![]() Now, there are two commercial, popular, and well-supported windowing environments that let you easily run Windows applications alongside regular Mac applications: VMware Fusion and Parallels, both of which are available for about $60 (links go to Amazon product pages). That’s something to think about if want to do your part in the open-source community, save a few bucks, or if the software that you really really want to use doesn’t work just yet. If you are willing to help Codeweavers beta test– by becoming an advocate for a particular piece of software, you can even get free access to the latest CrossOver software. How can you know if your program will work if it isn’t yet on the list? You can download a 30-day free trial version (with registration– spamless, in my experience), which is unrestricted except for the expiration date– sufficient time to make sure that it works with that one esoteric program that you want to use. What they really need are more users to help to try out programs and rank their performance, and to help the developers find bugs that they can squash. One thing that is abundantly clear is that there isn’t any report yet for the vast majority of programs. There is also a longer list of programs that work albeit with minor issues and a genuinely short list of programs known to not run at all. ![]() To address this, the developers maintain a ranked database of programs tested with Crossover.Ī handful of programs are “officially supported” to run under Crossover (Microsoft Outlook, Half-Life 2, Quicken, … ) and a few dozen others have been tested and shown to work just fine. (Note: All the ones that *I* tried happened to work just fine). ![]() The down side of course is that not every Windows program will run correctly in the Wine environment. (There is a big gulf between running well and running fully native.)Ĭodeweavers also makes a version for Linux, bringing a simple transparent Wine compatibility layer to that platform as well. Naturally the menus of Windows apps remain attached to their windows– but that’s life in windows-app land. And, the very best thing that you can possibly say about a program like this is true: It is easy to forget that you are using it. It runs in its own window just like any other program does. From then on, you just double-click your program in the Finder to open up your application. You install new programs the usual way– e.g., download and double-click the “.EXE” installer. Working with applications that run under Crossover is nearly transparent. It’s called Crossover Mac, and it’s $60 from Codeweavers.Īnd the verdict? It’s not for everyone, but it’s a great start. It turns out that there is even a Parallels-like virtualization environment so that you can run programs programs in Wine alongside Mac programs. ![]() So why not look at Wine? Wine is a venerable software compatibility layer that allows unix-like operating systems to run programs designed for Windows. And, while contemplating the $200-$300 cost of a legitimate Windows license, it might occur to you that the goal in this case is to run a program that runs under Windows– not actually to run Windows itself. I recently came across an esoteric “Windows only” electrical engineering program that I wanted to run on my Mac (LTspice/SwitcherCAD III - more about that later). You can do this using Apple’s Boot Camp utility, or through virtual machine programs such as Parallels. One of the nice things about having an Intel-based Mac is that you can, in principle, run a variety of operating systems including Microsoft Windows.
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