mac OS X, and even (with care) old Mac OS. Surely I can't be the only one.
With a virtualization solution, the number of licenses required to be dealt with (Free licenses still have to be 'dealt with', i.e. make sure your usage legally matches the license) is at least four:
-The host os
-The virtualization software
-The guest os
-The application
For crossover it's three:
-The host os
-Crossover
-The application
The Windows license is expensive, and if you have commercial support from Crossover office for the app, it's not something that 'might work 90%', it is something that the vendor is legally obligated to get to work 100%. Crossover is fairly specific about what they provide support for, and for those applications it isn't 9/10 assed, it's supposed to work right or they have to help you make it work right.
Add to that some complications in virtualization (overhead of full guest os in terms of storage, paradigm of switching between OSes intrusive (both in terms of interface and filesystem space). Virtualization is needed/appropriate for some desktop scenarios, and more server scenarios, but I'm just stressing the counterpoints to show crossover is not a solution made irrelevant by virtualization.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
IT depts. that are efficient and effective choose the software and hardware platforms they can support and standardize on it and provide support to those platforms. I accept this is a realistic expectation to set, an IT dept can only do so much and to fund an IT dept to be capable of doing all things for all people is just bad business.
IT depts however may lose some of that effectiveness and efficiency when they start mandating only what they approve is allowed and start taking proactive measures to keep employees in line. For example, most of my past was IT. I would depending on the company officially support whatever the company wanted to use. If that company approved of Solaris and Windows, and a Linux user called for software help, I would simply respond that I can't help them, but they are welcome to try to figure it out themselves or have me assist with a supported solution, even if I knew full well I could fix their problem if I gave a little time for it. A bad IT department may spend extra effort to reprimand the user for ever using linux and do all kinds of ungodly things to the infrastructure to more obviously break Linux clients as a deterrent in this example.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
why not just wait until the free version of Wine is ported to OS X?
Because you can't or don't want to wait? I'm planning on getting getting a Macbook Pro when Apple releases one with Merom, Intel's new Core 2, which I'm hoping will be annouced during the Paris Expo if not sooner and I'll install my WinTel Macromedia Studio and I may get Photoshop CS. However Adobe won't release a native port of CS for MacTels until they release the next version. So I may get a WinTel version which I can use CrossOver to install it on my MacBook. At first I was thinking of just getting Parallels but I'll probably get CrossOver for Macs instead.
Quicken
Because I don't know when Apple will release the MacBook Pro with the Merom processor I've been thinking about getting a Mac Mini as my PC is in it's deaththrows, and I noticed the Minis come with Quicken installed. I didn't see whether the MacBook come with it or not, and I don't know how GNUCash or OpenOffice's financial software is, so if it doesn't come with Quicken I may use what comes with the Mini. Next I'll have to see if I can find an archive where I can download the compleat version of, or find a disk with, IE so I do some testing.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There's an entire industry of web app developers out there who wouldn't know browser portability if it walked up and told them its name.
That's unfortunately too true. Though I don't work in the industry now I am studying and working on it and hope to be able to work in it while working on my degree. I just got Jeff Zeldman's 2nd ed of his "designing with web standards" and am looking forward to working my way through it. Now I'm waiting to get a new MacBook Pro with the Merom processor.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Whether any of them are native ports to MacTels yet I don't know but there are a number of CAD tools for Macs. I even found a community of Mac using CAD designers when doing a search sometime back. On obviously a specific shop may require the use of a package only available on a PC.
* IT feels their job is to dictate technology
I've heard somewhat the opposite from IT people, complaints that the head office or something wants IT to use something specific when a better alternative exists. As with many other things it's possible for the pendullum to swing both ways.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That's something I'm hoping to see in Leopard, the ability to run Windows apps without also running Windows or CrossOver, with the Windows APIs in the OS.
Should there be a Law?