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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 price you pay covers 6 (or 12 depending on which plan) of support and updates. Past this period, you can still download software you were allowed to but not new software.
Support is quite good. As opposed to almost any other company I know, they speak English and Hacker (Unix meaning off the word) not corporate (or maybe they know that language, I never initiated a conversation in it). And support also covers fixing any bug that prevents your apps from running if they were garanteed to work.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Mathematica for Mac OS X is universal.
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.
Try using both. I usually have to fight with Wine to get it to run something properly, but whenever I demo Codeweavers it usually just works.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
The big problem with Parallels is that it is very RAM hungry. Seriously I have 1.5 GB and the virtual memory swapping when I click on parallels is simply amazing. Anything less than 2 GB is painful. So running Windows and expecting to painlessless switch between windows is a bit of a pipe dream. Don't get me wrong. I love it - it lets me run my Quickbooks and Visual Studio without booting into Boot Camp. But seamless it is not.
A lot of that depends on how much RAM you assign to the VM. I run Parallels and only give the virtual machine 256 MB of RAM. As a result, my OS X experience is perfectly smooth, but things are a little choppy inside the VM. I'm running very lightweight stuff inside the VM, though, so that works fine for me. You might try tuning how much memory you've assigned to the VM until you reach a point where you're happier about the balance between host and guest OS performance.
Guess what: most Windows applications make lousy Mac applications. They break interface guidelines; they look and work clumsy; they don't use wonderful APIs like Cocoa text input; they don't integrate with the rest of the system. To be sure, some "native" ports make all the same mistakes, which is hardly better than running the Windows version in emulation mode.
So from the user's perspective, what you're really recommending is that software developers make crappy applications for Mac users instead of good applications. (And, uh, pocket the "savings".)
Somehow, that doesn't sound like advice that will lead to much success or many savings. You'll lose out to a well-designed app every time.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I suppose it's redundant to point out that Apple do not make consistent interfaces. Whether they are "superior" or not depends largely on your taste, I personally can't stand iTunes.
Believe it or not, for people who don't take operating systems religiously things like features, performance etc usually win out over interface consistency. There are plenty of happy users of Picasa, which doesn't look native on any platform even Windows. Besides, ironically the only OS today that actually has a consistent UI is Linux, if you stick to GNOMEish/GTK+ apps. Out of the box Ubuntu - for instance - is basically consistent. Out of the box, both Windows and MacOS X ship with a bunch of apps that look different to the norm.
Those are the most commonly used apps because Crossover currently is used by Linux users. IE6 is pretty valuable incidentally - depressingly, it's one of the most commonly required apps for desktop Linux migrations in business. 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.
The real value of Crossover is the fact that it can, in fact, run many other apps just fine. The ones you listed are the supported ones, ie the ones they promise will work. There's a big database called C4 which shows you which other apps have been tested .... some won't work, others will. If there is an app you want to run you can check to find out if it works, and often it will quite well but don't try guessing, it's a bit hit and miss.
As time goes on, the idea is that more and more apps start working. In practice, this happens quite slowly because a lot of effort in recent years has gone into eliminating reliance on downloaded Microsoft components like MSI, which are still provided for Windows 98 users but will one day disappear. Still, a massive amount of code and improvements goes into every Crossover release - much of it written by CW employees but also a lot comes from the WineHQ community. There has definitely been a lot of progress in the last few years.
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.