"In theory, it's the holy grail," White said. White acknowledged that the Wine technology remains imperfect. White said about 100,000 people use the CrossOver Office product. Its main product has been its CrossOver Office for Linux, which uses the Wine technology to run, among other programs, Microsoft Office. The move to the Mac is new, but CodeWeavers has been trying to find a commercial market for Wine technology for three or four years now. "That's why it is so hard, and why not so many applications work," White said. ("Wine" used to stand for "Wine is not an emulator"-a mind-bending nonacronym along the lines of the GNU Project's "Gnu's not Unix.") Developers at CodeWeavers and others on the open-source Wine effort have to work on each program they want to make compatible. Its focus is on application compatibility, not device drivers, so things like printers don't work with the Windows applications.Īlso, Wine is a compatibility layer, not a true emulator, so it works with only some Windows programs. However, it also has significant downsides. White said CrossOver Office has one big advantage over those other options: Using it doesn't require the purchase of a copy of Windows.
#BETTER THAN WINE FOR MAC FOR MAC#
Though the move to Intel has already opened up Windows options for Mac users, the planned release of CrossOver Office highlights the fact that Apple's systems are becoming far more compatible with the Windows world. "We would have loved to have been the only solution out for a while." "It's unfortunate we couldn't get it out before," White said in an interview. CEO Jeremy White said he would have liked to have seen his product out before the rivals.
#BETTER THAN WINE FOR MAC MAC OS#
A company called CodeWeavers is using an open-source technology called Wine to allow some Windows programs to run under Mac OS X.ĬodeWeavers is in early testing with CrossOver Office for Mac now and plans to release a final version of the software in July or August. Soon there will be yet another option, which, unlike the current choices, doesn't even require a copy of Windows. Meanwhile, start-up Parallels has released software that lets the Microsoft operating system run in a separate virtual machine with only a slight loss in performance. For one, Apple has its own Boot Camp software, which lets Intel-based Macs boot up with either Windows or Mac OS X. There was only one option: running Virtual PC emulation software.īut with Apple Computer's shift to Intel chips, the pool of options has expanded considerably.
It used to be that running Windows programs on a Mac was a slow, painful process.
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