Dear List Members, As many of you will know, we have been overhauling the LiveCode engine for the last 12 months or so. For those of you who are watching the LiveCode Github repository, you'll notice that:
- LiveCode 7 (Unicode) is nearing a workable engine. - LiveCode 6.7 (Cocoa) is nearing a workable engine. As we approach a DP we have a decision to make in regards to our continuing support for older platforms, in particular, Mac OSX 10.5. LiveCode 6.7 requires considerable additional development resource to enable us to continue supporting Mac OSX 10.5. The cocoa port is all but complete for MacOS 10.6 and above. Our current plan is to put out a DP of LiveCode 6.7 as soon on the final elements are running and then return to round out Mac OSX 10.5 support in subsequent DPs. LiveCode 7.0 has also required us to spend considerable amounts of time ensuring compatibility with 10.5 and has complicated our build process. As the 7.0 project matures, we'll have to continue investing development resource to ensure that Mac OSX 10.5 is fully support, above and beyond the resources used to support 10.6 and above. So we'd like to consult the community to gauge whether now is the appropriate time to cease our support for Mac OS X 10.5. It would mean that LiveCode 6.6 would be the final Mac OSX 10.5 compatible version. We're keen to get the right balance between investing our development resources in progress and platform support. Are there compelling reasons to support MacOS X 10.5 in LiveCode 6.7 and above? If so, we'd love to hear them. Also, if we don't drop support at this point, when would it be appropriate for us to do so? Below is our list of concerns and also reasons we feel it benefits our team and the community to drop support at this time. Concerns MacOS 10.5 is the final version to support PowerPC. As a result, owners of PowerPC based Macs would not be able to use LiveCode 6.7 or above. However, only 3.8% of Mac desktop computers are running MacOS X 10.5 according to netmarketshare.com: http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Mac+OS+X+10.5&qpcustomb=0 Users of LiveCode would be able to continue supporting their PowerPC customers by building with LiveCode 6.6, but as a result would have to start shipping two mac installers. Pros Dropping support has the following advantages for the LiveCode team and the community: 1. We spend less time back porting the 10.6 cocoa implementation to support 10.5 (10.5's Cocoa APIs are less mature than 10.6's and it isn't possible to completely eliminate Carbon usage for a 10.5 port). We estimate it will take 3-4 weeks to get the core engine working on 10.5. This saving also applies to all future projects. 2. We spend less time getting new developments to build and run under 10.5. For example, the new libraries to support unicode took a considerable investment of engineering resource to compile for 10.5. 3. We can use newer compilers on Mac that have improved optimisation features, the result being a faster LiveCode engine. 4. Implementing desktop features for Mac becomes simpler (and as a result quicker) with the API's being relatively consistent from 10.6-10.9. This enables us to deliver features faster. The remainder of the stretch goals for the kickstarter project are 'feature' implementations. Supporting 10.5 requires us to implement the features for more than one API, in many cases doubling the amount of work we have to do. 5. Building and feature additions become easier for open-source contributors. Thanks for reading up to this point. We appreciate your feedback as it will help us in our decision making process. Warm regards, Ben _____________________________________________ Benjamin Beaumont . RunRev Ltd LiveCode Product Manager mail : 25a Thistle Street Lane South West, Edinburgh, EH2 1EW email : b...@runrev.com company : +44(0) 845 219 89 23 fax : +44(0) 845 458 8487 web : www.runrev.com LiveCode - Programming made simple _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
