Jeremy WhiteI 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
