Beverage choice should be simple: coffee or tea to rev up, wine or beer to spin down (App Store links). Of course, when it comes to drink choices, there's definitely an app for that: from the makers of espresso-instructions app Barista, we now have the $0.99 Cellar (under App Store review and appearing momentarily). Cellar's slick UI and quick data entry make keeping track of your wine library almost as fun as actually drinking the wine you collect.

When you start up Cellar, you face an empty winerack; you can add bottles one by one, entering both vintage details and customizing the look/label of the bottles with photos of the bottle labels. You can adjust the number of bottles of each kind of vino you have stored away, and then as you polish them off the 'empties' are stored in the Garage area of the app for reference or repurchase.

Cellars isn't an industrial-strength wine database or collection manager (My Wine or Velvet Vine Wine Pro might be better choices there, or a general-purpose database like Bento), but it is a handy way to remember what you've bought and liked. I'd like to see future versions support importing label images from the photo library (for iPod touch users) or download them from online wine libraries. Update: Apparently the library-select feature is already in place for iPod touch users. Readers also suggest checking out Drync for higher-end wine cellar management.

Cellar's $0.99 introductory price won't last for long. Check out the gallery for more Cellar shots.

Update 10/28: Welcome, Digg fans. CodeWeavers' site is getting crunched under the massive demand for the free versions of CrossOver, so there is now a minimal site at down.codeweavers.com that will accept your email address; you will be mailed your registration code in the next couple of days.

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Three months ago, CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White offered a challenge to another CEO -- the nation's chief executive, George W. Bush. If the president achieved one of White's six "Lame Duck" goals during the twilight of his 2nd term, White would make Windows-API enabler & WINE GUI CrossOver free to customers for one day. Some considered White's proposal a great motivational tool for GWB; others found it smug, partisan and kind of a goofy way to promote the company's products, but in any event none of his six challenges seemed to be on the path to achievement, so that's where the story should have ended. CrossOver is a fine way to run Windows apps on your Mac, but as a force for political change, not so much.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to January 20th: due to global economic conditions and through no fault of the president, the price of crude oil dropped precipitously and the cost of gasoline moved in parallel... bringing the average price per gallon in Minneapolis down to the target $2.79 level called for in White's goal #1. Can anyone say "Taco?"

The Star-Tribune is reporting that White is planning to follow through on his pledge: on Tuesday 10/28, all CodeWeavers products (CrossOver Mac, Linux & Games) will be freely downloadable. One license per customer, and we assume that the free licenses will be for the standard versions of the apps. Update: Word from CodeWeavers execs is that the free license will be for a download-only flavor of the Pro version (!), including the Games optimized build and the option to share a Windows 'bottle' among multiple users on the same machine. You will have to choose either the Mac or Linux product for your free copy (and I'm looking forward to the stats on that split once the dust settles). Pro licenses are eligible for support/update renewals after one year for $35.

You might argue with White's politics or his promotional instincts, but you can't argue with free software. CrossOver Mac normally retails for $40 and requires an Intel machine running either Tiger or Leopard.

Update 2: A number of commenters have pointed out that the original challenge rules said the giveaway day would be on the first of the month following the goal, meaning Nov. 1 instead of Oct. 28. CodeWeavers' press release confirms that the giveaway day will be 10/28 and not 11/1. The giveaway runs from midnight to midnight CST.

Thanks Austin!

Mike Rose and I were chatting about this on the Talkcast a few weeks back -- virtualization and emulation programmers get all John Locke from Lost when you try to tell them what's not possible. And so when the guys at CrossOver heard that Google wasn't releasing Chrome for the Mac, they decided to put together a release themselves. CrossOver Chromium is a proof-of-concept release of the Chromium browser (which Chrome is built off of) that allows Google's base code to run on Mac and Linux platforms.

It's designed to show off just how well Wine works to bring Windows-based code to other platforms, and wake Google up to the fact that if they wanted to port Chrome over, they could. CrossOver says they did this to prove a point (and the point seems proven), but it's likely not only that Google wants to run the code natively, but that they wanted to focus on their largest audience first, which anyone can tell you is likely still the Windows crowd.

Even CrossOver says their version isn't ready for prime-time yet, they just wanted to show how fast it could be done. Let this be a lesson, Google: don't tell virtual software developers what they can't do.

Firefox 3 was a pretty historic release this week, but I'd say that Wine 1.0 might actually beat it -- the open source non-emulator (Wine, after all, Is Not an Emulator) for Windows finally reached their first stable release. And Darwine, the OS X-rated version of Wine, also got a shiny 1.0 designation as well. It still won't work exactly perfectly (you've got to have XQuartz installed, and as with all emulators, there are so many different systems trying to talk to each other that you're bound to run into problems when one of them wants to do something complicated), but for standard Windows apps (Solitare and Spider Solitaire, we're told, work beautifully), it'll do ya.

Of course, we have no idea why you'd want to run anything Windows (ahem), but we won't judge. It's your computer: do what you like.

Thanks, Luigi193!

If you're a Mac-based web developer, a sysadmin at SomeBigCo, or an Outlook Web Access user, you might find yourself needing to use MS Internet Explorer from time to time. No, not IE for Mac OS X, frozen in amber within Applications folders around the globe; I mean IE for Windows, the hairy scary Active-X enabled browser that for better or worse represents a huge chunk of the web-surfing world.

Getting 'real' IE on the Mac, up until now, has meant OS emulation (Virtual PC), virtualization (Parallels/VMware), API translation (Wine/CrossOver) or remote access (RDC). Now there's another option for Intel Mac owners: ies4osx, a Mac port of the ies4linux package. Built on top of the Darwine version of the Wine Win32 API translation layer, ies4osx downloads and installs an official version of IE (you pick from v5, 5.5, 6 or 7) and then runs it inside the X11 environment on your Mac.

The resulting browser looks a little weird -- almost like a Bizarro version of IE, with the slightly altered type and menu look of the X11 windowing system -- but this bear can dance. OWA runs nicely, with full rich-text editing and message search, and the administration pages for MS Virtual Server also work pretty well. I wouldn't depend on ies4osx in a production role, at least not with the current build, but for one-off testing of websites in IE it's worth the (free) download. The ies4linux developer plans to roll the Mac-specific fixes back into the main package, so the next version of ies4 will probably support both Mac and Linux users from the same codebase.

[via MacApper]

You all know what I'm talking about: the moment you tear open your new Mac and are greeted by that complex combination of a "little bit of plastic bag with a hint of lindenberry followed by a rush of Styrofoam." We all love it. Just like every other Apple product I've purchased new, my MacBook features that same unique scent.

I'd forgotten how much I missed it. I purchased my last Mac (a 15" Titanium PowerBook) second hand, from a smoker. Then I spilt a glass of wine on the keyboard which made it pong of cheap rosé. Needless to say, my MacBook smells significantly better than my old Mac. Its scent is amongst my most favorite smells and in my opinion it is second only to the smell of napalm in the morning.

Knowing this, you'll understand my disappointment after I Googled "that new Mac smell" and found that research suggests that the smell emanating from new gadgets is very unhealthy. Wikipedia's entry on a similar feature found in cars, "that new car smell", links to research that likens the odor to sniffing glue. There's also an article from 2004 on Geek.com that recounts evidence that toxic fire retardant chemicals found in computers can be transferred to dust. Although the article says that "two of the chemicals in question (penta and octa-brominated diphenyl) have already been banned and will no longer be used in production by the end of this year," I'm forced to reconsider my love of the smell of new Macs.

Does anyone have any information that would restore my confidence in my new Mac's smell?

Don't get overly excited by this Digg post , announcing WINE arrives for Intel Macs. If you actually follow the links through to the discussion thread where this story originates, you'll find that WINE is compiled and working, but not that well: "I warn you. There is nothing to get excited about.... What I mean by this is, while this does in fact run windows apps, it *doesn't* seem to be running things that I *know* worked with the stuff that was floating around last summer. Its perplexing as to why this is. "

To keep your eye on the situation, you should keep reading those boards and check regularly with the Darwine project.