"The Real Dirt"

October 1, 2007

At CodeWeavers, we believe strongly in truth in advertising. This section is an honest appraisal of what CrossOver Mac can and cannot do, written after review of our own testing and what our testers have found. Hopefully this will help you to determine whether or not CrossOver is for you.

Just the Highlights:

• CrossOver Mac is a product with amazing promise. You can install Windows software easily, the program launchers should appear in the finder, it integrates nicely with the file system, it can run any type of program, including games and other complex software. And all of this without having to buy or run a copy of Windows.
• The catch is that CrossOver doesn't run every Windows program, and some programs that do run, run with flaws.
• However, CrossOver does work very well for many people, so it is always worth a try. And when you do run into a problem, we have many excellent systems to help you triage that problem, including our compatibility center and our support systems.

Tangible things you will get now for your money:

• Software, including an easy-to-use configuration program, that makes it possible to install and run any of the applications listed on our supported applications list. You can check our list of supported applications for full details, or better yet, explore our compatibility center for full details including user comments and ratings.
• A meaningful vote on our compatibilty center that will be respected.

Tangible things you will get in the future for your money:

• Support for 12 months

  For the 12 months after your purchase, you will be able to download all versions released and you will be able to obtain level 3 technical support. Upon the expiration of that time period, all customers will still be able to download the most current version of the software that they received while under the support agreement, forever (or at least as long as we can practically make that possible). See our Upgrade Policy for more details and instructions on how to upgrade.

• Documentation explaining how it works and how to use it, including both a nice HTML version and a printable PDF version.

Service you will get for your money:

Our customers will be able to submit problems to our Support Ticket System. A real human being will read every support issue entered, and will get back to you with suggestions and thoughts for fixes or work arounds. Level 1 customers will also receive direct phone support.

Level 3 customers will be limited to support issues that are related only to the installation of our supported applications. Beyond that, we may not be able to provide further support to Level 3 customers.

If your problem is serious (as many Wine problems are), we will triage your request. If possible, we will have a Wine developer examine your problem and come up with a solution. At the very least, we will aggregate the worst problems and make sure that they are solved in a future release of CrossOver.

We will prioritize in Level order, with Level 1 tickets taking precedence over Level 2 tickets, which are ahead of Level 3 tickets.

Much to our dismay, we are no longer able to have a Wine developer resolve each and every support request from our customers. We will have customer service people - trained in the use of CrossOver and Wine - respond to every issue. But there will be issues that they cannot solve, and that require a Wine developer. And within those tickets, there will be times when we simply cannot solve a problem in a timely fashion. We hate this, but it is true, and that's the point of this web page.

We're committed to providing community resources so that our customers can help each other. The compatibility center is a key to that, with tips and tricks, discussion forums, and much more. We also continue to host the Wine web site (www.winehq.org), so that you can always turn to the broader Wine community.

We also provide a 'Discuss' mailing list to foster direct communication between our customers and so that you can exchange tips and learn from the experience of each other.

Intangible benefit you will get for your money:

You will be helping to provide a much needed source of income to a Free Software company that has provided a large range of valuable improvements to one of the most key Free Software Projects - Wine. For a list of what we have done, please [click here].

CodeWeavers will use the revenue from the end user version of CrossOver Mac to continue its work on Wine as well as to enhance and improve our products.

What works well:

• Microsoft Outlook 2003, Project 2003, and Visio 2003 install and perform basic operations for us. Outlook primarily supports Exchange servers, but if you install Internet Explorer into the same bottle as Outlook, you can also use IMAP and POP servers.
• Internet Explorer, if installed into a Windows 98 bottle, works reasonably well.
• We have installed and lost time in playing real games with Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Prey, and a number of other game demos. There are some quirks, but we were able to get genuine gameplay joy.
• We were able to install and use a number of versions of Quicken. Versions up through 2006 seem to work reasonably well. Quicken 2007 is usable, but rough around the edges.
• We've had reports on a variety of other applications, with a surprising amount of success. Your mileage will vary depending on your application; the only way to know for sure is to try...

What sort of works:

• Because many web sites that require Internet Explorer embed complex programs in the form of ActiveX controls, there will likely be web sites that do not work. Our testers have reported a range of these. We always recommend using Firefox or Safari and using Internet Explorer only when you are forced to.
• The performance of CrossOver Mac on Tiger is not ideal. With the next revision of Mac OS X, Apple has fixed a long standing bug, enabling CrossOver to run 50% faster. Eventually, CrossOver will run at or very near native speed.

What doesn't work:

Games (and other software) that use the latest forms of copy protection.
We hope to address this in the relatively near future.

What we will make work:

We will continue to proceed on two fronts - to improve the core supported applications, as well as to bring new applications into the supported list.

In preparing our CrossOver Mac release, as we will with all future releases, we have carefully followed the votes and input from our customers. We rely on our compatibility center to help us learn what you need.