A few of the programs I use regularly don’t have Mac versions, so I’ve been playing around with CrossOver, Toolbox and TshwaneLex. Toolbox 1.54 (the ‘for mac with parallel/crossover version) seems to work pretty well under this arrangement, although keep in mind that I don’t actually use interlinearlisation at the moment, so I didn’t test that. I didn’t crash it in the ten minutes I tested it.
TshwaneLex was a bit harder, but it too works. Here are the settings and some notes. I’m using the generic CrossOver for Mac and TshwaneLex 3.0.8.
- the crossover ‘bottle’ must be Win98
- in TshwaneLex, the html display must be wxWidgets; Explorer doesn’t work (the display ends up in the top lefthand corner).
- TshwaneLex must be set to run under Windows NT4.0; otherwise right-click doesn’t work and/or the edit fields disappear (meaning that you can insert nodes but you can’t add information to them).
- This configuration of wxWidgets, Win98 bottle and NT4.0 emulator is crucial. (I spent a fair amount of time testing this before I found the right combination..) To set the environment for running TshwaneLex, enter winecfg (under the crossover control panel), .. add application … add TshwaneLex, and choose Windows NT4.0.
- Playing around with the window size can cause weird things to happen, but it’s fixable by clicking on the ‘expanded view’ (and then unexpanding it if need be).
- It runs a little slowly sometimes. In particular, the preview window doesn’t always update immediately.
- Mac alternative keyboard mappings don’t work, but you can define shortcuts which work within the file using TshwaneLex’s shortcuts.
- (I didn’t try ODBC but I did play around with all the standalone features I regularly use in editing the Yan-nhaŋu dictionary.)
- One of the CrossOver debugging forums recommends that IE6 be installed, because it populates the system folder with more recent dll files which can solve other problems. I did this – I don’t know if it had an effect.
Finally, typing Yan-nhaŋu reminded me that my Mac can now speak Yolŋu Matha. I made a keylayout. Send me an email if you’d like a copy of the file.
Anggarrgoon 
I’ve been using Toolbox under crossover for several months and all is going well. Interlinearising is fine too. The only thing I haven’t cracked is that after exporting I can get the rtf file to open in word, but it doesn’t have all of the nice MDF formatting. And nor is there a ‘finish exporting’ option like there is when you do the whole thing on a PC. I’ve just been whacking our Toolboxes onto one of the office PCs when we’ve needed to print until I can have a serious crack at figuring it out…but if anyone has any suggestions – I hope you don’t mind me highjacking your post Claire!
I bet I know what’s going on there – when Toolbox installs itself on a PC it makes the mdf word template available to Word, but if it’s running under CrossOver Word probably can’t find it. If you copy mdf_e.dot to the place where your Word templates are (I think it’s something like ~library/office/templates) it should work, and the finish export button should come back.
Thanks Claire. For the record I put that file in user/library/application support/microsoft/office/user templates/my templates. I then opened the toolbox text file in word, and there was ‘finish exporting from shoebox’ in the tools. This apparently did the same ‘run through’ thing that it does on a PC, but didn’t update the formatting. To get it to do that I went to tools>templates and add-ins, and attached the MDF file as a document template, checking ‘automatically update document styles’. It then popped into the correct mdf export format.
If all goes according to plan, we should have a ‘native’ version of TshwaneLex for Mac OS X in the near future – perhaps a month or two.
That’s great news, thanks David!