Playing with CrossOver for Mac

Last night, I downloaded a beta copy of CrossOver and installed it on my Intel-powered iMac. If you're not familiar with CrossOver, its promise is that you can run Windows applications within OS X and without using Windows. Obviously, that would be very advantageous if it worked well enough. At some point, I will buy a MacBook; and if I didn't have to buy a copy of Windows XP to run the one or two Windows applications I sometimes need when on the road, the better I would be. (Even though I was running CrossOver on my Intel iMac for this test, I have no plans to ever run it there full-time. I need a pure Windows machine to run my flight simulators, my PaperPort based document management system, and to run my flight planning applications at their fullest speed.)

I had looked at CrossOver a few months ago and found that one of the applications tested was my Aircraft Owners and Pilot’s Association (AOPA) Flight Planning application. I needed to run that on a MacBook, so it became my primary reason for wanting to see if CrossOver would do the trick. Recently, AOPA updated the application; and though I knew the update might play hell with CrossOver, I decided to give running it a shot anyway.

Double-clicking on the CrossOver’s .dmg file launched its expansion and its start-up, which were then rapidly followed by a couple of installation windows. One of them told me I needed to insert my OS X Installation DVD in the iMac’s DVD drive so it could copy a file it needed out of Apple’s X11 package. I did that, the installer copied the file, and the rest of the installation proceeded smoothly. As one would expect, CrossOver located itself into my Applications folder.

The first time I launched CrossOver, it presented a window containing a list of applications that had been proven to work with it. Many of them were common and even complex Windows applications (like Adobe FrameMaker) but I only wanted to try my AOPA application. I selected it by using a button that said “Install Unsupported Software” and then told it to “Continue”. The application window told me to “wait” while it made a “bottle” (a virtual Windows environment). After several minutes, the installation of the AOPA application ran. When it was done, I could get to it via the CrossOver Applications folder. I double-clicked on it and the program launched.

However, the results were not all that great. The application’s initial loading window appeared, the app synchronized with the AOPA servers as usual, and then the sign-in dialog appeared with absolutely no text labels on it whatsoever. Because I knew what was supposed to go into the boxes, I signed in anyway and the main screen of the application appeared. The main screen is a graphical diagram of the United States controlled by menu items and mouse clicks. Scrolling and zooming in and out on the screen worked as expected (and those functions can be controlled straight from the mouse), though some of the movement lagged. Menu items did not initially appear until I dragged my mouse across the menu bar causing the screen to refresh, and many of the windows controlled from there still popped up without their text, making the application virtually unusable. I had no reason to try more, so I closed the application and CrossOver and uninstalled them from my machine.

In short, I was not impressed. I’ll probably try the application later with one of the “supported” applications to give it a fair shot at working, sometime when I’ve got the time to deal with loading a fairly large Windows program. At least with the AOPA application, it performed about as fast as it does under the PPC version of Mac OS X running Virtual PC and Windows XP Pro. Nothing to write home about. Unless CrossOver’s performance improves with later versions, I’ll opt for either setting up my MacBook as a dual-boot or running XP under Parallels, the latter being something I have yet to try.