A little historical perspective: Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released in April 2005, nearly 9 years ago. RunRev only recently announced it is dropping support for Tiger. (In v. 6.6?)
The transition to Intel processors happened in 2006, 8 years ago. OS X 10.5 was released in October 2007, 6.5 years ago. Dropping support for 10.5 won't affect me much, if at all, but I do worry about the many primary and secondary schools, public and private, who still depend on old hardware. (Richmond, this is your cue.) :) My recommendation would be for RunRev to commit to maintaining LC 6.6 for at least another year, and even after that keeping it available for download for PPC/10.5 users. So I agree with the prevailing sentiment to drop 10.5 support so we can move forward with newer technologies, with this caveat. My .02. Devin On Feb 25, 2014, at 9:18 AM, Benjamin Beaumont <b...@runrev.com> wrote: > 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 Devin Asay Office of Digital Humanities Brigham Young University _______________________________________________ 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
