Founded back in 1996, CodeWeavers is a small company based in Minnesota that sells a proprietary version of Wine called CrossOver, to help users run Windows software on Mac OS X and Linux. A major contributor to the Wine project, CodeWeavers employs the project's maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, as their Chief Technology Officer.

Announced in June 2005, the Mac version of CrossOver Office, called CrossOver Mac, was finally released as a complete program - no more public previews, betas and all that! The last version available before the Macworld was a limited 60 days trial of Release Candidate 1 that has seen the light of day on the 22nd of December last year.

CrossOver Mac runs only on Intel-based Macs, and the applications supported at this time include Microsoft Office 2003, XP, 2000 and 97, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Macromedia Dreamwaver MX, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash MX, Quicken and Lotus Notes, as well as web browser plugins such as QuickTime and Windows Media Player, but the list obviously doesn't end here. A large list of over one thousand applications and their compatibility with CrossOver is available at the official CodeWeavers website, so you can check that before trying to run a program you're not sure it's going to work.

The price of a single copy of this program is 59.95$, but volume and educational discounts are also available. If you own a PowerPC-based Macs, then you shouldn't have any high hopes for the future, because CrossOver Mac won't run on these processors due to the fact that Wine, the free project that is the backbone of all CrossOver versions, requires a processor that uses the x86 architecture.