CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac: “The Real Dirt”

CodeWeavers has put together a comprehensive look at CrossOver Mac, in terms of what CrossOver Mac does and does not do. If you are interested in CrossOver Mac, which is a compatibility layer instead of true virtualization software, you should check this out. Compatibility layers offer something different than a typical virtualization application – for some people this maybe exactly what they are looking for.

Excerpt:

At CodeWeavers, we believe strongly in truth in advertising. This section is an honest appraisal of what CrossOver Mac can and cannot do, written after review of our own testing and what our testers have found. Hopefully this will help you to determine whether or not CrossOver is for you.

Just the Highlights:

* CrossOver Mac is a product with amazing promise. You can install Windows software easily, the program launchers should appear in the finder, it integrates nicely with the file system, it can run any type of program, including games and other complex software. And all of this without having to buy or run a copy of Windows.
* The catch is that CrossOver doesn’t run every Windows program, and some programs that do run, run with flaws.
* However, CrossOver does work very well for many people, so it is always worth a try. And when you do run into a problem, we have many excellent systems to help you triage that problem, including our compatibility center and our support systems.

Rest of the article

CrossOver Mac 6.0 – Limted Beta Version 3

From the CrossOver Mac 6.0 team:

From Jeremy White’s posting in the CrossOver Mac forums:

I’m happy to say that we’ve now made a public prerelease version of CrossOver Mac 6.0 available for your testing pleasure. A summary list of changes is available below.

At this point, we feel we’re finally beginning to converge on a final 6.0. We still have some major issues we hope to solve, mostly with programs like Quicken 2007.

However, we hope this build brings a lot of joy, particularly in fixes for service packs, Outlook 2003, Quicken versions prior to 2007, and with some Half Life 2 fixes.

We’re also hoping to confirm that we’ve made progress on non US locales, particularly European and Japanese environments, which should now be working reasonably well.

Major issues we will continue to work on are around Quicken 2007, and just general polish and clean up of a variety of applications (e.g. End Note and others).

I’m particularly interested in Outlook 2003 use in Exchange environments. In all of our testing, this seems to be working pretty well. I’d really appreciate test reports on your experiences with it.

At any rate, thanks for your interest and help. We’ll be watching the beta reports and forums more closely, please direct your feedback there.

Cheers,
Jeremy
—–

* CrossOver Mac 6.0.0beta3 Fixes
- Improved CD-handling: Now CrossOver should be able to detect and interact with all removable volumes and dynamically assign
drive letters to then. The ‘eject’ button should work better as well. All in all, multi-CD installs should work much better.
- Rearranged the panels in the Bottle Manager; added a bottle description field.
- Changed the GUI feedback during the deletion of a bottle.
- Fixed icons in the control-panel.
- Improved locale support — now the Windows locale should match the OS X locale.
- Fixed a few keymapping problems. Shift-arrow selection should now work properly, and non-US keyboards may work better.
- Added default association handling so that .pdfs and such arepassed to the system for opening.
- Fixed an occasional crash in Half-Life.
- Redesign of menu and Applications/CrossOver handling.
- Menus should now vanish when applications are removed.
- Added the first part of a User Guide.
- Partial redesign of the Bottle Manager dialog

General CrossOver fixes and improvements:
- Fixed network play in Half-Life 1.
- Fixed a bug with window sizing in Quicken
- Fixed problems with some Quicken versions that cause windows to become non-responsive.
- Fixed several issues with the connection between Outlook and Exchange.
- Office 2003 service packs can now be installed.
- Slipstream editions of Office 2003 can now be installed.
- Fixed popup menus in Photoshop

CrossOver Mac 6.0 Beta 2

CodeWeavers has announced the second beta of CrossOver Mac 6.0 (beta 2). This includes several fixes, including Microsoft producters (fixes for Internet Explorer being one of the more significant changes).

You can download it here.

Announcement at crossover.codewavers.com:

Hi Folks,

I am happy to announce that we have put up a new version of our public beta of CrossOver Mac as well as an equivalent public beta of CrossOver Linux.

For Mac users, this release includes fixes to Internet Explorer, fixes for many cases where programs would crash when run (e.g. Microsoft Office 2000 and similar older applications), fixes for Outlook 2003, and a range of other improvements.

Read more

Macworld UK Article: CrossOver lets Windows apps run on OS X, sans Windows

Macworld UK has an excellent write-up about CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac, and how it relates to Parallels Desktop and Apple’s Boot Camp.

CodeWeavers has announced plans to release CrossOver Mac this summer. The $60 software will allow Intel Mac users to run Windows applications – including some games – without having to buy or install Windows itself.

Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop both provide this capability for Intel Mac owners already. Boot Camp, software from Apple currently available in beta form, makes users reboot their Macs and run Windows. Parallels Desktop iis a ‘virtualisation’ utility that enables the Windows operating system and Windows applications to run in Mac OS X, within another window (or, alternately, in full screen mode).

CrossOver Mac will take this one step further – it eschews what CodeWeavers chief operating officer Jon Parshall calls the “box within a box approach”.

“What you see running is an application sitting in your Dock or your Applications folder,” Parshall said.

Both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop work because the new Macs utilise the same microprocessor that’s found in Windows-compatible computer, and CrossOver Mac employs the same basic principle. This wasn’t possible before January, when Macs depended solely on PowerPC-based microprocessors made by IBM and Freescale. The presence of an Intel processor inside the Mac forges a close enough resemblance to get Windows and Windows applications to work.

Full article.