Almost every major feature in Tiger and Leopard were either stolen or bought from existing developers. Dashboard, coverflow, spaces (virtue desktops). I'm sure Apple could have just let these developers keep at it, but it didn't.
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Leopard Recognizes Windows Executable Format, Virtualization in the Works?
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Almost every major feature in Tiger and Leopard were either stolen or bought from existing developers. Dashboard, coverflow, spaces (virtue desktops). I'm sure Apple could have just let these developers keep at it, but it didn't.
What I'd like to see is something like what Apple did with the old Mac OS APIs and Carbon. They could identify a subset of the Windows APIs that could be used to easily rebuild an application to run natively under Mac OS X.
This is a feature that many, including me, believe was slated to be launched with Leopard, but didn't make the cut. It even appeared, briefly, on Apple's website:
Easily? Probably not without proper licensing from Microsoft. Without licensing, they'll be reverse engineering. With reverse engineering, they'll be guessing. With guessing, nothing will be easy.
this cant be true. if it is, there is almost no reason to have OS X. as people said developers would stop making the mac version and we would have .dll files all over the place and would just be another windows hell. i have no problem with having os x on PC computers (in fact i advocate it), but integrating windoze into OS X is just suicide.
if this is true i would probably just give up on OS X as it would just be just as crappy as windoze (and prob even crappier w/ windoze only apps not optimize for OS X
if this is true i would probably just give up on OS X as it would just be just as crappy as windoze (and prob even crappier w/ windoze only apps not optimize for OS X
Here is a counter example: http://www.winehq.org/
This works well enough that you can run MS Office for Windows directly pn the Mac without emulation
"Works well enough" is quite subjective. You can't even print a page running IE 6 so as far as that goes, I disagree.
I've tried a flavor of WINE and quite frankly have a very low opinion of this option. After nearly a year of testing CrossOver, I saw very little improvement.
From earlier in this thread:
seems unlikely to me that 3rd party developers would use the minority platforms tools to build for the majority platform unless they were amazingly better than what they already have. Apple, Inc is smart but I think they would be better off focusing on development for their own platform.
Sadly it will stay like that unless MS allows Apple (or officially sacntions WINE/CrossOver) to go the same route IBM did with OS/2 Warp. The downside is at any moment MS could change something to make Windows apps non-compatible like they did to IBM. I still think overall it is a bad idea and can't for the life of me figure out why it would be seen as a good thing from a Mac users standpoint.
Somebody needs to explain to me how Microsoft could change something to make Windows applications incompatible with virtualization. It seems to me that anything they changed in Windows to make applications incompatible with virtualization would also make them incompatible with Windows.
As for why it would be good thing for Mac users, I can think of several -- provided that it was actually workable and reliable.
Even if they got it officially sanctioned, it's still a technical nightmare. Certainly not something the average user would want to deal with on a daily basis.
This doesn't sound like something apple would do. Windows software is notoriously "un-maclike". Cross platform software sucks for this reason. Windows is based around, you guessed it, windows. OS X is based around applications. The two don't mix.
Also, apple seems to be moving away from 3rd party development (see iPhone, Apple tv...). I'm not at all saying they want to ditch it completely, but they do prefer closed platforms to open ones, and this would be a very big step towards a more open platform (not that that's a good thing). This would be completely out of character for apple.
However, since the intel switch, mighty mouse and video iPod, I've learnt that apple just loves doing 180s with their policies, so it may not be so farfetched after all.
Also, apple seems to be moving away from 3rd party development (see iPhone, Apple tv...). I'm not at all saying they want to ditch it completely, but they do prefer closed platforms to open ones, and this would be a very big step towards a more open platform (not that that's a good thing). This would be completely out of character for apple.
However, since the intel switch, mighty mouse and video iPod, I've learnt that apple just loves doing 180s with their policies, so it may not be so farfetched after all.
Maybe I'm wrong, but....
From what I read about this, earlier this morning, there was talk of a tech. writer saying previously that his sources claimed Apple already paid Microsoft for rights to use the entire Windows XP API.
If that's really true, this would require no reverse-engineering at all..... and Apple may be basically sitting on this option right now, just like they sat on a completed Intel port of OS X. They may figure it's not the right time to incorporate Windows into OS X natively, but after MS discontinues XP and tries to force all their users to move to Vista? Then it might be an "ace up their sleeve" to pull out, telling all the people who preferred XP to "come on over to a Mac, as an alternative to a Vista migration"?
From what I read about this, earlier this morning, there was talk of a tech. writer saying previously that his sources claimed Apple already paid Microsoft for rights to use the entire Windows XP API.
If that's really true, this would require no reverse-engineering at all..... and Apple may be basically sitting on this option right now, just like they sat on a completed Intel port of OS X. They may figure it's not the right time to incorporate Windows into OS X natively, but after MS discontinues XP and tries to force all their users to move to Vista? Then it might be an "ace up their sleeve" to pull out, telling all the people who preferred XP to "come on over to a Mac, as an alternative to a Vista migration"?
As much as I love Apple's engineers I have to say there's no competing against VMware. Parallels sucks and I'm sure they could get something more stable than that, but VMware has been working on virtualization for 10+ years. They have tons of tricks to eek out performance and if Apple were to do anything it would be license VMware. I don't see them doing that because it just doesn't make sense... Not everyone will use virtualization, so why bother paying for it? I'm sure they're working very closely with VMware to make sure there are as few issues as possible, but I don't see them doing more than that. BTW if you've ever reversed Parallels you'll be scared ********, those guys have no idea how to write kernel level code... (I'm almost convinced they're just trying to sabotage their company from the inside)
Maybe so, but I always felt that Apple had this card tucked up their sleeve, just in case. Apple has been able to pull off some neat tricks too (including the transitions from 68k to PPC to Intel). Maybe it's one of those things which is more fun to think about than it is likely. Still...
OS/2 got its Window support by running a full-blown copy of Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine. That's why their "OS/2 for Windows" packaging cost less - it required you to have your own Windows license.
It is possible for Apple to license or develop a VM and boot XP or Vista into it, but they'd have to include a Windows license, and those won't be cheap. And MS probably won't go along with "family pack" pricing.
Would this feature be useful? Sure. Would this feature be important enough to raise the price of Mac OS from $130 to $400? Not to me it isn't. Not even close.
That happens when an app is developed on one platform, and is ported to the other. You get Mac apps that aren't Mac-like, and you get Windows apps that aren't Windows-like (e.g. iTunes for Windows).
But it doesn't have to be that way. In the not-too-distant past, there were several cross-platform software development kits that didn't compromise on those things. One such product, Galaxy (which, in the spirit of full disclosure, I helped develop, back in the 90's) worked very well in that capacity. You developed your app for Galaxy, based on Galaxy's coding paradigms. The app would look and feel like a Windows app on Windows, and like a Mac app on Mac OS (and like an OS/2 app on OS/2, and like either Motif or OpenLook on UNIX.)
But high-power toolkits like Galaxy don't come cheap (when I was involved, the C version sold for $10K per developer seat, and the C++ version for $16K), so you won't find it used on projects that are on a tight budget.
If the solution is to run a stock copy of Windows in a VM, then they can't. Any update to Windows can be installed via Windows Update, just like on a PC, although changes to the VM configuration would show up like hardware changes, possibly interfering with MS's product activation system.
If the solution is to license/develop Windows work-alike code, to avoid the need for a separate Windows license, then Apple ends up being responsible for porting all updates. MS could bundle a system update with Office (as they have done in the past), making it incompatible with platforms that aren't running a real copy of Windows.
They could probably also tie things to Genuine Advantage, which certainly wouldn't work without a real copy of Windows.
I don't think Apple is adding virtualization. But IF they were, it would remind me of the version of OS/2 Warp that could run 16 bit Windows apps.
I always thought it was a sign of weakness, personally. Like IBM was saying that OS/2 couldn't stand on it's own, or didn't have an adequate library of software to support most users (sadly this was pretty much true though.) Most folks I knew used this capability to run MS Office. But unfortunately OS/2 was a 32 bit OS so it always seemed to be a pretty unclean solution to step down to running 16 bit Windows apps.
I wonder how many users running VMWare/Parallels have a legit need to run Windows applications, and how many are simply unwilling or uncomfortable switching to a new Mac application that provides the same functionality? I assume most Mac users are not enterprise customers who are stuck with custom built or internally developed Windows apps. Personally I use Parallels because I'm a software engineer and need to test code out on Windows from time to time. On really rare occasions I have no other choice but to fire up Internet Explorer to deal with some pesky web site.
I always thought it was a sign of weakness, personally. Like IBM was saying that OS/2 couldn't stand on it's own, or didn't have an adequate library of software to support most users (sadly this was pretty much true though.) Most folks I knew used this capability to run MS Office. But unfortunately OS/2 was a 32 bit OS so it always seemed to be a pretty unclean solution to step down to running 16 bit Windows apps.
I wonder how many users running VMWare/Parallels have a legit need to run Windows applications, and how many are simply unwilling or uncomfortable switching to a new Mac application that provides the same functionality? I assume most Mac users are not enterprise customers who are stuck with custom built or internally developed Windows apps. Personally I use Parallels because I'm a software engineer and need to test code out on Windows from time to time. On really rare occasions I have no other choice but to fire up Internet Explorer to deal with some pesky web site.
Many people (myself included) believe that this is one of the things that killed OS/2.
Developers didn't bother to write OS/2 apps, in part because of the Windows compatibility - they said "if I develop a Windows app, I can target both platforms without any learning curve".
Then customers said "there aren't any OS/2 apps" followed by "if all I'm running are Windows apps, then I might as well just run Windows".
I'm sure Apple is aware of this history. If Apple ever bundles Windows compatibility, the exact same thing will happen. If the emulation sucks, it will be an embarrassment. If it works, developers will have a strong incentive to give up on Mac application development, which will give customers a strong incentive to give up on the platform altogether.
(How many minutes do you think MS would continue developing Mac Office if all Macs could run the Windows version? Ditto for Adobe, and all the game developers.)
It's one thing to provide a dual-boot tool and to provide an infrastructure to allow third-party emulation solutions. It's quite another to bundle the emulation with the OS itself.
The bottom line is, Microsoft can only change their own software. They can't cause a virtual machine to stop working if it doesn't rely upon a copy of Windows.
I agree with you here. And, spending time developing integrated virtualization wastes resources that could be utilized to further improve other parts of OS X. It is totally just a road not worth going down if you are Apple.
The thing that virtualized Windows apps will never have is tight integration with the rest of the standard apps and the OS. But this wouldn't be enough to cause most software shops to pump out native OS X apps. So the end user experience really suffers.
They can't make the VM stop working, but they can modify critical apps (like Office) such that they require updates to Windows, and bundle those updates with the application (or a live-update to the application). If the VM is booting real windows, the update will go through and work. If the VM is running non-MS code, the update (obviously) won't happen and the app will break.
A VM that technically works, but doesn't run critical apps, is useless.