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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."
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.
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
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.
iTunes for Windows allows WMA conversion.
A more useful Mac port of WINE would be Cider / Cedega from Transgaming. That way Macs could play windows games. As the the Mac gaming market is pretty poor with ports appearing months, years, or never after their Windows counterparts, it might prove to be a lucrative market. I would think that it would be far more lucrative than on Linux. Currently Cider appears to be pitched at developers so Transgaming are probably hoping to ship the runtime on the CD with the game rather than sell an all-purpose solution to the public.
They do know that language, and every employee in the company has a duty to do product support - even the Wine maintainer himself. So, if you are technically conversant you can usually get talking to the person who wrote the misbehaving code in question and there is also an IRC channel, #crossover on FreeNode, where you can go talk to the developers, CEO, support guys etc.
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.
Migrations usually require intermediate steps. For example, my company has a significant investment in mac software for my workstation to the tune of several thousand dollars. I need to work with some Windows only software for a new project. If I didn't already have a Windows box as well, it is cheaper to buy me a new laptop that can run the Windows software via Parallels or Crossover than to purchase new, Windows licenses for the software I use. For other people, they may have a thousand dollars invested in old video games and miscellaneous software. Until they run a mac, they don't know which of that software they will still want to use or what the cost of purchasing new versions will be. A few bucks for a virtualization environment is an easy, affordable solution.
I have to run both Windows and Mac only software every day to do my job. Right now that is accomplished with multiple computers. The PO is already in for my new MacBook, which will allow me to run Windows and Mac software as well as some custom Linux and OpenBSD systems. This will make my job more portable and require a lot less network bandwidth between the coffee shop and the office. It is also a lot cheaper than regularly upgrading three or more machines for me.
It is also interesting to note that when we hired a new sysadmin, experience with OS X was a requirement for the position. Our company does software development for really expensive network security solutions on Linux and OpenBSD.
...Which is annoying, since I'm usually running X11 anyway for stuff like GIMP. I'd much rather it just used the same X server, so I'd only need to run one instead of two.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz