Thursday, August 31, 2006 |
15:08 - Pour the WINE
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/
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Everybody's falling over themselves trying to figure out who can come closest to the Holy Grail of Windows functionality on a Mac within OS X. First it was Virtual PC, which was slow and crappy but the best anyone could do in emulation; but then with Intel came Boot Camp, and then Parallels, and then rumors of a Classic-like Windows environment in Leopard. But while the latter is vapor, CrossOver Mac is apparently real.
Essentially it appears to be WINE for Mac OS X, though that's hardly to belittle it; it seems to get the job done. It even supports 358 games. Real games, too, not just a million little clones of Solitaire and Tetris.
I've been using a MacBook Pro at my new job for this whole week, and Parallels is pretty slick; but the goal in running Windows is to run Windows apps, not to spend time booting up a virtualized Windows instance and bridging your devices and sucking up another DHCP address just beacause you need to run Visio. If you could just, you know, run Visio, that's 90% of what anyone needs to do in Windows anyway.
(The other 10%, and the sole reason why I installed a Parallels-ified copy of Windows on my machine, is to change your network password. Or so it would seem.)
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