From the “weren’t we just talking about this?” department comes a quiet announcement that the Darwine project has managed to get a wobbly developer preview port of the WINE Win32 run-time environment running on OS X for the Intel-based Mac. This went down a little while ago, but I didn’t want to spread the news until I could go hands-on with it.Darwine is a port of WINE to Darwin, OS X’s open source core. Darwine’s been a slow-moving project because it requires a PowerPC-to-x86 emulator). Now that Macs are x86, the emulator goes away. Now the big job is overcoming barriers erected by OS X’s uniqueness compared to Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD, which WINE supports directly.In its present state, Darwine is solely a tantalizing proof of concept. It is not suitable for application development or for execution of Win32 apps on OS X. Try it if you like, but do not use the developers for tech support if (when) it doesn’t work for you. The only apps I could consistently get to launch were the old Windows SDK samples that Darwine includes in the distribution. The Darwine project’s preview shows promise. Darwine already has the packaging right: After dropping Darwine in the Applications folder, all .EXE files bear the Darwine icon. Double-clicking on a plain old Windows executable–it does not have to be converted to Mach-O object code–in Finder does, indeed, transparently invoke the Darwine loader and launch the app inside an X Window frame. Lame as those apps are, this is a real kick in the head to watch.At first blush, it seems obvious that Darwine will be the solution to the dilemma of running Windows apps on Intel-based Macs. That may come to pass if WINE adds OS X to its list of supported targets, or if CodeWeavers sees commercial prospects in an OS X product. Otherwise, Darwine will get it done, but how long it takes depends on the number and quality of developers that pitch in to help. Software Development