MPLAB IDE works under Crossover

This curiosity hit me last week: while I am not very hopeful of the Wine and Crossover projects, it would be fun to see if certain program I constantly use under Bootcamp/Parallels works on the Wine layer. MPLAB IDE, the default Assembly/C way to program your Microchip PICs, is not an extremely intricate program (relative to those others Wine has bested like MS Office), but it is infinitely useful to me. So, I decided to try it.

The first install didn't work. It complained that I didn't have MS Internet Explorer. So I installed it, no prob. Then the MPLAB install went *almost* smoothly. I'd recommend others to uncheck the Programmer Drivers, and only leave the PIC Simulation option (I don't think CrossOver would relay USB streams, right?). I tested it with C code from the Pickit 1 and (Woohoo), it worked :D

I may have to change my position on CrossOver :)

CrossOver is currently under a temporary free/beta period, and can be downloaded from the Codeweavers website. The excellent MPLAB IDE is free of charge from Microchip.

The Birth of LabVIEW on the Mac

National Instruments has not been quiet about it. On October 8th, LabVIEW turned 20 years old, a fifth of a century since it was first introduced in a 512K Macintosh (a high-end workhorse in its day). If you thought that this was yet another product that aboandoned the Mac, well, you are very wrong. In fact a Universal Binary of LabVIEW 8 is available, for you Intel Mac holders :). And while they need to iron out a few hardware driver kinks, they are pretty straightforward disclosing it and they are working on it.

For students: you can have both hardware and software, worth many times its price of $159 (apparently fully supported in OSX Intel). A full experimentation lab in your Mac :D

For a more focused view of LabVIEW on the Mac, check out this blog: http://themacview.blogspot.com

More historical info: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/4617

An interview with an engineer who worked on the original LabVIEW

* Uncle Grandpa is (C) (R) (TM) Richard Stevens. Don't sue ;)