The Ellen G. White Estate has not released a Mac application for searching Ellen White’s published writings for many years. In fact, they have never released one that runs natively under OS X. And because newer Macs no longer ship with OS 9 emulation, this means new Mac users (and probably most users in general these days) are left out in the cold.

Of course, using Apple’s Boot Camp, it is possible to install Windows on a Mac, and run the EGW software that way. But this involves tedious rebooting each time you want to switch to Windows. Or it is possible to run the EGW software under a virtual environment such as VMware Fusion or Parallels. And that is what I had been doing; it works, but it’s slow (open VMware, wait for Windows to awake, start the EGW software, which then runs a bit slow in the virtual environment).

Recently, a friend, Nathan Tyler, tipped me off to the fact that the EGW software works great under Wine, a software environment for running Windows apps under UNIX-based operating systems (such as Linux or OS X). There is a special build of Wine for OS X, called Darwine. He claimed that the search software ran faster under Wine than it does on his Windows machine. (Edit: I guess he just claimed it was fast!) And guess what? I found that to be true for me as well.

It is not trivial to set up the EGW software to work this way, at least not yet. First I downloaded Darwine, and configured it. (The main thing to configure was mapping the folder where I would put my Windows apps to a drive letter.) Then I copied all the EGW software files from my Dell over to my Mac. Then came a tedious process of finding all the related Windows registry entries on my Dell, exporting them to files, copying those files to the Mac, editing them so the paths to the files are correct, and importing them into the Windows registry running in Darwine. (This is necessary because those registry entries contain the license information needed to run the software. The installer writes the license information to the registry, but I have not learned a way to run the installer from the CD-ROM under Darwine. Thus I had to do it myself.) Then I had to copy a file, “egwhite.lcf,” from the main EGW software folder to the subfolder “Books,” because for some reason I got an error saying the file had to be there instead. After that I could run the EGW software, but it was a bit tedious to launch. So then I created a shell script to open the EGW software using Wine, and then used the freeware application Platypus to create an OS X application that can be opened from Finder. And for a finishing touch, I copied the EGW icon to that OS X application.

Now I have a cool little OS X application that I can open with a simple click, and the EGW software is blazing fast. Faster at opening than on my Dell, and much faster than going through VMware Fusion.