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."

Comments

Re:Im not sure I understand..

[Red Alastor]

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.

Re:Win32 apps will run faster than OSX apps

[abergou]

Mathematica for Mac OS X is universal.

Actual facts

[gjh]

It's very nicely put together. Some thoughts...

• Software installation and allocation to WINE Bottles is very easy and so on, a nice experience
• It does not go as far as it might to give a 'Mac-like' experience, for example running apps do not get their own dock icons - but I suppose there would be little practical value since they don't have their own screen-top menus
• It uses X11 under the hood and mostly hides this. It asks you for the Apple installed disk to grab quartz-wm at install time, but Apple's actual X11 build is not used and presumably what does run runs on different ports
• It avoids silly things like anti-aliasing, so that Mac users can be happy knowing that "Windows apps are ugly". Having said that, all the important stuff like font metrics is spot on.

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.

Re:Why?

[IamTheRealMike]

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?

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.