#WINE FOR MAC MICROSOFT OFFICE MAC OS#
#WINE FOR MAC MICROSOFT OFFICE INSTALL#

Microsoft, with their tens of thousands of employees, has a hard time shipping a new release of Windows that is backwards compatible *cough* Vista *cough*. We’re completely recreating Windows from the ground up. White says, “I think people don’t realize just how very hard Wine is.

#WINE FOR MAC MICROSOFT OFFICE MAC OS#

Jeremy White is CEO of Wine’s commercial sibling, CodeWeavers, creators of Crossover Linux and Mac, programs that make it easy to use Wine on Linux and Mac OS X. So for a credible 1.0 we need to support a broad range of applications, which means we can’t take any shortcuts in our implementation, since any shortcut is bound to break some application somewhere.” In addition, Julliard says, “There are a huge number of Windows applications out there, and while most people only need one or two, they all need a different one or two. Also, finding what goes wrong with an application is hard, because we don’t have access to the application source code so we can’t easily see what confuses it.” It’s also a moving target, as Microsoft keeps adding new features and pushing developers to adopt them (not always successfully, fortunately for us). Wine has spent so many years in testing in large part because it must replace poorly documented Windows application program interfaces (API), which vary wildly from one release of Windows to another.Īs Julliard explains, “There are several reasons : the Windows API is huge, not well documented, and full of tricky behaviors and side effects that applications depend on. This problem is even bigger than it appears since there are so many different Windows environments, Windows applications, and Linux distributions. Wine, largely based on volunteer efforts, has always lacked the resources for comprehensive quality and assurance testing.

#WINE FOR MAC MICROSOFT OFFICE INSTALL#

While at this point there are about 1,300 Windows applications that will install and run on Wine to some degree, only four sets of Windows applications - Photoshop CS2, PowerPoint Viewer, Word Viewer, and Excel Viewer - are considered critical for the 1.0 release. If all goes well, Alexandre Julliard, Wine’s lead developer, says that Wine 1.0 should appear on June 20, two weeks after the program’s fifteenth birthday. Fifteen years in the making, everyone’s favorite software to run Windows programs on Linux and Unix, Wine, is almost ready for its 1.0 release.

Wine for mac microsoft office