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

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

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