Codeweavers have released the first beta release of CrossOver Mac, yet another solution for running Windows applications on Intel-based Macintosh machines.
At the moment, there are a couple of solutions for people that want to run Windows applications on their Intel Mac.
Apple’s official Boot Camp solution allows you to make your Mac a dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X system and you have to restart to use any Windows applications. This of course, requires that you pay for a full (not upgrade) copy of Windows XP, which needless to say, is quite expensive and there’s always the pain of restarting to use a single Windows application.
There are also virtualisation solutions like Parallels Desktop, which runs a full copy of Windows inside a window on the Mac desktop. These will set you back the cost of Parallels and a full Windows licence as well. The benefit of virtualisation is no restarting is required, but the downside is that it’s slow, expensive and doesn’t integrate very well with your other Macintosh applications.
What makes CrossOver different is that it doesn’t require you to own a Windows licence. CrossOver is based on the open source Wine project, which historically has been used to run Windows applications on Linux.
Wine doesn’t emulate Windows or run a full-copy of Windows anywhere. Essentially, what the Wine project do, is they reverse engineer the Windows code libraries (DLLs), so that they can make their own versions which offer the same functionality. Then, you run Windows applications and point them to Wine’s libraries. If all goes well, the Windows application happily functions as intended, completely unaware it’s not running inside a real Windows installation. In geek terms, Wine are rebuilding the Windows APIs from scratch.
For quite a long time, Codeweavers has sold a CrossOver Linux product which essentially offers the same functionality as the freely available Wine, but with support and easy configuration for popular applications. However, the Linux-running-Windows-applications market isn’t exactly very lucrative for a number of reasons. First of all, historically a lot of Linux users are geeks – they don’t mind messing around with Wine to get it to play with Windows apps they need, and second a lot are very committed to using free and open source software, such that they will find free alternatives rather than running Windows apps within Linux.
With the Mac going to Intel processors, the market opened up for this commercial arm of Wine to go onto the Mac platform, and that’s exactly what Codeweavers have done. Mac users are generally less bothered about whether applications are open source or not, so they don’t mind running Windows applications (in some cases they may need Windows applications).
There are a few more differences between other Windows solutions and CrossOver. First of all, CrossOver is only guaranteed to run with a handful of Windows apps. While this does include heavyweights like many of the Office 2003 applications, Quicken and Lotus Notes, there is definitely room for more application support to come.
Your mileage will vary with apps not officially supported, but on purchasing CrossOver you do get 15 months of support which is a bonus.
Overall, I think CrossOver Mac is a very strong product. Particularly its price ($39.95) is a great selling point for CrossOver, especially when compared to the other solutions which both require a Windows licence. If they work on application compatibility (which granted isn’t an easy task) then CrossOver could well be a big player in the running-Win-apps-on-Mac market.
