CrossOver Revisited - OSX
October 15, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
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Categories: OSX, Puter Stuff
My previous post inspired me to check-in on how the CrossOver team at Codeweavers is doing. I’d purchased a few licenses from them in the past and have a bit of experience in a corporate environment, with their strengths and numerous shortfalls for the monumental task they are attempting.
For those that aren’t aware, CrossOver is a commercial version of Wine, and does include numerous things that make your life easier. The big catch is to search the CrossOver compatibility database for what applications you want to run, and see if and how well they are supported.
For example MS Office 2000 is given a Gold star which means it runs as if it was on MS Windows. Two issues with that, one is I don’t think you can even buy MS Office 2000 anymore and the second being it does not run as well as on Windows. I had a rather large test bed environment and while the applications did technically run on Linux, MS Word and Excel did not run well for the power user.
Despite my own problems with it, I’m still interested in their work and was excited to see they have a new product offering - Crossover Mac. It’s currently beta and available for pre-order and trial 60 day download.
I decided to take a peak at the compatibility database and see if anything new was being supported. The two big applications for the small and home business have always been MS Office and QuickBooks. It looks like, those two are still problematic with outdated versions being supported for Office and QuickBooks having no Gold support. In the past I had to support numerous QuickBook users and versions including Intuits “Enterprise Edition”. QuickBooks is quirky enough running natively on MS Windows that supporting them via CrossOver has to be incredibly difficult.
My own problems with CrossOver which were MS Office specific aside, many people have been quite satisfied with the features and abilities CrossOver offers.
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