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The Outlook for 2009

Tom Wickline pointed out that it has been 8 months since I had put out a road map. So I thought I'd take some time to review what we've accomplished in these past 8 months, and what we hope to accomplish through the rest of the year.

This has been an interesting 8 months. We've deliberately been working on some very 'unsexy' initiatives. For example, we've been focusing a lot of energy on some 'under the hood' improvements to Wine. Things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We've also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to 'Gold' level.

We have had some challenges; for example, we discovered, after working our heart out on a DIB Engine, that in fact, the DIB engine wasn't the magic bullet we were hoping for. (Instead, we've recently focused more energy on Gdiplus, and we're pleased with the performance boost that is giving things like Quicken).

One great result is that we're continuing to see a lot of broad success stories; an awful lot of applications just work better now than they ever have with Wine in the past.

We've just shipped a lot of those 'under the hood' improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We're really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10.

In the next few months, we'll be shipping CrossOver Linux 8.0, and CrossOver Mac 8.0. That revision of our flagship product will bring support for IE7, modern QuickBooks versions, Quicken 2009 (at a nice speed), Photoshop CS3, and many many other improvements, particularly around Microsoft Office and specifically Outlook.

After we ship version 8, and make sure we keep Games fresh as well, we're going to turn our focus to our next major revision. In addition to our normal work of broadening and deepening our application support in Wine, we're going to try to dramatically improve the CrossOver GUI itself. First, the Linux version will get a fresh new look. But both versions are going to get an interface that we hope will bring the power of the Compatibility Center right into the installation view. The key idea is to make it easier to distill the gathered wisdom on unsupported applications and make it far easier to use. I hope we'll have that available before the end of the year.

At any rate, we're looking forward to bringing you all of this work we've done - 2009 should prove to be a great year for CrossOver!

Cheers,

Jeremy

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Is there any specified release date as yet? or estimated release date. have been waiting for photoshop cs3, any other word on the whole suite?

I really hate giving out dates, because I'm often wrong, and I don't like to mislead folks. I'm afraid Wine work is mostly debugging, and debugging is really hard to predict correctly.

However, we do have a hard deadline we're going to meet in some form (even if it's only an unsupported build): Quicken users need to have 2009 support by the end of April. So we'll have something for sure by mid to end of April; either an unsupported build or an official 8.0.

Will we finaly see proper OSX support (meaning Cocoa), or are you still determined to leave it as slugish second rated X application?

We're working on what we call the Quartz driver, which will get you what you crave.

We will be very slow to integrate the Quartz driver, though, as it will likely break everything. (Working and slightly slower is better in our opinion that broken and slightly faster). Given that, the ETA for that is probably more likely to be 2010 than 2009.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Jeremy:
I look forward to the release of 8. Hopefully, this will be a Mac Native (AQUA) application and we can look forward to the end of one of the major reasons for X11 on Leopard.
Thank you for posting the roadmap and I agree with no dates, yet, as this can cause many problems.
James

Have you been working on ways to optimize direct x translation to try to lessen the performance penalty when running games in crossover games versus running the same games on Windows?

Ehm sorry for posting two comments, but I forgot abotu one question, what about a FreeBSD port?

Great to hear updates. We like updates and projections and there should be more of them. It keeps you guys on track and keeps us interested by being more informed. Though we wouldn't want to see you neglecting your coding/debugging duties just to write a blog of course. Definitely looking forward to IE7, Quicken's always nice to have and Office 2007 is a must. What I'd mostly like to see is better performance in games like TF2, I know you guys can get them up to BootCamp standard. Give it your best guys, you've got such a vital product for any user wanting to escape Windows hell!

Francois has actually done a bunch of work lately on FreeBSD, and so we're
close to having fairly solid support for it. We'll likely push out unsupported
builds for FreeBSD in the relatively near future.

Cheers,

Jeremy

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