CodeWeavers Staff Blog

In honor of the great Lame Duck giveaway

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:37:00 -0500

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...

Cheers,
Jeremy

When to retire Tiger

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:14:00 -0500

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

Civil Rights for Zombies

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:53:00 -0500

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

The Vacation from Heck

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:24:00 -0500

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

The joy of small businesses

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:27:00 -0500

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

Living in interesting times

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:14:00 -0500

Last week, Google announced their newest operating system, Chrome OS. And the internet exploded with speculation and scheming about what it all means. But whether Chrome OS is a 'Windows Killer' or a big yawn, I don't care - I'm jumping up and down and celebrating regardless.

That is, I crave diversity, innovation, and freedom of choice. I believe that technology, particularly computer software, can drastically change the world for the better. And I believe that the more choices there are, the better. And to me, the emergence of products like Chrome OS signal the beginning of a new wave of innovation and choice in the technology field.

So you can bet that when Chrome OS comes out, we'll have an offering ready for it to enable folks to run their Windows applications on Chrome OS. And we'll be ready to help anyone else that wants to port their application to Chrome OS. That way, anyone that wants to make a different choice will have greater freedom to choose something new and exciting.

And I'll continue celebrating how it's so much fun to be a geek again!

Cheers,
Jeremy

The anatomy of a release

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:19:00 -0500

I am very happy to report that we've shipped CrossOver Mac 8.0 and CrossOver Linux 8.0.

As with all of our major releases, this has been a long and difficult process. Of course, we couldn't have done it without our fantastic beta testers and our great community of Advocates. Thanks guys!

It's interesting to compare and contrast this release with our original CrossOver Office 1.0 release. With that release, we were scrambling like mad; putting out new test releases every few hours. Our whole goal was to make Word and Excel operate nicely - that's all we cared about. We had no customers (and desperately needed them), so time pressure was killer. We went from idea to release in about 3 months. It was a great time to be at CodeWeavers - frightening, exhilarating, and great fun.

CrossOver 8 has been a year in the making (364 days to be precise :-/). When we start picking what goes in a release, we always look at our top lists. So Internet Explorer 7 was a given. But from there, it wasn't as clear. In truth, we're in a period of change at CodeWeavers. We're slowly shifting from running a few applications on Linux to running almost all applications on both Mac and Linux. And, of course, 'all' is a hard milestone to set for a release; you'll never ship with that goal.

At the same time, we've made some sweeping changes in our support infrastructure. Our secret Ninja Support Team has been enabling us to triage customer issues more completely. So I made the decision that CrossOver 8 would see a return to our roots - that is, I wanted to focus some attention back on our core applications - things like Microsoft Office and Quicken. It's been a hard struggle to make Office 2007 work as well as Office 2000 did, but I think we've largely crossed that bridge. I'm very pleased with how well Outlook 2007 is working for me (although the horror of using Outlook sometimes overwhelms my open source soul ).

More importantly, we're actively trying to raise the bar - so if you have any remaining issues with Outlook 2007, or any of the Office products, please file a ticket. We want to eliminate all remaining errors.

Of course, the 8.0 release remains drastically different from the 1.0 release. Twelve months instead of 3. The urgency was around not breaking things, instead of shipping quickly. And, while we did print out our famous 'Chicken List' (the list of things we do before release, traditionally running around like chickens with our heads cut off), everything went smoothly and without undue fuss (even with Andrew and I being out of town at key points).

So perhaps not quite as frightening, and maybe a bit less exhilarating. But still great fun!

Cheers,
Jeremy

Props for Our Advocates

Thu, 07 May 2009 11:34:00 -0500

One of the most powerful resources our company has is our community of Advocates. These are the people who voluntarily choose to help test CrossOver and then share their knowledge with other CrossOver users. They write the Tips & Tricks. They post on the Forums. Often, they find ways to get applications running when we simply don't have the time. In short, they are absolutely critical to the success of our Compatibility Center, which is one of our most valuable resources. As such, I'm pleased to announce that we've made a major set of changes in our Advocate program.

Some of these new features are modest tuneups our advocates have asked for, like being able to vote more than once, being able to easily advocate more applications, and having advocate ranks be more meaningful. However, the really fun stuff revolves around morphing our Compatibility Center into the MMO 'World of Compatibility' . No, this was not some sick idea of our World of Warcraft-addicted COO. Well, maybe it was. But whatever its genesis, we've built a whole system for recognizing our Advocates and their contributions. Because now, when Advocates help others by posting, or submitting beta reports, or just by being upstanding CodeWeavers citizens, they earn Experience Points that let them gain 'ranks' and show off to the world just how cool and helpful they are.

As part of this effort, we've gone back and combed through the forum posts and beta reports that our Advocates have made down through the years, and awarded XP based on prior performance. So, not all Advocates will start at ground zero; we appreciate these folks' past efforts too much for that. Thus far, the highest ranked Advocates on our 'realm' are the redoubtable Andrew Skinner, and the enigmatically named Mensch. Both have been duly accorded the rank of Raging Atomic Dragon Turbo Chief Senior Advocate. But even higher ranks await, and no doubt others will rise to seek their destiny. And if we find that we have to scramble and invent some new ranks; hey, we can make that happen. Jon, our COO, lives to make new icons.

Anyway, we hope that this will be seen as a fun way to thank and recognize our Advocates. I have to say I'm particularly proud of this change. We took a problem - how to detect and handle Advocates that weren't really living up to their end of the bargain - and turned it on its head by making it a positive for the folks who really help us. Not only that, but it was fun for Jeremy Newman, Jon Parshall, and our team of elite Support Ninjas to dream up a way to implement all of this. So, to all of our Advocates - thanks! You have our deepest gratitude, and hopefully a fun way to see how important you are to us.

Now we just have to start figuring out appropriate rewards for uber-high XP earners...

Cheers,
Jeremy

Another reason why this is so important

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:06:00 -0500

I've been in the business of trying to make Open Source into a business for about 10 years now. It's a long and hard process and I'm sometimes prone to bitterness and cynicism about it all, particularly when people just don't get it.

But I've recently read Bill Vass's blog about Open Source and our government. Bill makes a cogent argument that Open Source is superior because it is more secure than a proprietary solution. This reminds me that this whole proposition is about more than just making a living; it's also about doing things better. That is when I know we've really hit our stride - when people stop talking about this as a novelty, or as the cheap option, and instead really grasp that Open Source is just fundamentally better. Nicely, there is some real evidence that the U.S. administration is listening.

Perhaps I'll have to abandon some of that cynicism and bitterness after all...

Cheers,
Jeremy

Steady march to 8.0; builds for OpenSolaris and FreeBSD

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:29:00 -0500

We've been making good progress towards CrossOver 8.0. In fact, we are feeling confident enough about our progress that we put out a public release of the first beta. We've done this mostly for our customers that use Quicken 2006. This way, they can upgrade to Quicken 2009 before the support for Quicken 2006 expires.

While we're pleased with the progress on 8.0, we do have a good bit of work to do. Internet Explorer 7 requires some polish, and our efforts to make Office 2007 progress to Gold rating needs a good bit more work as well. Of course, all of our efforts and the efforts of the Wine community as a whole, mean that even this beta build represents a significant progress. I'm really looking forward to releasing a more polished version sometime in the next month or so - I think CrossOver 8 is going to be fantastic! (Okay, I'm admittedly quite biased, but hey, I still think it's going to be a great release ).

Additionally, I'm happy to say that we've leveraged Francois Gouget's hard work, along with a lot of work from the broader community, and have put out unsupported builds for FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. Hopefully this will help spread some CrossOver joy to folks that may have been feeling neglected. After all, it's a bit hypocritical for us Linux guys to fault BSD and Solaris for having low market share. And I feel that the BSD community has responded to my challenge.

Note: I don't recommend this beta for most customers. It is likely to be unstable, and cause other problems. This is really a bleeding edge build for fairly advanced users who don't mind taking on a bit of risk. But for those of you crazy enough to try it, enjoy!

Cheers,
Jeremy