CrossOver 12 Released

CodeWeavers has released CrossOver 12, the latest major release of CrossOver that comes with a number of interesting new features.

CrossOver is a product, available for both Linux and Mac OS X, that allows one to run Windows applications on Linux or Mac OSX. You may be thinking that this sounds a lot like Wine; and you would be right. In fact CrossOver is based on Wine, and simply provides some extra patches and a proper GUI that simplifies using Wine. Codeweavers contributes back to Wine.

This latest release of CrossOver is based on Wine 1.5.15 which has includes a lot of improvements over the release bundled with the previous version of CrossOver. Such improvements include support for ActiveX components in the in-built browser, an included version of Mono, bringing compatibility with the .NET API, among other changes.

A major new feature—available as a preview in this version—is “Mac Driver”. This technology is intended to do away with the requirement of the X Windows Server for running Windows applications on Mac OS X. The result is a better, and more seamless integration of Windows applications on Mac OS X. Currently it is selectively switched on for some Windows applications, but with more development by the community, and Codeweavers, it will eventually become the primary way of running Windows applications on Mac OS X.

CrossOver now support even more applications officially—although an application doesn’t need to be officially supported to run properly—with added support for Quicken 2013, World of Tanks, and Guild Wars 2. Also, installing .NET 4 will now work. Microsoft Office support has also been improved.

You can read more about the improvements in CrossOver 12 in the announcement post and can try out a trial version here