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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Bordeaux 2009 year end roadmap

I thought this would be a good time for us to share our next six months outlook for Bordeaux. Maybe I should start with whats taken place over the past few months then go over our future goals.

Over the past six months it's has been extremely exciting times around here, we shipped Bordeaux for Solaris and now its allot easier for Solaris and OpenSolaris users to use Wine to run Office 2003, Adobe Photoshop and other applications on their systems.

We also have a Bordeaux beta for MAC users and this is where allot of energy has been going lately. Once Bordeaux 2.0 for MAC ships it will be easy and inexpensive for MAC users to run IE 7 and Microsoft Office on their beloved Mac's.

We also refreshed Bordeaux for BSD and Linux twice thus far this year and added QuickTime Player and IrfanView support. fixed a number of bugs and tweaked the install scripts for cleaner installs.

In the next few months, we plan to ship Bordeaux 2.0 and this is where 95% of our work has been focused. We started off by re-writing our build and install scripts so they were portable across all platforms. Then we bundled in Cabextract, unnzip and wget to get a feel of the bundling process. And with bundling in these tools it makes life allot easier for the end user as they don't have to go out ad install each tool on their system. It's just there and it just works.

In the past Bordeaux was a run of the mill "Wine frontend" and while their is nothing wrong with being just a frontend to Wine this approach causes massive head aches. Wine is released every two weeks and over just a couple months their are numerous versions that need to be supported. Some people stick with the stable Wine 1.0.1 version that came with their distribution while others install the latest version just after each release. And if you have used Wine for more then a month you know that what worked in one release isn't guaranteed to work in the next release.

So it has comes the point to where we need to also Bundle Wine with Bordeaux. This way we can focus on one version and test all of our supported applications against it. and not have to worry about the next Wine release breaking a application or feature. It's also opens up the availability for us to add in hacks and tweaks so certain applications and games run, or in some circumstances run allot better then with just plain stock Wine.

We have a number of hacks and fixes in the works, a hack depends on how you look at the situation in our 2.0 build and one of these new features will be the unsupported DIB Engine. We know it's not perfect but it will allow our customers to use it if needed. We will be able to support IE 7 and Microsoft Outlook in the near future with our own Wine bundle.

After the Wine bundle is complete and all of our current applications and a few new applications have been tested and gone through QA test we plan to re-write the frontend and make it extremely simple to install any application or game through the new UI.

After the new frontend is complete we plan to have our own application and game database and then tie it into the UI so you can instantly see what other peoples success was with any given application.

Here is two recent screen shots of Office 2007 running on OpenSolaris 200.06



Sound now works on Solaris



IE 7 running on Linux (Gentoo).


If Bordeaux is something your interested in we would ask that you purchase the current 1.8.2 version to help fund the next release. All of the above changes take one of two things time or money. And with your support we can invest in more hacking hours and have Bordeaux 2.0 ready for release in just a couple short months.

Keep in mind if you make the purchase now you get six months of upgrades, so you will also get version 2.0 and any service releases.

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