Analysis of Port-to-Mac Guides and Tools

By Solomon Yu

Available Tutorials

Tutorial By:makeuseof (link)

Tool Used: WineBottler

Pros: Easy Step-by-Step instructions.

Cons: Does not troubleshoot any problems and only teaches the porting process of simple programs (games, etc.)

Video Tutorial by:

WarMachinePrime88(link)

Tools used:

CxEx Central

Pros: Step-By-Step video tutorial, video illustrates steps very well, straight forward.

Cons: No troubleshooting method taught.

Site by: Paulthetall (link)

Tools Used: Wineskin Winery,

GFX Card Status, Image2icons,

Zipeg, AnyTOIso.

Pros: Full tutorials on how to port apps using Wine, many perfectly working ported apps displayed and available for free download and testing, made video tutorials.

Cons: Too many pages in site, hard to navigate.

Windows-To-Mac App Porting Tools

Purpose of these Programs: To Port Windows Applications to Mac.

Wineskin Winery

Features: Original windows-to-mac porting engine. Supports features such as Fullscreen Apps on Mac OS X Lion (10.7 and above).

Ease of use: Many problems encountered may only be fixed by using XCode (Apple Coding Platform).

Pros: Original, unedited porting program, full customizable.

Cons: Troubleshooting is very hard, may have to use many additional tools.

WineBottler

Features: Based on Wine. Supports features such as Fullscreen Apps on Mac OS X Lion (10.7 and above).

Ease of use: Simple UI based on Wine.

Pros: Easy to use, straightforward UI.

Cons: Not all Windows apps can be ported, creates a self-contained file which will result in a much larger file size. Tool development appears to have stopped.

CxEX Central

Features: Many different wrappers for porting different types of apps, wrapper settings editing, wrapper launcher editing. Also based on Wine. Supports features such as Fullscreen Apps on Mac OS X Lion (10.7 and above).

Ease of Use: Many wrappers for easy application porting.

Pros: Easy to use, many wrappers to save the need of auditional coding.

Cons: Not a frequently updated tool.