Build for Classic

[Jeff Reynolds]

Joe and Richard,

Dropping os9 is not a solution if you build for the K-6 education  
market. there are still gobs of system 9 (and even a good number of  
8x systems) out there and the publisher and distributors all want the  
stuff to be osx and os9 compatible. we even have had school district  
reps want to make sure products are os9 capable as they say they will  
not buy it unless it can run on all their systems.

macs have this nasty nack of hanging in there and with school  
software they dont upgrade that often so if it works and content is  
not out of date they just keep using the same system until it dies. I  
have even seen quite a few old IIcs and es running out there and my  
old basis108 was still running happily in a 2nd grade class on last  
report!

Even if a mac is osx capable upgrading is just not an option for most  
schools as the first thing to go with budget cuts are the tech people  
who do the upgrades, support, new software installs, and training.  
Without them you are left with teachers to do this work. if you get  
lucky you get a teacher in a school who picks this up, but in k-6 you  
tend to not draw the kinds of teachers with these skills like you  
might in higher grades.

Sorry, I know its dumb, but just a fact of life you have to live with  
if you make educational software, along with making the lowest wages  
you can possibly make doing software -- but it is very fun and  
rewarding!

I too was waiting on 2.7x for the classic standalone build then it  
was billed for 2.8 so i upgraded and now am still waiting. luckily we  
just dont use any features past 2.6, so i can keep authoring there,  
then use it to make the classic build and move it up to 2.8 to do the  
osx and windows builds, but is a bit of a pain and i know that murphy  
will come along and bit me with some sort of build specific bug when  
doing this sort of bifurcated build process...

I can understand most of the market has dropped os9 and its probably  
a royal pain to make the engine to support it, but if its promised  
then it should be delivered or at least not promised any more and  
some sort of apology given for not coming through. I have emailed rev  
and get no response lately on this issue. earlier emails said it was  
coming back in 2.7. 2.8 material does make it sound like classic is  
included and says it will be there soon in the 2.8.1 standalone builder.

I just want a clear picture of what they are going to do about all  
this so i can plan accordingly. I have 3 more applications in the  
tubes for this summer/fall and need to start figuring out how i will  
be approaching them.

cheers,

Jeffrey Reynolds



On May 18, 2007, at 12:40 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

> Joe,
> All Macs shipped since 1998 can run OS X.
> All Macs shipped since the installation of Intel CPUs can "only"  
> run OS X.
> OS 9 (a good friend of mine) is dead.
> People who have not upgraded can not expect to get modern software  
> for their
> OS 9 systemed computers - from you or anyone else. As for a  
> children's market:
> most Macs shipped in a young child's lifetime had OS X installed.  
> If a parent
> bought a Mac for a child, it is probably running OS X.
> I, for one, would rather have the Rev team forget about OS 9  
> entirely and
> deploy the resources elsewhere.
> Paul Looney