CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I just streamlined installation of an application I've been running successfully in CrossOver for a couple of months -- AceMoney. In the process I got a better understanding of the installation process, and went ahead and installed two other applications, an old favorite -- InfoSelect -- and one I've wanted to check out for a long time -- BrainStorm.

Checking out the location of the folders that were created in the process, I am a little puzzled. For each application, there are two sets of folders, one in a new applications folder in the users folder, and one in the library/applications support folder in the users folder. Below representative paths to files in each location:

[1] /users/ericweir/applications/crossover/acemoney/acemoney help.app
[2] /users/ericweir/library/application support/crossover/bottles/acemoney/drive_c/acemoney/acemoney.exe

The files at the lowest level in each location are different, so there is no redundancy. But I am puzzled especially by the new applications folder location [1]. Is this the way it should be? Why weren't these files simply put in the top level applications folder, the way other applications do?

Not a serious problem, obviously. The applications appear to run fine, so far. Just puzzled.

Thanks,

Eric Weir

Hi,

I believe what you're seeing is;

[1] the application link that allows OSX to launch the app from the Mac's menu context

[2] the actual crossover bottle(folder) that contains the win32 app itself, as referred to by [1]

So this isn't any sort of 'redundancy' layout - it's the standard layout on the Mac I believe.

Cheers!

Yes, item [1] is a launcher mini-application. This is so there's something in the Finder which you can launch to run your program. Your program still runs within CrossOver, making the launcher just a facade or helper. The other purpose of the launcher is to give the Windows program a presence in the dock (you can keep it in the dock for quick launching, too) and in the Command-Tab application switcher.

CrossOver's Programs menu is actually populated from the contents of its programs folder (~/Applications/CrossOver, by default; "~" stands for your home folder). So, you can clean up the Programs menu by deleting unwanted launchers, reorganizing them within the sub-folder hierarchy, or renaming them. (Clearing and rebuilding the Programs menu will undo all of that, restoring it to match the bottle's Start Menu contents.)

These launcher mini-applications go into the user-specific ~/Applications folder because they are, in fact, user-specific. Your bottles are yours. They are in your user account and are not accessible to other user accounts. If these launchers were in a shared location, like /Applications, then they a) would be visible to other users, even though those users couldn't actually use them because they don't have the same bottles that you do; and b) might conflict if another user installed a similarly-named program (their launchers and your launchers would try to occupy the same place).

In fact, only administrator user accounts have permission to write into the shared /Applications folder. Many people use non-administrator accounts. So, they (or CrossOver acting on their behalf) couldn't even create their launchers under /Applications if we thought that was best, anyway.

Hope that clears things up.