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Saturday, May 3, 2008

CrossOver keeping up with Wine

While browsing CodeWeavers site today I came across this post by Jeremy White, the founder and CEO of CodeWeavers.
I thought I'd take a minute to go a little more in depth on our recent announcement of 'experimental' builds of CrossOver.

It is a very exciting time for Wine - we've been making great strides on our way to Wine 1.0, and I'm thrilled with that progress. But sometimes we struggle with the success and progress of Wine. We'll get customers that come to us and say "CrossOver stinks, Wine runs my application much better." And what can be deeply frustrating is that often Wine will run their application because of our work. This has long been a struggle for us; while we do a lot of the active development on Wine, we take a lot of time to refine that and polish it so that it works reliably before we ship a CrossOver release. Sometimes that makes people complain that CrossOver is old and dull when compared to Wine.

Of course, if you've ever done technical support, you know that dull is good.

But many of our customers don't want dull. They want latest and greatest, the more bleeding edge, the better. And since we're often doing the bleeding edge work, it can be frustrating not to be able to give our customers our very latest work.

So now we have a facility that lets our developers take control. Any developer can now request of our QA lead to have a development build 'blessed'. If the QA lead does a modicum of testing, and feels that it is good enough, then we'll put the build up. That should hopefully speed up the process of making experimental builds available, and allow our developers to more directly interact with our customers.
In reality the best way to support Wine is to purchase a copy of CrossOver for Games or Productivity applications. Personally, I look at a purchase as a small investment in the future of Wine and CrossOver. A small investment made today can go a long way in insuring the future of our favorite open source application.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I've tried CrossOver Mac and found to be a very powerful tool, with an easy to follow installation process, I highly recommend this to whoever wants to install Windows programs without having to waste endless hours. The issue is, CrossOver is behind Wine in Windows compatability, I understand that they are the major contributor to Wine, and one of the reasons they are behind Wine is to avoid any regressions that happen in the Wine code.

I think synchronyzing CrossOver with Wine should be done on a monthly basis (every other release) and design CrossOver in a way to avoid regressions as much as possible and allow for multiple versions of Wine, each bottle can have its Wine version, so a program that runs now, wont be affected by future regressions.

Another problem is, neither Wine nor CrossOver run Visual Studio (2005 or 2008) and Windows Mobile 6 SDK, these two are the only Windows apps I use, and if CrossOver runs them I'll pay for it, for every other thing I have a Mac alternative.