On Jan 14, 2010, at 11:17 AM, Dominic Blais wrote: > So the big question I have for the group is whether it is important for new > Cocoa software that has a 10.5+ requirement to support PowerPC. We really > want to do the best by our users, both in the sense of supporting their > hardware and developing new features more quickly. Any advice or similar > experiences would be greatly appreciated.
I'd say keep it for the time being, unless: (1) You are targeting Snow Leopard and later only, (2) You are very concerned about the size of your executables, (3) Your software has a lot of dependencies on things that are difficult/impossible to compile as universal (e.g. glib), or (4) Your software depends on X86(-64) assembly language or little-endian byte order, or other CPU-specific features, and back-porting would be impossible or take too long. Unless these are concerns, I wouldn't drop PPC support, since there are still quite a few people out there using PPC Macs that are downloading/buying software for Leopard, even though they're now in the minority. Of course, this will change in the next few years, as new versions of OS X come and go, and PPC becomes a distant memory. After a while, there will still be PPC users, but they probably won't be buying new software, and they probably won't be worth your time. Also, keep in mind that some unfortunate users must run their UB apps under Rosetta on Intel Macs, because they rely on some third-party add-ons that were never ported to X86(-64). This is quite rare, though. That said, if you do decide to drop support, you probably won't receive (m)any complaints. At least I've never received a single complaint from a PPC user about the X86-64-only preference pane I released a few months ago, which required a very specific feature of X86-64-based Macs and couldn't be back-ported. Nick Zitzmann <http://www.chronosnet.com/> _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
