CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I used CrossOver when I was experimenting with Linux and was quite impressed but on the Mac I don't feel it has the same usefulness which is why I haven't purchased it yet.

I use my Macs for running my business and spend thousands of pounds each year for various pieces of accounting software that I need to run using parallels. I would happily spend a couple of hundred pounds (I am in the UK) for a piece of software that would allow me to do this without the overhead of a VM machine but it seems that CrossOver is targetted at software that I don't really need.

As a Mac user I have Safari, Firefox and Camino so I really don't need, nor want Internet Explorer. I have MS Office for Mac so I don't need MS Office for Windows. In fact there are a number of applications that have a perfectly adequate Mac version that CrossOver appears to support and I don't understand why. If a certain piece of software has a Mac version why make a windows version with CrossOver?

Perhaps I am in a minority of one in wanting to use CrossOver Mac in a business environment rather than for entertainment. If this is the general will of users then I am happy to be quiet now and carry on with parallels I simply feel that the emphasis has changed over the past few years.

Would be interested to hear other views. Thanks.

I agree that generally speaking there's not much point in using Windows software when there are good Mac alternatives. However, I can understand some people using MSOffice, because the Mac versions really do not have the same functionality when it comes to things like some advanced collaborative features. Similarly, there are some websites that only work properly with Internet Explorer - and some web developers need to see how their pages look in Internet Explorer, because each browser seems to have its peculiarities in rendering pages, and like it or not, most people are using IE.

I personally am only using VMware regularly for one or two not-officially-supported non-entertainment Windows programs that happen to work well with Crossover, and for IE6 for a web site I need to access that works with no other brand of browser. For me, Crossover Mac Standard is well worth it for these few applications.

Agreed and agreed. CrossOver Office is meant to support many office applications but it doesn't do everything. We're always looking for new territory to move into and we're always trying to find out what applications people would like.

I seriously doubt you are part of a minority. I think a growing number of people are either using or trying to use CrossOver Office in a business environment. What I've noticed about your post is that there is no mention of which applications you'd like to see supported in the future for CrossOver. Without a clear path, we can't even begin to narrow down the choices... so what do you want?

On that note, have you used your votes to show what applications you would like? You get some votes upon being a registered user that you can apply to one or several applications in our Compatibility Center. This is how we get our Top 25 Voted Applications, the number of votes it takes right now for an application to get on the top 25 list is 50, with the five votes a registered user gets, they can put ten percent of the needed votes on one application. While this won't take the application to the top of the list, it will certainly get it going. As you can see from the list, Internet Explorer 7 is at the top of the list and we just added support for Internet Explorer 7. As we come to our games release we will look at the top games and when we sit down to brainstorm our next office release, we'll again look at the top office applications.

Right now we would probably look at refining:
Internet Explorer 7
Outlook 2007
Word 2007
Quicken 2008

And retesting for functionality and what it would take to bring support to:
iTunes 8.x
Photoshop CS3
Visual Studio 2008
Photoshop CS4
Visio 2007
Internet Explorer 8

And polishing our FreeBSD work a bit more.

While we may not be able to accomplish visible work on everything above, we will take a realistic look at everything (and probably do some work in the process). We would highly appreciate your feedback on what would best suite our next direction. Please give us a more specific request, we'll be happy to listen and look into it (after all, we just released, we have time on our hands! ...right?).