Personal Blog of Ricky Mills; Web Developer, PHP Programmer and Mobile Application Developer
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Crossover Office for Mac

September 17th, 2008 | Posted by Rick in Apple | Random | Software - (0 Comments)

When I first switched to a Mac just over a year ago, I pretty much ditched everything on my old Windows computer. In fact, I dont think its been turned on since the day I got my mac home!

I found that to run Windows games or apps I needed to use bootcamp (which results in tedius rebooting to switch between the two operating systems) or Parallels (which is great for apps, but not for games). Another alternative was Crossover. I had used WINE on Linux before and loved it, however knew it had limitations, as did Crossover.

I’ve pretty much stopped playing games on my mac as I’ve got an Xbox 360 however I still have the piles of Windows only games. Well, today I decided to give the new crossover a whirl as well as crossover games and was amazed. I tried a few games (RCT2, Train Simulator and Joint Operations). They all worked flawlessly! What surprized me was that the crossover site said they wouldnt work!

Basically the new crossover release, supports almost anything. I’ve yet to find something that doesnt work! Another fantasic reason why Windows users should get a mac!

For anyone interested in crossover office, check out their site: http://www.codeweavers.com

Alternatively you can try the free WINE app: http://www.winehq.org

Well the rest of the blogging world covered this within 2 seconds of it being accidentally announced by Google. Personally I wanted time to think about and read the speculation about this exciting news.

If you’ve not yet read Google’s blog post announcing their own Web Browser, click here. Now, I’ve read that many people are not liking this. Sure there’s umpteen browsers out there, do we need another one? Yes, actually we do.

The Google browser is not about Google getting into bigger markets. Its not about power, money or popularity. Its about filling a void which currently no other company has even looked at, let alone attempted to fill.

The new browser promises “Multi-Threading” which allows processes to be managed, much like they are in Activity Monitor (OS X) and Task Manager (Windows). For instance, you can quit processes for javascript, or audio, movies, etc exclusively, allowing the rest of the web-page to function as usual.

This is a browser for cloud computing. Like it or lump it, cloud computing exists, sure its a fancy term for something thats always been around, but thats just how it works.

I’ll post a follow up review once the browser gets released later today. (I’ll be trying to get it running under WINE or Crossover on OS X first ;) )