Last Friday the Wine Project shipped Wine 1.2. This was the work of 328 people in over 23,000 separate patches over a span of two years.

CodeWeavers is proud to be a major part of that effort and we're thrilled to see Wine reach this milestone. This represents a major step forward for Wine; you can see the full list of accomplishments in the announcement. My personal favorite is the spiffy new icons.

The CrossOver products already contain most of those changes, as we roll our work on Wine into CrossOver as we go. However, we are hard at work on CrossOver 9.1 and CrossOver Games 9.1, which will contain all of Wine 1.2.

By way of celebrating, we're making beta versions of CrossOver 9.1 and CrossOver Games 9.1 available to all current customers. If you are a current customer, you can download the beta from your account.

Of course, we only recommend the beta for folks that enjoy bleeding edge software. If you don't enjoy the thrill of something right on the edge, you should wait a week or two until we finish putting the polish on the official 9.1 releases.

Cheers,
Jeremy

(3 Comments)

Everyone in the Wine community is driving to release Wine 1.2; the newest and best version of Wine.

It's been two years since Wine 1.0, and we've really made huge strides. This version will include the beginnings of genuine 64-bit support, along with major Direct3D improvements, and improvements in a huge number of other areas.

Since the majority of CodeWeavers staff are Wine developers, that means we're busily working on Wine 1.2 ourselves. Further, we're working to roll Wine 1.2 into CrossOver 9.1 and CrossOver Games 9.1. We are really happy with the improvements and think this is going to make the very best CrossOver release.

Of course, you might wonder, when is Wine 1.2 going to come out? And when is CrossOver 9.1 going to come out? Reasonable questions, and one you think we'd be able to answer.

However, it's not that easy, because of the unusual relationship we have with Alexandre Julliard, the maintainer of Wine. That is, while he is our CTO, and helps enormously with CrossOver, we also have a clear understanding that he is completely autonomous in his role as the Wine maintainer.

So when we ask him, in his role as Wine maintainer, when Wine 1.2 will ship, he simply tells us 'when it's ready'. He goes on to discuss regression counts, and productivity of developers, and so far as I know, how the tea leaves look to him. This drives James, our VP of Sales absolutely crazy, which perhaps is the point.

So the official timeline for CrossOver 9.1 is one tad after 'when it's ready'.

Cheers,
Jeremy

(3 Comments)

Software guys are often accused of wanting to spend too much time polishing their beloved programs. I'm very guilty of that myself, and that's doubly hard because of our work on Wine. While Wine is amazing, it's not perfect, so there is a challenging balance in deciding that we've made enough progress to justify a release. Of course, if you let us software guys decide, we'll take forever and never ship anything.

Luckily for our gaming customers, Valve has forced our hand. That is, they have released an entirely rewritten version of Steam today. And, unfortunately, it does not work at all in our existing CrossOver Games releases. And since Steam is a large part of what our customers use CrossOver Games for, we've been forced to rush out a release to provide that support. We've been in a mad scramble this past month; Wine did not run the new GUI at all. We finally fixed it last week, just in time for the production launch by Valve.

So I am happy to announce that we're making a beta version of our CrossOver Games 9.0 release available today.  We're feeling pretty good about it; it runs the new Steam GUI, and quite a few games work very nicely. However, we really haven't had much time to test it or shake out any problems. So we really recommend it only for customers that need to use the new Steam GUI.

We hope to ship the 'real' 9.0 very quickly; if you're not using Steam, please give us a bit more time for that picky polish .

Cheers,
Jeremy

(9 Comments)

I realize that it's trite for anyone in the computer industry, but I have to confess to being a life long fan of Star Trek.

Now, mind you, I don't know Klingon, I don't own a starfleet uniform, and I don't routinely go around quoting obscure Ferengi dialog. So there are many that would say I don't really qualify as a trekkie (or trekker, although I do know that it's a point of debate :-/ ).

But my wife and I have watched every episode and every movie, and we've enjoyed sharing many of the episodes with our kids.

So when Cryptic offered an opportunity to beta test Star Trek Online, I jumped at the chance. With a lot of hard work the team here and some help from Cryptic, we were just able to get it running in Wine.

Further, I discovered as I played the game, that it's fun, and 'missions' is a better game metaphore than 'quests', in my humble opinion. That is, in World of Warcraft, I always felt like I was a dog, and each quest was an instruction to 'fetch'. And why on earth does Lieutenant Farren Orinelle need so many Merlock heads? But rescuing a freighter seems like a legitimate thing to do, and if you have to destroy a bunch of Orion ships on the way, well that sort of makes sense as well.

So I'm hoping that my wife and I can play this game for a while. But in order for that to happen, I've got to have a release of CrossOver to use to play it. So I put together an unsupported build, and did some basic testing, trying not to take anything away from our efforts on 'Snow Mallard'. It runs Company of Heroes more nicely, but seems to cause trouble with Left 4 Dead 1 and 2.

Then I asked the support staff here what they thought I should do. They were a bit concerned; they felt that any benefit from Star Trek Online would probably be overshadowed by the support issues from folks who didn't read our warnings. So they requested that we not ship it, and take some time to polish it up more properly, probably requiring that we wait until after we had shipped Snow Mallard.

But in this case, I decided that the needs of the one (me) outweighed the needs of the many (our support staff) .

So, if you want to try Star Trek Online, you can learn how to do it here.

But please be kind to our support staff - it's not their fault!

Cheers,
Jeremy

(3 Comments)

I thought I'd start the year fresh with a road map of what we hope to accomplish in 2010.

Early in the year, we plan to bring out 'Snow Mallard', our new platform for CrossOver 9. This is going to be an exciting release for us for a variety of reasons.

Our Linux users will be excited to see the first ever revamp of the GUI; folks that are weary of the TK look should enjoy the fresh new GTK interface. We also think the user interface as a whole is going to be substantially better, both for Mac and Linux users.  It should feel faster and cleaner.

Next, we're going to make a major shift in the way we approach applications. CrossOver 9 is going to include the concept of 'Application Profiles'; a way to describe a given Windows application and all of its dependencies and quirks. This is going to allow us to expand the user interface to take advantage of all of the great work that has been done in the community areas of our compatibility center. This way, if one person discovers how best to run an application with CrossOver, they can easily share that information with all other users.

Essentially, in addition to directly supporting a limited range of applications ourselves, we're adding the ability for our community to help dramatically expand the number of applications that 'just work'.

Additionally, CrossOver 9 will reflect a year's progress in Wine. This means more applications will run, and applications that ran before should run more cleanly. We're particularly focused on Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. With proper support for Excel Macros and a number of other Office features, we feel that Office users will appreciate CrossOver 9 very much.

After we ship CrossOver 9, we'll quickly ship CrossOver Games 9, which will have the same core engine and updates to a variety of games. We're hoping the new system will enable us to more cleanly support Lord of The Rings Online, and we're looking to improve support for Modern Warfare 2, and perhaps some titles such as the upcoming Star Trek Online.

After that, we'll need to focus on Microsoft Office 2010, and we're going to continue our work on Office 2003, 2007, and Internet Explorer.

But more than likely, our year is going to be consumed by the changes we're going to start in CrossOver 9. The plan is for CrossOver to integrate directly into the Compatibility Center, so that tips and tricks can flow directly from the work of one of our Advocates into a simple and easy install for one of our customers. Hopefully, this will make it that much easier for our users to run an ever expanding pool of Windows software.

Finally, I want to repeat that none of this would be possible without all of the support we receive from our customers and our advocates. Thank you all; I hope we can continue to sustain our work on Wine and CrossOver and continue to deserve your support.

Cheers,
Jeremy

(14 Comments)