Wednesday the 28th is the one year anniversary of our Lame Duck giveaway special, in which we gave away 650,000 copies of CrossOver, melted down our servers, and destroyed the US economy.

We're choosing to celebrate the anniversary in a variety of ways. First, we're going to launch a 'CrossOver is NOT Free' promotion starting on Wednesday.

Next, in honor of the Lame Duck, we have given our next two upcoming releases code names. 'Snow Mallard' is the upcoming version of regular CrossOver and 'Zombie Mallard' is the upcoming version of CrossOver Games.

Snow Mallard represents a radical departure for us. For the first time, we're going to embrace the reality that CrossOver runs many applications, rather than just a limited number. Instead of a fixed number of applications supported by CrossOver, CrossOver will be able to use 'Application Installer Profiles', which can come from us, or from the broader community. This should make it easier for our Advocates to bake tips and tricks right into an installation recipe.

Snow Mallard also includes a complete rewrite of the client engine, so everyone, particularly Linux users, should see a dramatic improvement in behavior.

Zombie Mallard will continue to build on the great games we support now, and add support for Left 4 Dead 2, once it's available.

The marketing guys also tell me we'll have a new video out tomorrow, something to do about the Lame Duck as well. But they won't tell me what it is; some kind of surprise...

So now that Snow Leopard is out and roaring, a debate is raging inside CodeWeavers about Tiger. With each release of Mac OS X, we have to tune CrossOver; we've yet to have a major release 'just work'. And at this point, CrossOver runs on all versions of Mac OS X that run on an Intel processor. But I'm getting a lot of pressure to drop Tiger support from the development team.

Supporting Tiger slows us down; there are more advanced techniques we don't use, because we need to remain backwards compatible with Tiger. Further, Tiger never really supported CrossOver that well; there is a nasty bug that causes a serious performance hit. Nicely, Apple fixed that in Leopard. Further, less than 10% of our customer base is still on Tiger. So there are a lot of reasons to drop Tiger support.

But, on the other hand, I hate to keep even one person from having CrossOver joy. And, being mercenary, it is often large organizations that stay with old versions of Mac OS X, so I know for a fact that the sales team is someday going to come to me demanding Tiger support. So I'd rather leave it in place than have to retrofit it 9 months from now when the sales team has a killer opportunity we just can't ignore.

So if anyone has any compelling stats on Tiger use or what other software makers are doing, I'd love to hear it.

Meanwhile, it's back to cranking on our next release, code name: 'Snow Mallard'.

Cheers,
Jeremy

So I think of myself as an open minded person, and I'm deeply passionate about securing rights for every person, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or operating system choice. (Although I'm not so sure about marriage amongst Windows users - is that really safe? ).

However, I just can't get behind the idea of Civil Rights for Zombies. Now I understand that Zombies were people, too, and that we should be open minded and considerate where we can. But, feeble as it may be, I'm remarkably fond of my brain, and don't care to have it eaten.

Perhaps history will judge us all harshly. Perhaps it would be more humane to establish zoos, where they could be safely watched, as we do with other predators, such as Snow Leopards. But that raises troubling questions as well - what would they eat? You could argue that Windows fan boys aren't really using their brains, and thus could be used as a food supply, but then you risk destroying the zombies from malnutrition.

No, I remain persuaded the only solution is to exterminate all the Zombies. So I'm gleeful that we now encourage wanton Zombie killing for users of all operating systems, not just Windows.

Cheers,
Jeremy

Each year, my family vacations in beautiful Door County, Wisconsin. In fact, my wife has been there every year but one of her life. It's a great vacation; we stay at a fantastic timeshare that my wife's parents own.

One year - the first time we took our older son there - we had what we refer to as "the vacation from Hell". Our son developed asthma and croup that week. This was long before we understood either ailment, so all we knew was that he was miserable and that three days of sleep deprivation mess you up. We finally fled in misery, late in the night, in a complete fog bank. It felt like a bad horror movie . We still have fond memories of a Shell station near Green Bay that was far enough inland to be out of the fog. Nicely, every year since, we've had idyllic vacations there, with great memories.

This past year, though, we've decided that the Prince of Insufficient Light darned us to Heck. Our vacation was mostly cheerful, but every day came with at least one thing that was not quite right. The weather was mostly nice, with only brief periods of rain. Of course, one of those brief periods were right during the 6 hours we needed to be out of our unit, when we traditionally bike through Peninsula State Park. So no bike ride for us this year.

Last year, our older son, who loves pancakes, airplanes and flying, went down to the local EAA chapter and got to eat pancakes and fly a plane. It was great - so great, in fact, that we took our younger son, who doesn't much like pancakes, but wanted to fly, down to give it a whirl. Of course, this year, they didn't have any qualified pilots, so there were no flights, only pancakes. No airplane flight for us this year, and 2 hours of wasted driving.

Next, we love to go see a sunset show at the Peninsula Players. This is a fantastic treat; professional theater, right on Green Bay. You can get a glass of wine and sit by the shore and watch the sunset, and then go in and watch a great production. This year, for whatever reason, they moved the Sunday production (which was the day we could go), to 4:00 instead of 8:00. The play was great, but no sunset for us this year.

Also, my in-laws traditionally hang out with the kids while we go out for a nice Italian meal. Each year, we've had a great experience, with great service and a relaxing meal. This year, the hostess ticked us off and the waitress double billed us. When we played our traditional post date game of pinball, the pinball machine was broken in a subtle way (you had to tilt to get it to move down the side alley). And the darning went on like that, day after darn day.

Of course, there was a lot of sun and sand and sailing and cheerful times, and if these remain the only things I have to complain about in life, boy am I one lucky son of a gun.

But I'm glad to be back at work, and hopeful that our efforts to ship CrossOver Games 8 aren't going to be darned in any way. Nicely, the early beta reports all look good, so I'm hopeful it's avoided the curse...

Cheers,
Jeremy

There are many frustrations running a small business. You don't have an army of accountants to deal with oddball tax problems . You don't have a large marketing department to run expensive ads on national TV. Your embezzlement choices are paper clips or pens, not millions of dollars in golden parachutes.

But there is a lot of joy as well. You get to pull together fun marketing campaigns. If you're bored of the grind, it's nice to knock off to go grab some shag carpet samples, and roll start an old car.

Last week was even more fun - our game developers told us that we were ready for some large scale testing on a lot of work they'd done. So I got to order everyone in the office to play games. Despite the fact that Left 4 Dead was playing perfectly, and everyone was laughing and enjoying themselves, they all insisted that more testing was required .

So, as soon as I make bail here in Seattle, drive home, and then we clear up a few bugs, we should have CrossOver Games 8.0 ready for your gaming pleasure.

Cheers,
Jeremy