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Any feedback/reviews for CrossOver Mac?

post #1 of 8
3/3/10 at 4:39pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer some insight into this app that's supposed to allow you to run apps like MS Office et al and Quicken on your Mac, without having to install Win OS

Software comes from CodeWeavers: http://www.codeweavers.com/

Cheers
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post #2 of 8
3/3/10 at 6:37pm
I haven't tried it for at least a year and when I did I found it complicated and kind of klunky, but apparently a new version is out so I might give it another try. At the very least, the CEO's quote on their website makes them worthy of a second look: "...in other words, our diabolical plot for world domination is going exactly as planned."
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post #3 of 8
3/4/10 at 10:14am
I've used Crossover 8 for a lot of apps/games and most don't work. The installer fails or the application won't launch and no errors given. It seems like it was built to run certain apps, not to replace Windows.

Also, I find it uses a lot of CPU and is slow to launch programs. Launching programs is like launching a VM for each app. With a VM, you launch once and apps load pretty fast.

The advantages are that you get more RAM to use, you share drive space with OS X and apps feel a little more native.

It's a nice app to have around if there's a couple of programs you really need to use a lot that are Windows-only but between it and a VM like VMWare or Parallels for everyday things, the VM wins easily.

I'll check out version 9 though and see if it's any good. Improved bottle creation speed will be a nice improvement.
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post #4 of 8
3/4/10 at 11:09am
I did download version 9 and it installed Office 2007 with no problems but Excel was very slow to open a spreadsheet and when it did it was difficult to read because the fonts were very fuzzy... must be some Windows/Crossover effect, but whatever the cause it looked horrible. Also Outlook crashed while trying to connect to my Exchange server at work, which never happens when I run it in VMWare, Parallels, or natively in Windows. At that point the disadvantages were already so overwhelming that I uninstalled it. Oh well, maybe version 10....
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post #5 of 8
3/4/10 at 11:32am
Greta idea but didn't work well for me.

I need to use IE 6 to access some websites and it barfed using Crossover.

Now I use VM Ware and have no problems.
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post #6 of 8
3/5/10 at 10:07am
CrossOver (8.0) for Mac isn't perfect, and can indeed be confusing, but it does run quite a number of Windoze apps – definitely not all, though – under OSX without Windoze being installed.
Can't tell you about M$ Office as I run M$ Office for Mac (if I really have to; IRL I rarely do).

I got CrossOver for free, and it does add some extra functionality to my Macs, so I'm not complaining. But I could easily live without it. I would suggest you can too.
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post #7 of 8
3/5/10 at 10:50am
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the responses.
A further look at their website information about the apps supported by this software, they appear to be in 3 main categories (copied & pasted below) of which the majority fall in to either mostly bronze or silver. Very few seem to be 'gold' level performance.

While I can appreciate the huge undertaking it must be to port an app to run without error on another OS, I don't think it worth my while to buy in to software that 'sort of' works



Bronze Medal (Officially Supported)
The Bronze is awarded to applications that install and run, and that can accomplish some portion of their fundamental mission. However, Bronze applications generally have enough bugs that we recommend that our customers use them with caution. Save early/save often, and don't be surprised if there are some bumps along the way.

The most important aspect of a supported Bronze application is that CodeWeavers makes a firm commitment to bring all Bronze applications to the Silver level in future releases of CrossOver. Likewise, CodeWeavers will respond to and address all bugs reported in these applications.


Silver Medal (Officially Supported)
The Silver is awarded to applications that install and run well enough to be usable. However, in our testing, we find that these applications have bugs that prevent them from running flawlessly.

The most important aspect of a supported Silver application is that CodeWeavers makes a firm commitment to bring all Silver applications to the Gold level in future releases of CrossOver. Likewise, CodeWeavers will respond to and address all bugs reported in these applications.


Gold Medal (Officially Supported)
The Gold rank is awarded to applications that install and run as you would expect them to in Microsoft Windows. We expect that our customers can use these applications on an everyday basis with good results, and only minor bugs.

The further aspect of a supported gold applications is that CodeWeavers will respond to and address all bugs reported in a Gold application, either immediately, or in a future release.
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post #8 of 8
3/5/10 at 1:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr.B View Post

Thanks for the responses.
A further look at their website information about the apps supported by this software, they appear to be in 3 main categories (copied & pasted below) of which the majority fall in to either mostly bronze or silver. Very few seem to be 'gold' level performance.

While I can appreciate the huge undertaking it must be to port an app to run without error on another OS, I don't think it worth my while to buy in to software that 'sort of' works



Bronze Medal (Officially Supported)
The Bronze is awarded to applications that install and run, and that can accomplish some portion of their fundamental mission. However, Bronze applications generally have enough bugs that we recommend that our customers use them with caution. Save early/save often, and don't be surprised if there are some bumps along the way.

The most important aspect of a supported Bronze application is that CodeWeavers makes a firm commitment to bring all Bronze applications to the Silver level in future releases of CrossOver. Likewise, CodeWeavers will respond to and address all bugs reported in these applications.


Silver Medal (Officially Supported)
The Silver is awarded to applications that install and run well enough to be usable. However, in our testing, we find that these applications have bugs that prevent them from running flawlessly.

The most important aspect of a supported Silver application is that CodeWeavers makes a firm commitment to bring all Silver applications to the Gold level in future releases of CrossOver. Likewise, CodeWeavers will respond to and address all bugs reported in these applications.


Gold Medal (Officially Supported)
The Gold rank is awarded to applications that install and run as you would expect them to in Microsoft Windows. We expect that our customers can use these applications on an everyday basis with good results, and only minor bugs.

The further aspect of a supported gold applications is that CodeWeavers will respond to and address all bugs reported in a Gold application, either immediately, or in a future release.

Considering that Crossover isn't free I have a hard time justifying it since things just don't quite work well enough IME.

A cheaper virtualization solution solution is Virtual Box. You'll need to buy a copy of Windows if you don't already have on but VB is free and has received generally favorable reports from what I've seen.
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