OSNews

(never mind)

Edited 2006-06-30 21:30

Despite its name, Cross Office is not restricted to MS Office, officially supporting more applications. Some of those are available for Mac OS X (iTunes, Photoshop, etc) but some are not.

The Mac version of MS Office doesn't have Access does it? I think this is a real shame as in my opinion Access is the best part of office.

Is this, MS using Office to help its OS? - probably not just being paranoid – anyway well done the WINE project, and Crossover Office.

It's probably a deliberate anti competitive play by MS not to release Access for Mac. However, if what you need is an end user database product, Filemaker, which runs in native mode, is far superior to Access, and the version which generates standalone apps has become quite affordable.

People have probably well founded technical objections to Filemaker, but there is nothing to touch it in terms of ease of use and speed of getting your app up and running if you are an end user.

If you're a real developer, it will probably drive you nuts!

I don't think it's all that deliberate really. Macs are just not common business desktops like PCs. MSO Mac has Word, Excel, Powerpoint & Entourage (Outlook) - the apps most used and needed by most users. MSAccess, Infopath etc are very business scope and the effort of porting would probably not be worth it.

Or conversly MS is delibiratly trying to keep Apple out of the business space by not porting certain key apps.

Apple might not be worried about getting into the business space, but I am sure if there was a Mac version of Access there would be more Macs in the work place.

I think Access wasn't ported because the big-endianess of PPC chips would have made it much more difficult to port than something like Word. DBs have to get very low-level for performance reasons, while the rest of Office shouldn't have to worry about that nearly as much.

last build of Darwine i tried required apple's X11, and started X11 when a windows app was launched.

I read that they were trying to get rid of the X11 dependancy on the MacOS X port. It was a few months ago on some article on the CodeWeavers website. IF I find it again I'll link it.

is EVIL codeweavers spreading FUD against wine!?

of course wine is not "true" emulator... WINE Is Not Emulator at all!

I am running Parallels Workstation right now and can watch videos on it, so I am not sure what you are referring to. In fact, I haven't found any Windows programs that can't run on Parallels and can in Bootcamp. Some games will run slowly because there is no 3D acceleration, but they will still run. And hardware is a totally different story (some USB devices just don't work in Parallels).

Picassa runs under Crossover Office Intel mac

You know there is a native MS Office version for Mac, don't you ?
No need to run Wine (or anything else for that matter), only MS Office for Mac strait on Mac OS X.

BTW.: Office was first released on Mac before it was on Windows !
(Word was allready available as a DOS application though)

I know, I was being sarcastic

True - There is a Mac version of Microsoft Office suite, but some applications are missing.

Thanks CodeWeavers, this is a great. I use Visio a lot and always have to move my work from the iMac to the ThinkPad whenever I have to work with it.

Nevertheless, I hope CrossOver Office is better implemented in OS X than it is in Linux, where the application is far from perfection, IMHO.

Regarding the article itself, I found out very interesting the last sentence:
"Parting with money is just not part of the Linux way", White said.

It this is what most ISV think about Linux? If yes, it is easy to understand the lack of commercial applications in the Linux world.

Hmmm,that comment does bother me, though you can't argue with the fact that Mac users are used to paying through the nose for pretty much everything and so probably wouldn't be worried about shelling out for Crossover.

There is one thing stopping me from paying for Wine, the god-awful UI, written in TCL/TK or something along those lines, if they simply implemented those GUIs in a more GNOME compatible way with GTK i'd be much happier.

I want a more polished product, Codeweavers wouldn't expect to sell to the mac crowd if they hadn't done something to make crossover look and behave, at least partly, like a Mac program, why don't we linux users, used to a polished Desktop environment like GNOME enjoy the same experience?

The article touchs on the fact that "Apple's systems are becoming far more compatible with the Windows world" Yep, nearly as good as standard PCs running Linux and either VMware, Dualbooting or using Crossover office for windows compatibility, not to mention terminal services in large organisations.

Does the fact that the screenshot in the article has an X in its titlebar mean that it's running atop X11? It obviously doesn't make sense to go to all the trouble of tearing Wine away from its X roots just yet.

"There is one thing stopping me from paying for Wine, the god-awful UI, written in TCL/TK or something along those lines, if they simply implemented those GUIs in a more GNOME compatible way with GTK i'd be much happier."

Wine uses its own implementation of the Windows API and draws its own widgets. This is necessary to acheive the greatest compatibility with Windows apps. Some progress has been made in themeing support, but I'm not sure where that currently stands.

Wine uses its own implementation of the Windows API and draws its own widgets. This is necessary to acheive the greatest compatibility with Windows apps. Some progress has been made in themeing support, but I'm not sure where that currently stands.

The parent poster was talking about CrossOver UI, which indeed looks like a TCL/TK script with a bunch of bitmaps here and there. Windows apps draw their own widgets following the win32 API, just like you said, regardless if they're running a top of straight wine or CxOffice.

Others could argue for a nice QT-based gui, instead of an ugly GTK+ gui, but that's just as much flaming as you did. Please keep in mind there's more than Gnome on Linux.