Submitted by Jeremy White posted the CodeWeavers’ Outlook for 2009, explaining what the group has been working fervently on the past eight months as well as plans for the coming months of 2009. CodeWeavers develops and sells CrossOver, an application based upon Wine that can run Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux, specifically certain games and office applications. They’re also the leading corporate backer of the Wine Project. In the road map, White explains that the past eight months have been spent on unattractive, under-the-hood improvements to Wine, particularly “things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We’ve also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to ‘Gold’ level.” He goes on to say that DirectX 9 support is coming along nicely for the CrossOver Games project, and DirectX 10 is around the corner. The plans for the upcoming months include shipping CrossOver 8.0 for both Linux and Mac, which will include many improvements, the juiciest of which are centered around Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Office, and Quicken 2009. Aside from adding more and better application support in Wine, the GUI of CrossOver is supposed to get a hefty overhaul by the CodeWeavers team.
What made the work frivolous? Perhaps you meant fervently?
**smacking face against any and all hard and sharp surfaces**
And to think that I poke fun at people who use words, phrases, and grammar incorrectly. I feel like a hypocrite. A heretic. A lowly worm. I fervently try to avoid such linguistic sin.
At any rate, it’s fixed. Thanks are in order.
🙂
I’d really like to see the business plan for codeweavers. It never made any sense that they should “finish”. What they are doing however is a great plan, string people along with endless promises of finally getting all windows apps to work but never actually get there.
Also, someone already said this but I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean “frivolously”. Maybe assiduously?
Support CrossOver and their staff and you support the WINE project. What is the conflict.
You can say the same thing about any piece of software. There is no end because the target is continually evolving. There’ll never be a point in time where it’s finished, but as long as it runs the applications its customers desire to run, I’m sure they’re happy — it’s not like they’re kept in the dark as to what works and what doesn’t.
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/
Edited 2009-03-10 08:43 UTC
> the GUI of CrossOver is supposed to get a hefty overhaul
I think it’s about time. Windows apps in Linux/Gnome look like Win 98 apps. Windows apps need the native GTK look and feel in Gnome. Same goes for Windows apps in KDE, I suppose.
Other than that, it’s nice to see more and more apps supported. I’d like to be able to use DVBViewer and my Terratec Cinergy HT PCI DVB-T board on Linux though (but no Linux driver, it’s not Codeweaver’s fault).
Isn’t he talking about the CrossOver GUI itself? I don’t think he’s talking about the applications running through wine.
Oh, and there already is some (basic) themeing support in wine itself – run winecfg and look at the themeing section ..
Yes i don’t see why people are confusing the crossover GUI with the actual games/applications look.
Support for Outlook 2003 would be great – I would buy their product 🙂
I use TB for mail, but Outlook voor my calendar. Outlook is one of the main reasons why I still boot into Windows. Its superior calendaring features still have no match in OSS. For example, try to attach (not link) a file to an appointment or task in Sunbird or Korganize. I like to attach files such as invitation letters to my appointments.
Codeweavers supports OutLook here is the link to OutLook 2007 in their appdb.
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=2841
They want to have OutLook and all other MS Office apps at a Gold rank, Gold means the application runs exactly in CrossOver as it would on native Windows.
Thanks for the link. It looks like Outlook support is improved last year 🙂
I tried Crossover Games on my new Mac mini and without fail every game I tried on it had a major issue
(zoo tycoon 2, europa universalis 3, Rome, Total War)
I’m looking forward to giving the new version a go (keeping fingers crossed)as its a product I would like to support over the likes of vmware
Did you try Cedega?
Whereas I feel crossover are someone I want to support, I have the exact opposite feeling towards Cedega.
The list of games you gave are all unsupported, so its going to be hit and miss, but from my testing about 50% of all the games Ive tested runs to some degree. Of course some are better then others. Over the past couple years their has been major improvements in Wine’s DirextX and gaming support.
Their is a debate if Wine is now actually better at running games then Cedega, Eve Online ditched Cedega and told their users to use Wine as Wine has better support.
see: http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-reviews/wine/eve-online-ditches-li…
At the current development rate in another year or two maybe 75%+ of all games will run in Wine and this is in no way a small feat.
That is actually my experience, that most games run better in Wine than in Cedega. Granted, I’m not playing the latest and fanciest 3D wankfests and neither do I have an Nvidia card but the only came I can recall that Cedega ran but not Wine was Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project.
Indeed. This has been my experience as well. Wine/Crossover just plain works better than Cedega these days. Plus, I would use Wine (or even buy Crossover) rather than Cedega anyway, as I just plain don’t like people who take open source code, enhance it and proceed to give little or nothing back. Moving to LGPL and ditching the leeches was just about the best move the Wine project ever made, IMHO.
I am aware the Games I listed are not officially supported but then again they are by no means new… I expect(wrong word, but you know what I mean)older games to be 99% working.
Would wine not be well served to halt chasing the latest and greatest (dx10) and get DX9 working with a high compatibility level
Edited 2009-03-10 14:33 UTC
Sadly, that’s not a correct expectation. Older games don’t magically start working under Wine just because they’re old. In many cases they *do* start magically working because a patch for Game A also fixes problems in Games X, Y, and Z as well. So, it’s reasonable to expect that *eventually* older titles will start magically working, but eventually may or may not be any time terribly soon. Trust me, we all want Wine to be a magical silver bullet. And some day it will be. But it’s *bloody* hard development work. In fact, it’s probably *the* hardest development work on the planet, bar none. And as such it just takes a while to make that silver bullet become a reality.
Cheers,
-jon parshall-
COO
http://www.codeweavers.com
I do not doubt the work done is difficult and impressive in its achivement thus far
What my point was was that (in my opinon) trying to get directx9 fully supported would be a better and help more people then running after the moving target of DX10
obviously i am but one man with one voice, but it could be worth asking the question and seeing what others say 🙂