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Codeweavers Releases CrossOver For Intel Mac
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 05, 2006 08:42 PM
from the schmootcamp-schmarallels dept.
from the schmootcamp-schmarallels dept.
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."
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Yes, but ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes, but ... (Score:5, Funny)
O
-|- ---- You
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That loud crack you heard was the joke passing supersonic velocities.
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Most tested apps (Score:5, Funny)
To whoever is tasked with trying to make Notes run... on Linux... on a Mac...
We feel for you man.
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Re:Most tested a pps (Score:2)
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While I personally prefer the OSX version of Word the fact is that Windows Word is faster and both Word and Excel macros don't work well with the Mac versions (and are actually be dropped in the forthcoming native version - although to be fair also on the 64bit Windows version. If you are running some custom Excel spreadsheet with lots of macros you may find it runs under Wine but not under OSX Excel.
iTunes now I'll grant you.
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Re:Most tested apps (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Most tested apps (Score:4, Funny)
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City of Villains (Score:2)
Re:City of Villains (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least you know your public loves you even if you can't get that particular piece of software to do what you'd like. Personally, I never get much attention when I'm installing software, but then maybe I don't do it with enough verve and flair.
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Re:City of Villains (Score:5, Funny)
I recommend a minimum of eight pieces of flair.
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in other news... (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, the guys over at CherryOS [drunkenblog.com] have announced that they have a new product...
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Well, maybe because it's worth supporting the people who are being paid to work on Wine. That "free" version is what it is largely because of Codeweavers.
People have this fantasy that all the great work in OSS is being done by volunteers. While there are certainly a lot of wonderful people that are contributing much work to many p
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Actual facts (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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...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.
It deserves some credit... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It deserves some credit... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This is based on the venerable WINE project and is a clean room reverse engineering of the Windows APIs. It has been around for many years and I doubt it is going to go away anytime soon. The only difference is a mac version is now beta testing.
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Altenate language input methods (Score:2)
Picasa (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Im not sure I understand.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Im not sure I understand.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Seriously--does anyone plan on using this? (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean? Lots of people use Macs for business, or *want* to use Macs for business. Usually (this is assuming an IT department who is reasonable, and more and more actually are), it boils down to one or two business critical applications that are Windows only. Some of the most common ones are:
* Microsoft Outlook (because Entourage is 98% of the way there... and that's not 100%)
* Microsoft Project
* Microsoft Visio
* Microsoft Access (and custom databases that have become "business critical"
* Internet Explorer 6 (with all its bastardized VBScript and
* CAD tools (Pro/E, SolidWorks, etc).
VM solutions like Parallels (and upcoming VMWare workstation) can do this, as can Boot Camp. But Crossover is lighter weight and works well also. Crossover is a very interesting and exciting option.
Again, this is predicated on whether IT permits it. I find IT departments are mostly divided into a couple groups:
* IT feels their job is to dictate technology -- they choose what's most convenient for them to control and manage, and put IT's needs in front of the users needs (i.e. users who want to run Linux or OS X on the desktop must fight and scratch and are sometimes locked out of the network altogether). CrossOver is no use here, nor is Parallels -- you offend the director of IT because he'll fall out of his l337 company with his Microsoft sales rep, and will also offend his staff of 43 MSCEs that are necessary to manage one Exchange instance
* IT who feels IT's job is to serve the needs of the business... basically they are willing to deploy and support solutions that have business value (I even heard one CIO say he let users use Macs because it was a competitive differentator when hiring... if a user could run a Mac all day at work he got more productivity out of them... this company ships tens of millions of DVDs to people in the mail every year... they're progressive
Crossover is perfect for the second case.
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Never underestimate support costs and their influence on corporate policy.
License costs (Score:3, Informative)
-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
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Moron.
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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
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A lot of that depends on how much RAM you assign to the VM. I run Parallels a
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And kiss your Mac-loyalist customers goodbye.
Speaking for myself, of course, but given a choice between a Mac-native application and a Windows-native-application-running-in-CrossOver/B
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Unless the opposite happens. CrossOver is based off of Darwine and Wine. Wine is licensed under the GNU Lesser Public License meaning unlike normal GPL stuff, you can link wine to closed sourced apps (or nonGPL open sourc
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So from the user's perspective, what you're really recommending is that software developers make crappy applications for Mac users instead of good a
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Mac users expect a superior interface. Among other things, that means consistency. A properly done Mac app has to follow the HIG. [apple.com] Emulated, virtualized, or poorly ported applications will always look like intruders.
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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.