up vote 6 down vote favorite
2
share [g+] share [fb]

I know that you cannot run MacOSX within a virtual machine, but I am curious if there is something similar to WINE that emulates MacOSX enough to allow running some MacOSX software under Windows. Maybe even through application virtualization?

Update: The site AlternativeTo.net has a lot of suggestions of alternative applications on different platforms.

Thanks!

link|improve this question
86% accept rate
2  
Is there a specific OS X application you want on Windows? – dbr Jul 25 '09 at 11:56
A few applications, specifically iWork. – Jim McKeeth Jul 18 '11 at 18:11
Well, it's not impossible to run OS X on a virtual machine, or even run it full time on your PC (see the OSx86 Project), but from experience I can tell you it's not very easy at all. – AUAnonymous Jul 18 '11 at 19:17
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

In short, no.

There is a project to run Mac binaries on Windows, but when I found it, about a year ago, it was a long way from reliably running simple Mach-O binaries, let alone emulating all the frameworks most GUI applications require (Cocoa, CoreImage and the likes).. I don't recall the name of the project, and it didn't seem very active at the time

There is Cocotron, "an open source project which aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.'s Cocoa documentation" - but I don't think this is what you're after..

Again, no, there is nothing like WINE for running Mac software on Windows, and really I doubt there ever will be.

The closest you'll likely get is software being ported (via recompilation, which will involve a lot of modification to the source code), and as John T says, there's plenty of equivalent software which will be far better integrated with Windows..

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 6 down vote

To date there really is no application which does this well, although I'm sure there have been a lot of attempts. Your best bet is to find alternative software. Most software nowadays has a counterpart which does pretty much the same thing on a different operating system.

link|improve this answer
1  
I love downvotes without comments. If you're going to say my answer is wrong, prove it, i'd love to see OSX apps run on win32. – John T Jul 26 '09 at 13:35
1  
John T, look at your answer (which mysteriously got 5 points) compared to the best answer, which is far more interesting and informative than yours. Though we do not expect questioners to know how to ask open-ended questions, we do upvote answerers who know how to inform on-topic. Though with 39K points, does it make a difference? – Yar Jan 19 '10 at 0:31
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.