Google Sponsors Wine Improvements for Photoshop and other Apps

Google seems to be impressing Linux users with some recent improvements to Wine it has sponsored last year. An email posted on a Wine mailing list by Dan Kegel, a software engineer at Google, went on to describe recent efforts and improvements Wine has made.

For those not familiar with Wine, it is an open source initiative that tries to enable Windows binary runtime support on different OS's. In short this will enable a user to run some native Windows applications on Linux (or other OS's).

In the past Wine has been known to provide less than optimal experience for most users as compared to running that same app on Windows natively. For some apps though Wine works well enough that it has become a decent alternative for Linux users needing to run Windows apps.

Google has sponsored efforts that has focused on getting two such applications to work with Wine. Adobe photoshop has become the de-facto standard for most professional graphic artists. This has forced them to use Windows or Mac platforms since there are few alternatives for Linux (GIMP is good but does not have all the features required by most professional graphic designers).

The other application was Dragon Naturally speaking. This has become a required tool for the millions of physically challenged users around the world who need this tool to speak rather than type words into a computer.

Google's efforts seem to be paying off and these applications have reached a point where they can be viably run via Wine. Wine could serve a very useful function for applications that do not have an Open Source alternative that meets their need yet. I think it is a worth while project and I'm glad to see that Google has decided to sponsor such an effort.

I look forward to future Wine improvements and other used of Wine that the community can come up with.

Vassilios
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http://www.outervillage.com
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Vassilios
Co-Founder
OuterVillage.com
http://outervillage.com

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