Announcing the Mac driver

[Ken Thomases]

Greetings Wine community,

As many of you may be aware, CodeWeavers just released CrossOver 12.  We're pleased to announce that CrossOver 12 includes the long-awaited Mac driver.  If you're not familiar with it, the Mac driver is an alternative to Wine's X11 driver for use on Mac OS X.  It allows Wine to present windows, receive input from the keyboard and mouse, and interact with system facilities like the clipboard using Cocoa and other Mac-native APIs.  That allows for superior integration into the Mac UI and eliminates the need for the foreign X11 middleware.

The Mac driver is not yet complete but it's pretty far along.  In CrossOver 12, it's described as an "experimental" feature and is disabled by default.  We're aware of chunks of functionality, both big and small, that are simply not implemented yet and there are surely many bugs in need of squashing.

You can take a look at the source in CodeWeavers' usual Wine source tarball at <http://www.codeweavers.com/products/faq/source/>.  The Mac driver lives in dlls/winemac.drv.  Because it was under (somewhat chaotic) development right up until the release of CrossOver 12, we do not yet have a series of clean patches for it to submit to Wine.  In the coming days and weeks, I will be reconstructing the Mac driver as just such a patch series and submitting it.  Mind you, those patches will face the same demanding scrutiny from Alexandre as everything else, so that process may be slow and painful.  I'm SO looking forward to that!

Thank you to everyone who contributes to Wine for making this possible.  It will be fun to work with you on continuing development of the Mac driver.

Cheers,
Ken