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

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.