CrossOver Office for Mac

CrossOver Office will soon be available on OSX Intel machines and it is looking pretty good. CrossOver use the Wine libraries to reproduce the Win32 command set on non-Win32 operating systems (most famously Linux). It all runs quite well but the result does look ugly at times as the Windows look and feel often doesn't sit well with more up to date visual styles. Whilst what comes out of this latest pairing may at times have the visual characteristics of a swan/pig mutant it will at least get useful tools like Microsoft Visio running in OSX without virtualisation. This is good as running virtualised software is expensive on both the processor and your wallet (technically you should buy two operating systems). Hopefully this means with Wine on OSX maturing we may see a OSX version of Picasa from Google based on Wine, I don't think it could seriously compete with iPhoto in terms of OSX integration but at least it would provide an worthwhile alternative for people who do not like iPhoto or who are used to Picasa on other platforms.

The other good news from all this is that OSX-based Wine development will also begin to open up the Windows gaming platform environment to Mac users without having to always resort to Bootcamp. I have tried playing around with Cedega on Linux which implements the DirectX framework within Wine but had mixed success and the successes I did have were often limited. Still it is all promising stuff and the more Windows applications that can run on platforms other than Windows the better.