CodeWeavers Staff Blog

Celebrating Wine 1.2 with a public Beta

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:35:00 -0500

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

Stamping out Wine 1.2

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:13:00 -0500

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

Full Steam ahead with 9.0 beta

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:01:00 -0500

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

The needs of the one...

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:53:00 -0600

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

The Road Map for 2010

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:05:00 -0600

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

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