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
 

                                   

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WINE for ARM littlenoodles 2010-01-09 09:39:49 Something that I think the WINE community should think about is a way for WINE to run WIN32 apps on ARM processors. With a new generation of ARM-based netbooks on the way, wouldn't it be amazing if the only way to run 'Windows' on these things were to run Windows apps under WINE? I might not even be all that hard. Essentially you implement the WIN32 API stuff natively on the ARM, and then you couple that with an X86 emulator to handle the application logic. Might not work for games or other processing-heavy stuff, but most apps spend most of their processing time in the various levels of library calls that WINE provides. If those parts ran at native speed, you might not even notice much of a hit for the X86 emulation (shouldn't be any worse than a GUI app written in Python or VB or whatever). Reply | Quote 0   1

Wine for ARM isn't that far-fetched Stephan Sokolow 2010-01-09 12:09:18 @littlenoodles: Aside from the issue of having to make sure they use IPC rather than linking to connect the CodeWeavers parts, that sounds like just a re-architecting and merging (to move more into native ARM code for better efficiency) of the Wine+qemu-user stack that PPC users often used. (qemu-user is a GPLed user-mode emulator that you call in a manner similar to Wine to run Linux apps not native to your CPU arch) Reply | Quote 0   1

Multimedia Stomfi 2010-01-09 17:23:25 I suppose most Windows PC desktops are used for word processing and spreadsheets like they have ever since IBM created the platform. Mostly I notice that office systems are used as database terminals, harking back to the days of mainframes. These days even those staples of Microsoft desktop dominance are moving to the cloud, relegating the PC to the role of intelligent terminal Yet, despite Windows disregard of secure networking, the PC has a powerful place as a multimedia authoring platform for the Internet cloud. Coupled with a Linux OS for the security aspect, Crossover can offer the best of Windows and Linux multimedia applications for a modern breed of power users. Reply | Quote 0   1

Rotated text 90 degrees still not fixed in Crossov Abelardo 2010-05-31 04:54:03 Please fix the problem of rotated text (90 degrees) in Powerpoint 2007, Crossover. Reply | Quote 0   0

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