[Wine] Greater OS X integration

[James McKenzie]

Haravikk wrote:
> Okay, I'd like to start first by saying, awesome work on this project! It's been a few years since I last tracked the progress of WINE on OS X, and it's come on leaps and bounds as I can run most everything I've thrown at it so far, with only minor issues here and there, which is a damned sight better than VMWare Fusion or Parallels which have compatibility issues everywhere, despite what they would have you believe!
>
> Now, for OS X there isn't currently even a binary, but I've been thinking about how much (or actually how little) would be required to have WINE integrate that little bit more natively into OS X, and I've come up with a few main points which might be nice if anyone is currently looking at building a package, or would like to (I might give it a go myself if I find the time):
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> Default folder location
> While I've coped with ~/.wine/ just fine so far, it's not that easily accessible. I've ended up migrating the C: drive into a folder under ~/Documents/Virtual Machines where it's that bit easier to work with. It's also not the most user-friendly place to dig around if you want to recover files using Time Machine.
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> WINE as an App
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This is in progress with Mike Kronenberg's Wine Bottler and doh123's 
WineSkin.  Neither of these will be accepted into the main Wine trunk 
because they both must use ObjC code.

> .exe files targeting WINE
>   
Actually, what you want is linkage between the Wine.app file and any PE 
exe on the system.  The Wine.app's plist file should take care of this.  
WineHelper, a project from the defunct Darwine project did this.

> Not desperately elegant, but it does the job to a degree. A proper app would certainly be nice for a more integrated feel, but at least the above serves as a decent stop-gap. If you'd like to download such a dummy app (I made some basic icons using the WINE glass icon) then you can grab mine here (http://depositfiles.com/files/60qz7nsrp).
>   
There are ways on the Mac to do this more efficiently.  See my comment 
above.
> "Mount" the C: drive
> This one I'm not sure on, but I'd like to be able to see my C: "drive" appear in the devices list like an actual hard-drive. I've no idea how to actually do this, so for the moment I'm just making do with a symbolic link in the sidebar that points to my C: drive folder, and have given it a suitable icon.
>   
Why?  Wine's files are kept in a 'hidden' directory and you can have 
more than one Wine Bottle (that is the technical term for the entire 
user directory structure.)  Again, the two products mentioned above are 
trying to handle this in a user friendly way.
> Start-menu
> This could possibly be achieved as another feature of a wine .app; quite simply a WINE .app package could add the ability for a start-menu style list on right-click. This would likely require .lnk support, but the files don't seem too complex.
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>   
This is entirely foreign to the Mac Aqua interface.  What WineSkin does 
is way more Aqua friendly.
> Thoughts
>
>   
Interesting.  However, both Mac Users and Apple have become used to a 
specific way of doing things.  Most of this is not "Mac Friendly" but 
more UNIXy than they like.

James McKenzie

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